3 Reasons To Be Transparent with Your Marketing Agency

by Kara McGaharan, Director, Program Strategy

General Marketing

Four colleagues in a bright office having an honest, engaged discussion around a table, leaning in attentively.

1. Transparency Sets You Up for Success

From the very beginning of the relationship with your marketing agency, it’s vital to be on the same page.

Your agency uses those initial conversations to set program goals and create strategies that may involve or affect all aspects of your business.

When you’re not completely open and honest with your agency partners, you might unintentionally withhold key information and negatively impact the outcome of your marketing efforts.

Also, both your team and your agency must agree on how you define a successful program so the agency has a clear vision of your goals.

Plus, the stronger your relationship, the longer your relationship. The average client-agency alliance lasts only three years. (At MadAveGroup, we’ve been serving more than 100 clients for over 25 years.)

Maintaining open, honest communication creates trust that, over time, can elevate the relationship and lead to exchanges and ideas you never imagined at the outset. Another bonus: the longer your agency relationship lasts, the longer you’ll avoid the long, painful learning curve that can accompany finding a new marketing partner.

2. Finding Solutions for Current Problems

When you don’t make time for regular communication with your marketing agency or your contribution to the conversations is sparse, they won’t be able to fully understand the issues you’re facing.

Your agency may think everything is running smoothly when, in reality, you and your team are struggling with unspoken issues.

The topics that are hardest to talk about are often the most important. While you may find it uncomfortable to bring up your pain points, allowing your vulnerability to show gives your marketing partners valuable insight that they can apply to solve your problems and reduce your stress.

Even if your challenges aren’t directly related to marketing, your agency might have experience with your industry or complementary markets and they may be able to share solutions that have worked for other companies.

A good agency will want to provide ongoing, proactive marketing strategies with your entire company in mind. But they can only do that if you’re willing to be open and honest about all aspects of your business.

3. Locating and Avoiding Potential Problems

Having intimate conversations with your marketing agency’s members can reveal a lot about your current and previous frustrations, industry fluctuations and challenges, and more.

Your agency may be able to offer a new perspective, a different skillset and unbiased expertise to identify and solve problems you weren’t aware of or potential future problems.

They can likely use that knowledge to provide solutions for current issues or recommendations for avoiding future challenges.

And think about how the practice of open, honest communication can benefit your company culture.

You may learn how to be more transparent with your staff, which can positively impact your hiring and employee retention. And that encourages your employees to be more open with you, so you can learn about potential issues and address them before you lose a good team member.

Looking for a marketing agency to build a lasting relationship with? Contact us.