How to fight for attribution
How digital design agencies attribute their work to business value for their clients.
Today I spoke with the CEO of a full-service digital agency on the west coast. He’s been in the business for over 20 years, and for the past six has run his own firm, with a mix of enterprise clients, as well as mid-size and small-business clients. And, like most agency CEOs nowadays, he’s keen on signing longer committed agreements with clients. “I can’t afford to compete for a client I just did a project for six months or a year ago, every single time,” he told me.
That’s something we hear a lot from our agency partners. Gone are the days of living project to project, hoping to win the next bid. Every day, agency CEOs and strategy executives tell us, we need to establish longer term agreements, get more time with the CMO.
How do they do that? In large part, by fighting for attribution for their work.
“I mean, you can see the work,” this particular CEO told me. ”And the campaigns drive traffic. But how do I show my client that it was because of our design, our copy, the new systems we integrated, that was the true cause of an increase in sales?”
A solid moment of silence hung over our video call. I stared out to all of the snow I had shoveled the previous day in Boston, and thought of the glorious sun he must be enjoying out in Cali. He was not alone. We’ve heard this before.
If in the client’s eyes all you have to do is “buy” a site redesign or an ad campaign, then what makes this guy’s agency so much more valuable then the guy or gal’s firm down the road? How does this CEO differentiate his engagement model from all the other agencies out there?
What if this CEO had a unique insight that only he could share with his client? Insight that would allow his team to know exactly what to design for, and what KPIs they needed to move the needle on that would drive his client’s business objectives? He would then, as they say, be bringing a gun to a knife fight.
What if he could tell your client: “these are the top tasks across your site,” “this is the demand you have for each one,” “this is the percentage of users who cannot complete their intended task, and this is why not, and this is what they tried to do instead”? And most importantly, what if you could use that data to tell them how they can fix those problems, and how much their revenue can go up as a result?
Better yet, I asked, what if you had a tool that continuously collected data, so that your team could go in and review it with your client on a monthly or quarterly basis for a “workshop” (a.k.a, billable hours)? And from that “workshop” you had a prioritized list of use cases to work on? “Very cool,” said the west coast CEO, “Very cool indeed. Let’s set a meeting for next Thursday to discuss these two clients I have in mind.”
