8 Marketing Technology Stats To Help Ad Agencies Boost Client Retention [Data]

Organic growth and client retention are top of mind for ad agencies and they’re topics, along with marketing technology, we’ve discussed recently as well.

Along those lines, we just released our latest survey report, which you can (and should) download here: RSW/US 2021 Marketing Technology & Agency New Business Tools. 

As we point out in the intro,  

We took a break last year and have completely revamped our report.  

With 67% of marketers saying their company’s spending on analytics and marketing technology tools is increasing and 88% of agencies recognizing that the need for these tools continues to grow, we didn’t think you needed to know that LinkedIn is the most-used social media platform for agency new business again. 

Instead, we surveyed marketers on a specific, brief set of questions around these tools and their potential challenges, for additional perspective, and then performed a more in-depth survey of agencies, to bring you a total of 19 tool categories: 12 on the tools you and your peers are using to support the marketing activities of your clients, and 7 on the tools you and your peers use to help drive agency new business. 

And along with those two stats, there’s another, recent stat, that you and your ad agency team need to be aware of:  

CMO tenure slipped to just 40 months in 2020, the lowest average since 2009. 

CMO tenure has always been a roller coaster, but the lowest since 2009 is worth paying attention to. 

And one of the quotes from the Drum piece I linked to mirrors language in our report. 

From the piece: 

Top marketers are coming under severe pressure from ever-tightening budgets coupled with a need to improve return on investment 

You’ve heard this before, but now couple that with a question we asked marketers in our survey:  

Which of the following challenges related to marketing are most likely to worry you over coming years? 

Per the chart below, the top two answers are (tied at 58%): 

1) Tracking marketing effectiveness and media spend 

 2) Personalizing the customer experience without violating customer privacy 

Personalization continues to be top of mind, from the Marketing Charts piece, Personalization of Content A Key Coming Priority: 

About half (49%) of the senior content team executives at enterprise-level companies surveyed say they will prioritize investing in technology that enables real-time delivery and personalization of data, while 46% will be using better data to create personalized content that serves the customer journey. Another third (34%) also plan to prioritize investing in platforms, people and processes to scale the production of personalized content. 

And further in our report, when marketers were asked what techniques/tasks their companies would work to improve over the next 1-2 years, they zeroed in on “experience optimization” and “general audience analytics”. 

We’ll be covering more on our report in future posts, but these stats certainly represent more potential opportunities for agencies to deliver value, ROI, and ultimately increase client retention.

Certainly for those agencies that take advantage. 

I’ll leave you with one last stat from our report along those lines: 

Only 56% of agencies have specific individuals that “own” activities related to finding marketing analytics and technology tools at their agency. This is short of the 70% of marketers who responded saying that they have dedicated people exploring new ways to use technology to drive their business. 

For small and mid-sized agencies, understandably you typically won’t be able to dedicate someone full time to that activity, but you can certainly have an individual who “owns it” as part of their job description. 

Or, as we do here at RSW, have a revolving group of individuals who meet monthly, for example, to examine current/new tools.