How Clients Choose Their Agencies

Hey everybody, Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute. This week I am coming to you from Cleveland, Ohio where I am speaking at Content Marketing World. And this year Susan Baier and I, as we always do at Content Marketing World, are unveiling the latest research we've done. So we just came out of the field, we talked to over 1,000 CMOs, business owners, VP's of marketing, EVPs of marketing and sales, anybody who hires agencies. We talked to over 1,000 of them and we ask them questions around how and why they hire a the agency that they've chosen, and what they're looking for in that agency during the buying process. And this is actually, so we started The Agency Edge Research Series in 2014. And you can get all the executive summaries from all the previous studies for free on the AMI website—go into resources, and you'll see agency edge, and you can download all of the executive summaries. But anyway, in 2014 we did a study very similar to this. So we took the 2014 study and we said, "I wonder what's changed in five years?" And a lot has changed. So we took that study, we added some additional questions around, geographically, how close do you want your agency to be to you? We added some questions around how involved, and where do you want the agency owner to show up, and all kinds of other things. We also added some other countries. In 2014 we only surveyed American companies, American-based companies, but in this research, we added, we have US, UK, Australia, and Canada. So you're also going to see the differences and similarities among those geographies. So the research was fascinating. Some of the takeaways are sort of jaw-dropping in terms of how they think about us, what they want from us, and I've got a couple opportunities for you. So number one, you can go to the AMI website and load the executive summary, or if you want, we're doing a webinar on November 12th where we are literally going to go question by question and walk people through what the data told us. So you can get the executive summary emailed to you and be registered for the webinar if you do this: Text to the number 38470 and then in the part where you would type your text message, type AMI2019. So again in the numbers part put 38470 and then in the text part put AMI2019. Now if you do that, A, you'll get the executive summary sent to you right away, and, B, you'll be signed up for the webinar. You don't have to attend the webinar if you don't want to if you can't make it live it on November 12th. Then we will just send you a couple days after the webinar a link where you can watch the video of the webinar. Or you can ignore all of that altogether if you don't want to join us. The cool thing about the webinar is, we will literally be able, you'll be able to ask us live like, "Well how did women feel about that instead of men?" Or, "What if that person responding was over 45, verses under 40?" Or whatever that is. And Susan, I was going to say we, but it's not me, and Susan will be able to manipulate, you know, click some buttons and say, "Oh, well here are the results for that subset." So you can really drill down to the clients, the geography, the questions that you want to ask more questions about, and we will be able to answer it on the webinar. So, a couple quick facts out of that research that were very telling: Number one, geography is not an issue for our clients. In fact, a majority of them choose for very specific reasons, which we outline in the executive summary, they choose to work with agencies that are more than 200 miles away from them. Another thing is, many clients do think the agency owners should be more present, and they have some very specific places where they'd like to see that happen. So grab the executive summary, join us for the webinar, and let us help you understand how your clients and prospects are thinking about you, and feeling about you, because I think it's not only about the ones you're chasing and how do you how do you win more of them, but I also think it's about how to even keep the ones that you have? Alright, I'll talk to you next week.