Agency marketing is hard. Many agencies simply lack the resource or do not carve out any time for their own marketing. Over time, working with agencies, we noticed many of them do not practice what they preach to their clients.
We wanted to communicate to agencies how important their own marketing was for success and thought hard data would be best to send that message. From there, the ‘Practice what you preach’ agency marketing report was born.
This research primarily aimed to test our hypothesis that 'agencies do not practice what they preach'. We also hoped to identify where agencies excel and where they can improve across different marketing competencies.
We have therefore provided a benchmark for agencies to reference their own performance and help them stand out.
The structure of the research
We decided to look at three key areas for each agency:
Website (including positioning)
Social channels
Content strategy.
Within each of these sections, we asked specific questions that would reflect good marketing practice. For instance, the ‘website’ section included questions like ‘Is the agency’s mission/ vision/ values clearly communicated to external visitors?’, while the social media section included questions like ‘Does their social content always ladder back to their agency proposition (or does it get confused and talk about things that are not relevant)?’
With each question, the agency being scored gained or lost a point, leading to their total score out of 42.
On top of that, we ran all the agencies through a URL analysis, which showed us how search engines view what agencies’ websites are about.
The analysis process
During the analysis, we looked at key statistics, like the top and lowest-performing agencies, on top of testing our original hypothesis, ‘Agencies do not practice what they preach’.
For testing our main hypothesis, we looked at how agencies demonstrate their expertise digitally. The section is divided by agency specialism and breaks down how each agency type can avoid falling into the same pitfall.
Along the way, we also spotted patterns within the data which gave us interesting findings such as the stark difference between URL generated topics for each agency’s website and the actual topic of the website. This generated the ‘Human vs Robot’ section of the report, highlighting the incorrect distribution of content on agencies’ channels which leads to poor search engine ranking.
We saw the same pattern between the positioning scores (which were scored within the ‘website’ section) and the overall performance. Just looking at the data, we could see the agencies with poorer propositions performed worse overall. Our suspicions once again were confirmed with the data analysis.
All of these led us to pull out a multitude of statistics that allow agencies to focus on where they might be falling behind and give them the needed insights and recommendations to improve their marketing.
Learn how to improve your agency’s marketing
The report generated a wealth of insights for agencies of different specialities and sizes, as well as for us to guide our clients in the right direction. With the help of the report, we can understand precisely where focus is needed to help an agency stand out from the competitors.
If you’re ready to become your own best case study, download and read our Practice what you Preach report now.
We will be scoring a handful of agencies each month and providing a tailored report to show how they perform against the benchmarks in our research. Get in touch if you would like to be considered for a bespoke agency scoring.
Download our Practice What You Preach report
Agency marketing is hard. Our research with over 100 UK agencies proves it. Download the report to learn how to become your own best case study.
