Agency owners will vouch for the fact that theirs is one of the most competitive industries.
For every agency that winds down, there are a couple that comes up. Existing large agencies are adding to their own technology stack and partnerships.
In this backdrop, it is important for agencies to add to their arsenal of tools and keep with the trends. Using consumer insight platforms is one such trend.
Why is it important for agencies to use a listening and consumer insights tool?
Using insights leads to better marketing strategies. This is an assumption that has stood the test of time. What has changed then? A couple of things:
- Unlike in the past, there is a lot of consumer interaction and conversation in the public domain. A brand needs to know what is being said about them, competitors and the category.
- Again, different from the past, a new source of consumer insights is available. Insights used to come from customer interviews and other market research techniques. Now, you can use this alternative data source to derive insights. And these insights can be available in real-time!
This is an opportunity for agencies – to be at the cutting edge of collecting insights and to use these to empower their customers’ strategy.
Why are real-time insights worth investing on?
The quality of consumer and category insights determines the success of a marketing strategy. Real-time makes it more powerful.
The reason is that any product flaw or operational issues bubble up immediately. Any new trends can be discovered and leveraged as is being done by forward-thinking brands. Contextual advertising by Burger King is a good example.
The deeper the insights, the more multi-dimensional the insight the better informed would be your strategy for the client.
What are the “must-have” features for an ‘agency friendly’ listening and consumer insights platform?
Here are some that come to mind, based on our own work, working with many agencies across advertising, digital and public relations.
- At the outset, is the platform the best possible option for the customer? This question needs to be answered before moving to the below-mentioned considerations.
- The ability to create and commission accounts for many brands.
- An admin-panel to track usage, activity across all brand accounts.
- Ability to be the “super-admin” or admin-to-all accounts so that you can perform activities such as adding users, changing the setup, etc.
- If you can apportion the ammunition across brands, and in real-time, that would be a wonderful feature. For example, in lean periods for one brand, we can move the mentions limit to another brand.
- It would be all futile if managing listening does not add to the bottom line! You should rake in a decent revenue share with the provider.
- Additional revenue streams from managed services using the platform. Can you offer services such as a response service, or a brand health monitoring and escalation service? There can be many ideas, each one contributing to your topline and bottom-line.
Our own insights team (yes, we do have one!), interacted with several agency owners to create an ‘agency-friendly’ version of Auris. That wealth of information helped us address the needs of agencies.
We are looking to add to this list of features which are good for agencies. If you are an agency owner or manager, do share features you’d like to see. We are actively listening 🙂