Agencies Need to Think Like Consultants; Here’s Why and How

In order to improve productivity and efficiency, businesses often pass their work to agencies. However, the agencies are allowing consulting firms to take competitive advantage of newer technologies. While the agencies still rely on the conventional ways. As a result, consulting firms like Accenture and Deloitte has acquired more than a dozen of creative agencies in the past few years. It has become essential for the marketing and ad agencies to take some different approach such as a data-led strategy. Like the consultants, they need to plan before processing a solution. They should also focus on driving growth of their clients’ business in the competitive environment with their solutions.
Why?
Converging business models
With the fast pace of changing trends, business models are transforming and so are the consulting firms and creative agencies. The consultants have a deep background in business strategy and enterprise technology. Agencies need to show that they understand business strategy and the role of technology in the process to keep pace with consulting firms.
Embracing a data-driven approach
Data enables businesses to discover customer insights and innovate products. It is also a key to create an outstanding customer experience that is both individualized and scalable. The consultants use data as a key tool. Marketing agencies need to embrace the data-driven approach to provide the right product messaging and the right marketing tools for that message and to measure the results.
Investing in technical talent
Talent acquisition is the main hurdle in the way to go digital and to embrace data for the agencies. Agencies don’t have money to hire right personnel and so they need to respond to these challenges.
How?
Sell your people, not what they create
Businesses pass the work to the agencies so that it gets performed by the experts. But, the work often gets passed to the junior staff, who don’t have the same experience or expertise. The agencies should spend time talking with the clients about who will work and commit to the business that brings value to the client relationship.
Invest in your people
The consultants invest in everything from onboarding to training. If agencies treated their people like primary assets, the clients would also invest more. The agencies can’t market their people if they can’t hold on to their people.
Be a partner, not a vendor
Agencies often create detailed contracts that turn them into a little more responsible than vendors to produce a deliverable. They handle project-based work to gain thin margins. On the other hand, Consultants become strategic partners who focus on solving business problems and integrating the systems, processes, and people required to run the business.
Agencies should start to think like the consultants and find the solutions in the non-conventional ways with the help of technology. Moreover, the agencies may be more creative, but the consulting firms cater cutting-edge services. Thus, the agencies need to reinvent themselves and open up new lines of business to compete. The growth opportunities lie in partnering with the clients rather than executing against them.