Why Effective Marketing Supplier Management is Essential for Growing Businesses

In the early stages of a company’s existence, marketing supplier management is rarely at the top of the priority list. Marketing itself probably is, because creating a brand, setting up a website and making yourself visible are things that most founders and entrepreneurs will consider early on. Those needs only grow with you. Unfortunately many companies find that keeping their marketing approach stable as they acquire new providers can be a real challenge.

Three ways marketing supplier management goes wrong.

The challenge of keeping multiple suppliers in line, delivering marketing results that match your needs, without marketing costs spiralling out of control, creeps up on growing businesses.

The problems start to manifest long before companies consider hiring in senior marketing leadership. Usually at a time while managing marketing, sustaining sales, and directing the future of the brand, are all still effectively in the hands of its founder and leader – who is rapidly running out of bandwidth. 

The problem has several characteristics, including:

  • Piecemeal approach: Young companies, ambitious about growth, will hire numerous new marketing agencies and suppliers as they evolve. Usually this is approached in a sequential, piecemeal way. You realise that you need to address a new piece of the marketing puzzle. So, you look for a new marketing supplier to fulfil it. Taking on a new specialist can seem a challenge – but the antidote is not always to let existing agencies (or a junior in the office) ‘have a go’ at a new area, either.

  • Bad choices: Even as the roster grows, it changes. Because some of those hires will go wrong. Even those with a clear marketing strategy in mind can find they make a few mistakes. Perhaps you hire the wrong people when you lack sufficient knowledge to judge experience and capability. You make the ‘least cost’ choices first, seeking out the way that seems least painful. Or you may simply misjudge your readiness, or ability to cope with the costs, of a new type of activity and start switching agencies ‘on and off’ on a reactive basis.

  • Disjointed briefs: A natural consequence of building your marketing agency roster without a well-advised and integrated strategy, is usually that things don’t hang together well.  Briefs are ill-conceived, and ill-defined. Gaps between areas of responsibility arise as often as accidental overlap and duplication. When new needs and priorities emerge, you too often find the capability you need isn’t covered by any of the current roster and you are constantly in sticking-plaster mode.

The road to bad marketing supplier management is paved with good intentions

Multiple marketing suppliers are always hired with the best of intentions.

You spend significant time seeking out specialist skills, and finding people and teams you like to execute a specific marketing function, such as:

  • Marketing agencies

  • Web design and development

  • Graphic design and branding

  • Public relations agencies or PR freelancers

  • PPC and traditional advertising

  • Lead generation agencies

  • Digital and social media marketing

  • Search engine optimisation (SEO) services

  • ‘Online reputation’ agencies

  • Content writers or content marketers

Adding to the complexity will be all the marketing opportunity vendors – those trying to sell you the next best thing in marketing software or cloud platform, latest trend in print and promotional concepts, advertising opportunities and ‘must be seen at’ events.

The costs of bad marketing supplier management

Keeping the cost of marketing under control is always important – but so is ensuring that you gain the value from what can seem a significant, and growing, investment.

Ineffective management of this roster of suppliers can carry additional hidden costs.

Time is the first significant factor. Managing the different activities, plans, people, calendars and costs take more and more of a young business leader’s precious time and attention. Companies often fail to realise that marketing suppliers need management time and someone as a readily-accessible point of contact. Their reality is that they often spend significant unplanned time trying to co-ordinate across fragmented relationships, never giving suppliers the time and input they need to do the job to their maximum capability. 

Secondly, value and missed opportunity.  With a disjointed, sequential, separated strategy for managing marketing and its suppliers, there is no way any company can gain the full value either from access to the specialist thinkers and experts at its disposal, nor from the potential compound value of pulling this expertise together.

Does some of this sound familiar? I bet it does. 

Fundamentals of effective marketing supplier management

  1. Strategic and tactical ownership are equally essential. Marketing activities by different suppliers can quickly become disconnected and divergent without an internal owner specifically responsible for keeping everything in synch, and available as a constant point of contact.  Meanwhile, someone senior needs to care about whether the efforts of the whole marketing roster are (a) focused in the same direction and (b) that this direction supports the company’s achievement of its strategic goals.

  2. Commercial considerations matter. Too many marketing suppliers act in effective isolation from commercial considerations, while others can be disproportionately burdened with driving leads and sales results. Marketing for growing companies is only of significant value if it helps it to achieve its sales and customer goals overall. This is a collective endeavour, involving every one of your marketing suppliers to some degree – and they need to know, and acknowledge, their role in creating success.  How will you ensure that suppliers know this, and that marketing supplier outcomes are monitored and measured in context

  3. Practical integration is critical. With marketing suppliers working on different specialisms, with different dynamics and skills required, the interfaces between them are essential. That means ensuring there is commonality of thinking around the marketing calendar, content to support different areas of marketing and sales, and so on.  Consider how you can keep activities in alignment and acting in concert for maximum outcomes, and what resources and shared platforms you might need to make that happen.

Assertive marketing supplier management and alignment deliver results

There are broad potential benefits of taking a more assertive approach to marketing supplier management. 

By eliminating duplication and redundant efforts, you can reduce unnecessary costs. 

By taking a more proactive approach to ownership and management of suppliers, you gain greater visibility of marketing supplier activity and the results they create.

This in turn can reduce the risk of surprises and wasted money alike and enable you to look on aggregate at your overall marketing budgeting and ROI.

Taking a more hands-on and regular approach to communicating with your suppliers helps you work well together, get better results, and sustain longer-lasting relationships so you can avoid the time and cost of agency or supplier searches and changes.  With those better relationships, your suppliers and agencies are likely to feel more invested, and work harder for you to deliver the kind of results that will help you to grow your business.

If ownership is delegated to a capable individual this should, at a stroke, remove the distraction and workload overhead that many growing business leaders otherwise must juggle – so they can focus on the more important job of leading the company.

Need any help? Sometimes a fresh pair of expert eyes is exactly what’s required to cast a new light on existing marketing efforts supported by multiple marketing suppliers. Whether you need a review and quick analysis to check things are working as well as they can be, or fresh perspective to trouble shoot some gaps and issues, our agency alignment analysis and consulting may be exactly what you need – so get in touch if we can help.  

Previous
Previous

Reinventing customer case studies – how the modern customer case study needs a shake-up for the digital and social world

Next
Next

Don’t cripple faster business growth through fear of success