We Play Well With Others. No, really.
If you’ve seen one of Seer’s pitch or proposal decks, you have undoubtedly seen phrases like “collaboration” and “we play well with others”. We tout things like “our goal is to work with your in-house or agency team, not against them”, and unlike others, we actually mean it.
In fact, Our willingness to share our data, and data sources, with partner agencies is something that truly sets us apart; a unicorn in an industry where most players keep this valuable information close to their chest.
This post explores why we feel it’s so critical to build strong relationships with partner agencies, gives a few examples of how our services are successful in doing that - and insights on how YOU can do it too
When agencies don’t collaborate, the only person that loses is the client.
Although some clients may choose the route of working with an Agency of Record (AOR), our 20 years of experience has shown that clients typically work with 2+ vendors or agencies to execute an omnichannel marketing strategy, as most vendors tend to specialize in specific set of channels.
While the goal is to bring each of these highly skilled teams to the table to support an holistic marketing plan, the reality is that oftentimes the great work these teams are doing ends up living in silos, which ultimately works against a core goal.
When we don’t collaborate, we set ourselves, and our clients, up for:
- Incomplete strategies caused by lack of data visibility
- Overlapping or conflicting work that can result in wasted marketing dollars
- Quality work or cross-agency recommendations that don’t see the light of day
So with that in mind, we wanted to share a few examples of the types of solutions Seer can bring to the table. Our ultimate goal, and deep passion, is to support your holistic marketing strategy - regardless of which channels Seer owns.
Example One: Consumer Demand Analysis
Scenario: You’ve partnered with Seer to manage your SEO & on-site content writing, but all other marketing channels are handled in house or by other agencies. Based on your goals, Seer recommends running a Consumer Demand Analysis as part of your 2023 project plan. Once this analysis is complete, Seer will host a meeting with you and relevant partner agencies to share findings and discuss any recommended changes in your strategy.
What’s a Consumer Demand Analysis? Seer will analyze year over year monthly search volume by region to uncover annual, seasonal, and regional trends in consumer demand associated with your business. The goal here is that by better understanding how consumer search behavior changes over time and location, we can make more informed decisions around how, when and where to best target these consumers.
How does this help not just Seer’s strategy, but partner agencies and in-house teams?
- Determine optimal months to promote topics or themes based on peak search demand. This vital information can influence key budget-saving strategic levers such as seasonal buying/heavy ups for TV, Display, programmatic, PPC, etc.
- Identify locations with high search growth and demand as well as search decline or low demand. Discovering and understanding regional differences in search demand by location can:
- Validate any existing regional campaigns & location based investments or uncover the need to begin more localized efforts
- Make marketing dollars more efficient: ex. Pull back TV spend, an awareness tactic, in areas of high search demand and reinvest advertising dollars to drive conversion focused channels. Conversely, drive ad spend in demographics with low demand to build a stronger brand presence.
- Determine if year-over-year performance is in-line with industry trends which could trigger a need for deeper competitive analysis.
Example Two: Reddit Analysis
Scenario: You’ve partnered with Seer to run your Paid Search and Paid Social campaigns, but all other marketing channels are handled in house or by other vendors. Based on your goals, Seer recommends running a Reddit Analysis as part of your 2023 project plan. Once this analysis is complete, Seer will host a meeting with you and any relevant partner agencies to share findings and discuss any recommended strategy changes.
What’s a Reddit Analysis? Seer will source and analyze comments, threads and forums on Reddit relevant to your business. This helps the Seer team identify popular topics, new keyword opportunities, FAQs, pain points, and details on what users are saying about you and your competitors online. This can all be leveraged to inform content opportunities, creative messaging, positioning, sales training, etc.
How does this help not just Seer’s strategy, but partner agencies and in house teams?
- Identify brand perception themes that can be leveraged by a Branding Agency or PR team
- Uncover pain points and triggers that users have on their journey with your website or brand that can influence work done by your UX / Web Design teams (example: users complaining that your site is hard to navigate)
- Aggregate common questions, content themes and keywords that users discuss frequently that can be addressed through SEO optimizations or creation of net new content on your website
- If certain forums are particularly active, there is a potential to inform a Paid Reddit Ads strategy and social content
- Identify competitors who clients most frequently compare your brand against and ways to navigate the competition
The bottom line: when the client wins we all win
Even if you don’t currently work with Seer, we highly recommend facilitating an environment for collaboration and information sharing across your internal and external teams. We know that’s easier said than done, so here are a few examples from partnerships we’ve seen success with:- Set up a regular cadence of touch points across all agency teams, with at least one core representative (weekly or monthly is ideal depending on number of partners)
- As a client, create an environment for sharing and set expectations with all agencies that the more information we all know, the better our holistic strategy will be
- Cross share monthly reports, Quarterly Business Reviews, and include appropriate parties in major deliverable presentations
- Consider looping in partner agency ahead of time for a pre-read to make sure that recommendations aren’t already in progress or have been discussed in the past
- As a client, TRUST that the agencies are able to work and collaborate together
Want more information on how our solutions can help better bring your teams and strategies together?
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