Should a Marketing Agency Also Be Your Business Strategy Consultant?

One of the most common dynamics I encounter working with clients is they're looking to us, as their agency partner, to play a leading advisory role in developing their overall strategy and roadmap.

The truth is, most clients don't actually want us to simply take orders — they need our expertise to help shape the direction.

At first, this reality may seem counterintuitive. Don't clients hire agencies specifically to execute based on their own pre-defined visions and requirements? That's certainly part of our role. But there's typically a much deeper, more consultative value we provide in getting there.

The role of a (good) marketing agency

While you are the expert in your products, services and industries, you're often too close to the details of your business to be able to fully see the bigger picture. It's unavoidable — you're mired in the daily operations of running your businesses, making it extremely difficult to split time between grinding away in the business and stepping back to think holistically about future-focused strategies.

That's where an experienced agency team can provide immense value. As unbiased third-parties with panoramic vision, we have the unique advantage of working across multiple sectors and categories. We bring methodologies honed from exposure to diverse situations. And we can assess a client's challenges with fresh eyes.

This vantage point allows us to:

• Ask probing questions
• Identify potential blind spots
• Anticipate roadblocks
• Pressure test different strategic approaches before you invest in and embark on a multi-year plan.

We're not constrained by internal politics or groupthink. We can call out potential conflicts or areas of misalignment within their organization.

Marketing isn't a function — it's part of your team

Any credible agency recognizes that they can't develop a strategy from an ivory tower without deep client input and knowledge sharing.

We need clients to be the subject matter experts conveying:

• Their industry dynamics and landscape
• Their product/service differentiators
• Their first-hand customer/user insights
• Their business goals and key performance indicators
• Their operational constraints and requirements

It's a collaborative process of the client providing critical foundational context and the agency layering on our strategic oversight and recommendations based on experience helping other companies in similar situations.

We then get into the nitty gritty of conducting supplemental research, building out distribution models and roadmaps, pressure testing our approach, and ultimately presenting a defined, data-backed strategic proposal for how to tackle the client's objectives.

Does that mean the client abdicates all decision-making and simply rubber-stamps our suggestions? Not at all. We view it as our role to provide options, implications, and specific recommendations - all laid out in a clear-eyed, unbiased way. We'll make our case using facts, not opinions. But at the end of the day, we respect the client's responsibility and right to determine their path forward.

So while execution may be why agencies are hired, our ability to provide unvarnished strategic perspective is ultimately what creates the most value for many clients. They need us to guide them out of those overly insular mindsets and see the bigger picture possibilities. They want us to push their thinking, back up our advice, and hold them accountable.

By taking a pragmatic, consultative approach, the dynamic shifts from a client simply ordering agency implementation to an agency truly earning a seat at the strategic table as a trusted counselor. We collaborate as partners rather than executed vendor requests. It's a team effort to develop the proper game plan before taking the field.

Curious if you could benefit from an agency partner?

We specialize in marketing partnerships to beyond project-by-project execution to truly make an impact on our clients' bottom lines. 

Sound like something you could benefit from? Let's talk.