Project management is both an art and a science. At the heart of this balance is budget management. For creative agencies, keeping budgets under control is crucial for being profitable and achieving positive outcomes in both the short term and long term.

Between Planned and Actual: Understanding Deviations in the Industry

93% of agencies report deviations from their initial budgets. This figure is more than just a simple statistic; it’s a wake-up call about the need for greater visibility.

The root of problems in the industry is directly related to time deviations. These deviations can make a project unprofitable or lead to a resource being oversold. If an agency seeks to improve the management of its resources, it needs to know the capacity of its team.

A deviation refers to the difference that arises between the budgeted amount and the amount that ultimately results when planning a project for a client, such as a campaign. This deviation can occur in any line of revenue and expenses.

Visibility is not just a buzzword. It’s the ability to clearly see every aspect of a project in real time. From resource allocation to time tracking and progress, visibility allows agencies to keep projects on the right track and make decisions based on real data.

The cause of the major challenges facing agencies is the time deviation between what is sold and what is executed. Consuming more time than estimated makes profitable orders stop being so, and teams that would be available to take on new projects end up overloaded with work with new requirements for the same type of deliverable. Additionally, today employee turnover in the industry is at its peak, which is due, in quantitative terms, mainly to employee salaries and their workload.

“Nowadays, fees do not represent the total value of the work”

The term “deviation” has been a persistent headache for agencies. At first glance, it may seem like a small mismatch between what was planned and what was achieved. But, in reality, these deviations have deeper ramifications that can affect an agency’s profitability and reputation.

In the creative industry, time is essential. Every hour counts, and each hour not accounted for correctly can lead to financial losses and missed opportunities. Deviations arise when there is a lack of alignment between client expectations and the agency’s actual capacity.

This imbalance can be attributed to:

• Lack of clear communication with the client.
• Lack of a robust project management tool.
• Not understanding the real capacity of the team.
• Lack of visibility on the actual progression of the project.

To overcome these challenges, it is essential to adopt tools and practices that provide transparency and real-time data. Furthermore, agencies should strive to establish clear communication with their clients, clearly defining the scope, expectations, and potential challenges.

Transparency of Assigned Resources for Each Project and Budget Estimation

It is crucial that agencies do not view visibility merely as a way to control costs. Instead, it should be seen as a way to improve project delivery, strengthen client relationships, and ultimately drive profitability.

In the absence of visibility, challenges arise. Unplanned change requests from clients, inaccurate estimates, and tight deadlines can quickly derail a project. Each deviation can impact the final outcome and, more importantly, profitability.

Having a real-time view of project progress is also essential for communication with the client. By keeping the client informed and aligned with the process, expectations can be managed and client satisfaction ensured.

How much will it cost to execute your project? What resources are needed to carry out your project?

In today’s digital age, the amount of data available is overwhelming. But having access to data is not enough; clarity is needed. Firstly, agencies must be able to break down and analyze this data to get a clear picture of where the necessary resources for each project are being spent and whether those expenses are generating the desired return on investment.

Agencies need to demonstrate to the client with concrete data what are the causes of time deviations and thus reach the stage of renegotiating fees. Thanks to the correct use of a project management tool, we can know:

• how long it takes an agency to complete them
• what fees they contemplate according to the areas
• how long it takes a designer to complete a project based on their seniority
• the comparison between teams when analyzing productivity
• Once this internal information is collected, the natural step to give access to a client is to show it. When an agency lacks internal information, it becomes very difficult to show its processes to an external client. The first major recommendation is to be clear about the time and human memories that the projects involve.

To achieve 100% transparency, we must communicate to the client that the quotes have monetary value in:

• Time invested
• Knowledge
• Creativity

Innovative solutions to visualize the operation of the agency

From a technological standpoint, modern project management tools are essential for achieving this visibility. These tools offer a real-time view of each project, allowing agencies to identify and address deviations before they become larger issues. This should be one of the strategic goals of every agency to seek to be more profitable and achieve a fair and effective budgeting process.

Without clear visibility, agencies may find themselves reacting to problems instead of anticipating them. Proactivity, fueled by a clear vision of the project and budget, allows for real-time adjustments, which maximizes efficiency and minimizes losses.

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In the dynamic world of creative agencies, profitability becomes a constant concern. Not just for the financial aspect, but also for sustainability and growth. A powerful tool that is often overlooked in this context is the strategic renegotiation of fees.

Within the vast universe of observations and insights from some of the major advertising, marketing, and media agencies, a notable trend emerges: numerous agencies have managed to significantly boost their profitability by granting their clients full visibility of the working process and offering a tool for collaboration and transparency. This openness not only generates trust but also becomes a competitive differentiator in the market by ensuring a better way to visualize what is invested in each project. It is a trend that is present in agencies around the world, including Latin America, Spain, the United States, Mexico, among others.

The Dual Benefit of Transparency

The impact is twofold. On one hand, this transparency has opened doors to new business opportunities, allowing agencies to r On the other hand, by having a clear understanding of the hours and resources involved in a project, agencies can establish more accurate and suitable rates for emerging business opportunities.

Proactive Management: Key to Success

Effective management is not merely a day-to-day operation; it is an art. For an agency to position itself advantageously, it is crucial that it can review, adjust, and continuously renegotiate its scope of work. It is not about waiting months or even years to make adjustments, but about being proactive and anticipating the changing needs of the client and the market. This management must be a key part of the business’s strategic planning.

The Importance of Concrete Information and Data

Adjustments in the scope of work are not arbitrary. They are based on data, on constant feedback, and on a deep understanding of the agency’s operations. It is essential to recognize that such improvements and adjustments are not possible if there is not complete and up-to-date information of the operations. There are no success stories without transparent and full access to operational data.

Steps for Successful Renegotiation

So, what is the path forward for agency and client?

• Define the initial scope of work: Both parties must be clear about the expectations, deliverables, and resources needed from the beginning. The overall goal should be clear.
• Agree on the fee for that project: Once the scope is defined, a price is established that reflects the value and work that will be contributed.
• Execution of the scope of work: During this phase, the agency must be transparent, showing the client how the project is progressing as agreed, giving visibility to each step.
• Evaluation and adjustment: At the end, or even during the process, the results should be reviewed, evaluating whether adjustments are necessary or if new requests from the client arise. This is the renegotiation phase, where fees can be reviewed based on changing needs.

Conclusion

In an increasingly competitive market, transparency, adaptability, and collaboration are key to driving success and profitability in the world of agencies. The strategic renegotiation of fees is more than a financial tactic; it is a management philosophy that, when applied correctly, can transform the trajectory of an agency and achieve a competitive advantage in the business model within the industry.

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Creative agencies face the significant challenge of not only staying relevant but also profitable. The key to success and sustainability in this environment is nothing other than visibility and effective resource management. But, how can agencies turn everyday challenges into meaningful opportunities for growth and improvement? Here’s a practical guide to boost your profitability and billing indicators.

The first step towards any significant change is to understand the current state of affairs. According to a recent study that covered more than 600 agency executives worldwide, it was discovered that half of these organizations are not fully aware of their productive capacity. This lack of knowledge directly translates into suboptimal profitability and billing. Transparency and a clear understanding of internal operations emerge as non-negotiable factors for continuous improvement.

The Importance of Metrics in Profitability

The profitability of a creative agency can be measured through several key metrics. Operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and project profitability are crucial indicators of success. However, to get a complete picture, it is essential to analyze these metrics within the context of current trends.

For example, operational efficiency should consider not only costs and production time but also adaptability to new platforms and technologies. Customer satisfaction should be measured not just in terms of project delivery but also in the agency’s ability to anticipate and adapt to changing customer needs. And project profitability should be evaluated in the context of investments in innovation and the development of new services.

Identifying Areas for Improvement

The profitability of an agency revolves around two main axes: earnings and resource management. An astounding 37% of executives consider earnings as their main focus, seeking to optimize the profitability of their worked hours. However, efficiency does not end with profitability. The remaining 23% focuses on improving resource management to prevent overwork and high staff turnover, two factors that can silently but lethally bleed any organization’s resources.

Practical Solutions for Common Challenges

The key to transforming these challenges into opportunities lies in the implementation of effective strategies that address the specific needs of the agency:

• Improve Operational Visibility: Adopt tools and technologies that allow clear tracking of tasks, time, and resources. This not only helps identify where time or resources are being wasted but also facilitates data-driven decision-making.
• Optimize Time Management: Billable hours become the axis of profitability. Ensure that each team member knows and understands their billing capacity and goals. Implement systems to constantly monitor and improve these metrics.
• Encourage Transparency with Clients: Lack of clarity in the relationship with clients can lead to misunderstandings and, ultimately, loss of business. Ensuring open and honest communication is key, setting clear expectations from the start of the project.
• Centralize Information: Data scattering across multiple platforms can lead to the loss of crucial information. Using a unified tool for project management, time tracking, and accounting can significantly increase efficiency and visibility.

Profitability Analysis with Artificial Intelligence

New technologies can help predict profitability in real time and negotiate better fees.

• Identify the clients and projects that contribute to or detract from your profitability: Through dashboards, you can obtain information on the most profitable clients and projects vs those that bill the most. It is crucial for making decisions to correct the profitability of your projects before they end in loss.
• Understand which services contribute to your business’s profitability: Get a complete picture of all the types of services you offer, to discern which ones are profitable for you and which require adjustments. Thanks to the analysis of budgeted hours, estimated hours, and hours invested, in real time you can make decisions that favor your profitability.
• Avoid competing for services that may generate losses: Just by entering the budget offered by the tender into our project template function, you can understand whether the competition is worth it financially or not. Avoid competing for campaigns that do not align with your team’s time value.

Conclusion

Improving profitability and billing in a creative agency requires a constant commitment to transparency, efficiency, and continuous improvement. By implementing these strategies, your agency will not only be able to overcome current challenges but also position itself for sustained success in the future. Remember, every small change in internal efficiency can have a significant impact on your profitability.

The post The Importance of Operational and Financial Metrics in Agencies appeared first on COR.

When an agency chooses transparency, it offers more than just a project or service; it provides an experience based on trust and openness, highly valued aspects in today’s market. To achieve this, it is crucial to have precise knowledge of the hours dedicated by the teams, a key factor in evaluating profitability and adjusting budgets as needed.

In the realm of agencies, maintaining fluid communication is vital for achieving long-term goals. It is essential to show clients the processes undertaken to achieve the final result. This transparency in the work done and the value of the effort invested reinforce trust between client and agency, allowing the client to be involved in decision-making, contribute ideas and suggestions, and foster effective communication between both parties.

Towards Centralized Communication: The Importance of Client Access

The collection and analysis of internal information by those managing agency accounts are fundamental to creating exhaustive reports on each project. This practice not only strengthens the initial relationship with clients but also establishes a solid foundation for future collaborations.

Client access to project information centralizes communication and facilitates collaboration between both parties. This includes managing in an organized and transparent manner. project elements such as: 

• feedback
• approvals
• file exchanges
• requests for rework 

This transparency regarding the hard work of the teams and the value of the effort invested in each project reinforces client trust and appreciation for the work performed. Agencies can demonstrate to their clients the procedures and processes used to achieve the final deliverable. This visibility of the teams’ hard work and the value of the effort invested in each project strengthens client confidence and appreciation for the work performed.

Building Long-lasting Relationships: The Role of Honesty in Agencies

Currently, honesty in business emerges as a powerful tool rather than an obstacle. Transparency and frankness are established as key differentiators that attract and retain clients who appreciate quality and authenticity. By choosing honesty, an agency not only offers projects or services but also an experience of trust and openness, highly valued in today’s market.

A transparent and honest approach to project management not only strengthens the relationship between agencies and clients in addition to results in greater productivity and satisfaction for both parties. In this collaborative and open environment, clients become active partners, contributing significantly to the success of the project. It is essential for those managing accounts in agencies to gather internal information provided by collaborators to create detailed reports documenting processes from the beginning of each delivery.

The availability of information on each project for the client centralizes communication and facilitates collaboration between the agency and the client. This collaboration allows for feedback, approvals, file exchanges, and requests for changes in an organized and transparent manner with all involved team members. Honesty and transparency are not only ethical values in business but also powerful tools that drive success and satisfaction for both agencies and their clients. Transparent and open collaboration is essential for building long-lasting relationships and achieving objectives effectively and efficiently.

The post The Value of Visibility: How Transparency Drives the Success of Your Agency appeared first on COR.

Remember the days when brand loyalty grew year by year? Today’s most successful consumer goods brands were built by heavy advertising and marketing investments long ago. But recently, many marketers have lost sight of the connection between advertising spending and market share. They practice the art of discounting: cutting ad budgets to fund price promotions or fattening quarterly earnings. They may win the volume battle today. They may win the volume battle today but lose the competitive war.

The marketers at some companies, however, remember that brand value and consumer preference for brands drive market share. They also know that price promotion in digital advertising and consumer preference for brands drive the market share value. Most importantly, in social media, they understand the balance of advertising and promotion expenditures needed to build brands and gain share, market by market, regardless of growth trends in the product categories where they compete.

What do great marketers have in common? Among other things, awareness is a key factor in the advertising market: consistent investment spending. They do not raid their budgets to ratchet earnings up for a few quarters. They know that advertising should not be managed as a discretionary variable cost.

Analyzing the impact of advertising spending in situations where competitors’ products are more or less the same and competitors’ marketing, promotion, and advertising people appear to be equally effective. Of course, truly superior or inferior advertising content is an important factor in the gain or loss of market share, but I am not talking about that here.

Under such circumstances, the following patterns emerge:

• Advertising spending can determine advances and retreats in market share – but only when a big spending difference among competitors has been maintained for a long time. Judging from studies of many consumer products over the past several years, this difference must be at least double the main rival’s outlay. The relationship between digital ad spending and share change appears after about 18 months, and reliable correlations can be established after 3 years.
• Most of the time, competitors are in a state of equilibrium where the leaders’ spending growth remains stable despite marginal changes in their ad expenditures. Competitors that understand the spending game will establish this equilibrium at a level so high that no upstart can afford the extra sustained investment needed to increase its share.
• A competitor with an aggressive total ad spending strategy will keep up the attack only so long as it adds to market share. By pouring enough attribution to convince this aggressor that the market has returned to a stalemate, the combatants can force a return to share equilibrium levels.
• Therefore, unsupportable levels of ad spending will not continue indefinitely.
• Global ad spending requirements powerfully contribute to industry consolidation. Because the equilibrium point is likely to be high, in most cases no more than two or three players can generate the volume needed to maintain the necessary amount of advertising expenditure.
• These relationships exist on an individual market basis, not on a national level. In fact, the cases in which we have observed share upheavals have been those where the loser was focusing on ad budgets at the national level and was blind or did not react, to a rival’s attacks with large spending differentials in particular markets.

Ad spend Overview

The global advertising market experienced some fairly turbulent times between 2000 and 2010, seeing growth rates as high as 11.2 percent as well as lows reaching 9.5 percent during that time period. However, since 2011 the situation has stabilized, and advertising growth remained on average roughly five percent. Yet 2020 brought the coronavirus pandemic outbreak and with it a high drop in ad spending of about four percent (through previous forecasts expected a nine percent drop. According to projections, by 2024 the industry will see an expenditure growth return of 7.6 percent.

Not surprisingly, the Internet will be the largest advertising medium in 2024, accounting for a little over 65 percent of global ad expenditures that year. Television, which has been the undisputed favorite among advertisers, will be overtaken by digital media. Between 2022 and 2024 TV is forecast to gain only around seven billion US dollars, while mobile internet is expected to gain 147 billion dollars in the same period. Most of the major media are projected to have small gains in investments during the measured period, while newspapers are projected to lose by roughly three and two billion respectively.

All in all, the North American region will still be the most prominent region, with the US poised to hold the crown for the largest advertising market in 2024. Canada and Mexico will take the second and third spots within the region, but on a global scale are not predicted to rank anywhere close to the top three markets. As a matter of fact, Asian countries, China and Japan will close the top three, making Asia the second leading region in terms of ad expenditures.

Ad Spending and Market Share

Global advertising spend is on course to rise by 8,3% – or $67, 3bn – to $880,9, finds WARC lifted by a positive first half for holding companies and a boost from cyclical events in the seconds, most notably the US midterm elections and the men’s FIFA world cup in Qatar now in November. Market growth is then set to ease significantly – to 2.6% – in 2023, as an investment is inhibited by cooling economic conditions and third-party cookie blocking online.

The new projections, based on data from 100 ad markets worldwide, amount to a downgrade of 4.3 percentage points to 2022 growth and 5.7 to 2023s prospects, compared to WARC’s previous global forecast in December 2021. Taken together, the new forecasts represent a reduction of almost $90bn in growth potential for the global advertising market this year and next.

Advertising holding companies, which serve many of the world’s biggest brands – have recorded a positive to 2022, with all major firms upwardly revising forward guidance for the year ahead. Conversely, small to medium businesses (SMSbs) that largely buy ad space directly, are bearing the brunt of worsening economic conditions. A slowdown in SMB advertising activity will impact social media advertising and other digital platforms most – a sector already struggling to grapple with the impact of Apple´s new privacy measures. WARC expects social media ad spending to rise by 11.5 this year ( compared to 47, 1 in 2021) and then ease to just 5,2% in 2023 – the slowest rate yet for the sector.

Aside from the businesses, consumers are also feeling the squeeze of soaring price inflation. This is particularly true among low earners for whom energy and food costs comprise a higher proportion of income. Wealthier consumers, however, have seen the value of their assets appreciate in recent years and are more likely to have received above-inflation pay rises – spending intentions among high earners remain bullishly positive per Delloiute monitoring. Sectors like technology & electronics (11.5% in 2023), pharma & healthcare (+7.5%), and household & domestic (6.5%) are expected to post healthy increases in advertising investment to capture any available disposable income.

Meta recorded its first annual decline in advertising income during Q2 2022 and WARC believes its full-year growth will be flat over the forecast period, as the Instagram platform stymies ongoing losses from the core Facebook platform this year and next. TikTok (41,5%) Snap (+5,8%) and Twitter (+2,7%) are all expected to record growth next year, but at a far slower rate than historically seen, while a number of Chinese platforms are set to record losses.

Video Ad Spending is set to grow faster than the total ad market this year ( 8,4%) and next year (7,0%). Within this, the advertising-funded video-on-demand (AVOD) sector – which includes the likes of Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and YouTube is expected to rise 8.0% this year and then a further 7.6% in 2023 to rise 8,0% this year and then a further 7,6% in 2023 to reach a value of almost $65bn.

There is already evidence of saturation in the streaming market, particularly in the US, with audiences now using seven streaming services on average ( compared to the global average of five). Consequently, new entrants are just as likely to be fighting for existing advertising spend as they are for incremental dollars, which could hinder the overall growth of streaming operators in the short-medium – term.

Streaming services owned by broadcasters are also set to grow their advertising income this year (+9,7%) and next year (+5,2%), but from a far lower base (reaching $18,5bn in 2023). Linear TV is set to benefit from cyclic sporting and political events this year, raising advertising investment by 3.6% ( 20,4% of all advertising spend) but the market is then on course to record a 4.5 loss in the absence of these events next year.

Ad spend post-pandemic

Following a calamitous 2020 and a year of deep cuts in the first year of COVID, ad spending enjoyed a bounce back in 2021. Even though many categories and economies were still operating in very abnormal circumstances last year, the pivot to digital and eCommerce made by many brands saw digital ad spending increase by 30%. The biggest bounce-back effects were felt in Brazil (+56%), the world’s largest advertising market the US (+38% to US$211bn alone), and the U.K. (+36%).

Although growth will be more modest in the next three years – up 16% in 2022, 13% in 2023, and 11% in 2024 – these increases are in line with the pre-pandemic growth trajectory of digital advertising and will take total worldwide digital ad spend to US $757bn by 2024.

While in China, the media ad spending growth rate has slowed to 9,2% due to regulatory constraints and hobbled economy, it will be the second largest ad market in the world after the US. Investment in traditional media will only experience a modest 4% growth from 2021-2024, increasing from US$229bn to US$312bn. The projected changes are shown above.

The pandemic years have shown many brands around the world quite how straightforward and effective it can be to switch investment to digital channels and drive growth there. Not only have the dominant advertising channels and social media platforms owned by Alphabet and Meta – Google and YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram – enjoyed strong growth in 2021, a trend that will continue in the years ahead. Other, smaller platforms have benefitted too, including both the more established, such as Pinterest and Snapchat, and newer routes to market, most notably TikTok.

Social media advertising has been particularly impactful for smaller, local businesses, as well as the growing army of direct consumers of D2C brands. Sales here are more performance-driven and distinctly different from the way that major brands have used traditional media historically to grow by brand building. Intrigued, by the tactics of smaller, local businesses and D2C brands are now also being adopted by established megabrands and market leaders.

The Advertising Response Function

There is a correlation between sales volume and the advertising budget and the advertising budget, and that is what led to looking for the relative share of voice effect.

Market leaders have this problem. Spending at levels loud enough to be heard, they are in a zero-sum jousting match. For either company No.1 or company No.2, cutting the share of voice too much can be a disaster. The share of voice effect takes hold, and the quiet competitor loses share while the louder competitor gains. Similarly, an obvious run at an SOV advantage is likely to spark an unprofitable war as both players spend to maintain equilibrium.

The shrewd marketer, therefore, picks its attacks carefully, targeting markets wisely, aiming at markets for share gain where the competitor is vulnerable, markets where that competitor is vulnerable, markets where that competitor is perhaps knowingly understanding, markets, markets where a voice can be raised without breaking the budget.

The boom of Digital & Mobile markets

Cross-platform advertising, also known as cross-screen or cross-device advertising, is referred to the unified digital advertising strategy adopted for multiple devices such as personal computers, tablets, smart TVs, smartphones, and gaming consoles. Cross-platform advertising has emerged as an integrated form of marketing, which involves planning and sequencing a seamless flow of content and messages to multiple devices.

A key characteristic of such a cross-platform advertising strategy is that each of the aspects complements other components. Cross-platform advertising has emerged as an efficient way for advertisers to reach out to target customers with a single advertisement broadcast on multiple platforms. Through cross-platform advertising, marketers, publishers, and advertisers can reach targeted customers from any given location, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of campaigns.

Cross-platform advertising campaigns also enable marketers to engage with consumers repeatedly over different platforms. This contrasts with a conventional marketing initiative that is more massive in its approach.

Future growth in the market will be primarily driven by the growing proliferation of mobile devices as the preferred digital media platform, rapid adoption across various industry verticals, an improving economic environment, expanding mobile subscriber base, and increasing distribution of film and music online. The continuous shift of users towards digital media and rapid evolution in consumer behavior towards value-based advertising where the target audience is appropriately compensated for their time and attention through loyalty points, free subsidized content, and various user-friendly tools, are additionally providing impetus to market growth.

The overall increase in advertising budgets, generous allocation of budget to online ads, increased prices for direct response vehicles and branding ads, and an increase in the number of advertising agencies incorporating online media into their integrated campaigns are some of the major factors driving market expansion. Other important factors poised to benefit market prospects in the near term includes urging the popularity of social media networks that promote improved targeting; increasing the trend towards mobile apps offering huge potential for cross-platform advertising; growing prominence loT and the resultant growth in connected devices, and robust demand for digital video advertising supported by effective delivery and streaming of ad content.

Most attractive countries for digital creative agencies

The country you live in is the best place to start a marketing agency. You need to be aware of the culture, heritage, and lifestyle of the country’s people.

These are the most important factors for any marketing strategy and no data or research can make you more aware of the likes and dislikes of local people than the person living among them.

Bottom line, the country where you spend most of your life is the best place to get started with a marketing agency as you are well aware of your people which can’t be compared to any statistics or analytic research.

Although what was said earlier is the best advice possible, statistics say that the two spots among the ranking of most attractive countries for digital agency professionals belonged to Belgium, with a score of 5.39 points out of 10, and then came the Netherlands with a score of 4,78 points. Third came to India, with 4,71 points.

Conclusion

The post-pandemic bounce back in ad spending particularly investment in digital, most notably social – has enabled the global advertisement market to catch up on the chaotic lost year of 2020. The lessons of agility learned by brands big and small, selling both indirectly and directly, mean that digital is increasingly dominating marketers’ media plans. Any growth in a brand’s digital ad spending needs to be closely monitored to ensure that it is being spent as efficiently as possible.

The post Growing Markets shares in Ad spending appeared first on COR.

For example, Silicon Valley Associates Recruitment offers you some significant reasons why paying your employees a competitive salary is substantial.

First of all, what does it mean to pay a competitive salary? This means the salary incentives you pay to your employees are comparable to the money market. For instance, for a similar job, a competitive salary is equal to or above the standard offered by companies in the same industry or geographical area. A common HR practice offers within 10% above or below the market average for a job as a basis for competitive pay.

For workers, there’s a clear advantage to leaving, since they gain, on average a 10 to 20 percent raise in base salary with each new role, but 73% of the time they need to leave their current employer to capture that increased employee salary. Such high employee turnover is acutely felt on the employer side as well since the cost of voluntary turnover can become exorbitant depending on the seniority of the role that needs to be filled.

Make Sure Base Salary is Competitive

On the bottom line, thanks to a candidate-friendly job market and the advent of data transparency tools like management fees, workers know the value of the work more than ever before. So if your employees’ compensation levels are not competitive for the industry and marketplace you’re in, don’t expect them to stick around for long.

Also, ensure that you offer meaningful promotions – in both responsibilities and salaries. Know that with higher compensation comes higher expectations: Paying employees top-notch salaries means that your standards can be equally high. Rest assured, as well, that workers who are paid well will also expect more from themselves. Be sure your salary is adjusted accordingly, employees who work on the front lines for you in more expensive cities shouldn’t have to shoulder the additional evaluations for you.

Go Beyond Base Salary

To retain top talent, the investment plan goes into thinking beyond base salary, and variable pay benefits are a great place to start. Think of salary as employee compensation for regularly performing the tasks required for them, day in and day out. On the other side of the coin are variable pay benefits and investment options – financial incentives that serve as hedge funds to motivate your workers to exceed established goals and capture additional mutual funds.

Many organizations have found variable pay benefits to be a proven powerful tool for driving long-term investments as well as short-term, and retention. These include:

• End-of-year or holiday bonuses.

• Sales commissions.
• Stock Market interest rates.
• referral bonuses in real estate.
• Ash spiffs diversification.
• Profit sharing.

No matter the benefits you choose, the most important thing to remember is to keep the incentives simple. Each of your employees should understand them and know exactly how to achieve them, so clearly communicate every goal, the amount of productivity required, and the results they need to deliver.

Why paying a competitive Salary is important

One of the common mistakes for employers is overlooking the importance of providing competitive salaries to their employees. This is because they as a financial institution see it as an expense and paying them less may seem at first as a lower risk for the agency, but in the long run financial advisors will surely advise you that it is part of any investment product in any enterprise.

First of all, what does it mean to pay a “competitive” salary? This means the salary you pay for your employees is comparable to the market. For instance, corporate finance will tell you a competitive salary is equal to or above the standard offered by companies in the same industry or geographical area. A common HR practice offers within 10% above or below the market average for a job as a basis for competitive pay.

• Paying Less tends to be more Costly

Employers need to consider that one of the primary reasons for employee turnover is salary: Employees who feel they are not well compensated tend to look for other high-paid elsewhere, underwriting private equity and well-being above everything else. This will cause your employees to quit and move on and will cost your agency a huge amount of money because it is costly to recruit and train new employees for replacement. Therefore, the cost of hiring a new employee exceeds the amount of money you think you’ve saved by offering lower salaries.

• Low Pay could Demotivate employees

Salary is a primary extrinsic motivator for employees. And we cannot deny that we work because we wanted to be paid fairly. Workers that feel they’re being paid fairly are more likely to stay motivated and go motivated and go the extra mile to help your company achieve its goals. So when employees feel they are paid less than others who have a similar job to theirs, they can get demotivated and less invested in their work.

What is even worse about this is that demotivating employees could adversely impact their productivity and morale. They might devote little to their work and spend their time looking for another job. People who are willing to work for low salaries might not see it worth their time to bring value or optimal productivity to the agency but rather as a stepping stone to a better job. This could lead to an employee decline and leave you with a constant flow of new employees who are always training. You get what you pay for in a nutshell.

• High Pay Improves Motivation

On the other side, employees are heavily motivated by higher pay. This would make them feel valued and appreciated, which enhances employee treatment of clients with passion. In turn, employers can demand a higher quality output from them.

• Top talents are Attracted to High Salaries

Talent employees know what they’re worth. When your company is not offering a competitive salary, then they won’t likely buy into the job offer. This could hinder companies from scouting talented employees to their desire. And there are many top candidates in the market. Institutional investors should value your salary proposal, they will likely end up with what you ask for. This could become a threat to you because their capabilities can enhance the competitor’s performance over yours.

• Higher Pay improves the Company’s Stakeholders

So when employers invest in their employees, they will have more economic opportunities to improve their lifestyle. Employees who have more money will also spend more money. And this would boost not only their well-being but also the community where your business is operating. Your business can benefit from it. Corporate bonds will not last if this matter is not attended to, what goes around, comes around. This cycle applies to any agency.

What should you do…

Take advantage of paying a competitive salary! Looking over its benefits and disadvantages, we can conclude that how we pay our employees play a crucial factor in the company’s performance. Paying a competitive salary also benefits hiring managers from getting rid of employee turnover and constant recruitment process to new employees training.

Employers must not take their employees as a financial burden but rather as an investment for growth, improvement, and success. This includes training and team-building activities that enhance employee relationships, acquire new skills and knowledge, and establish a positive organizational culture.

How to Determine a Competitive Pay…

Employees that make lower wages, especially those at minimum wage, can struggle to make ends meet. This can adversely affect their performance and living conditions.

Industry trends and Market

• You have to take into account the trends and market performance of your company. Find out what your competitors offer for a similar position, taking into account your company’s industry and size.

Benchmark salaries and Benefits

• Research salary guides and employee feedback aligned to your target or chosen position to know the range and what to expect in your salary.

Location and cost of living

• Consider where your business is located. Salaries vary from state to state and even city to city, so research nearby pay rates and the cost of living in your area.

Supply and Demand

• Employers who Loof for Specific or highly qualified skills and qualifications are more likely to offer high salaries to attract candidates.

Benefits, Incentives, and Bonuses

• While benchmarking and researching a salary guide, you can also research the required and potential benefits and incentives you can get from the company.

Quality of Work-Life Rewards

In addition to base pay and variable rewards, you can strengthen your compensation arsenal by providing “quality of work life” rewards. Like variable pay benefits, these are incentives that reward workers for going above and beyond, but instead of cash are focused more on improving life and skill development. These can include:

• Educational assistance, such as tuition reimbursement or paid professional development and certification programs.
• An annual retreat for top performers, with workshops and other events that inspire engaging creative thinking.
• Increased opportunities for telecommuting or schedule flexibility.
• Equipment upgrades, such as laptops for performing remote work or tablets to use during sales presentations.

The most important consideration here is to develop a reward program that is applied fairly and consistently across the entire organization, so everyone can help the benefits no matter their type of investment.

Know that Salary alone may not be enough

Even when you’re checking all the boxes for salary and additional compensation, it may not be enough to halt employee turnover – retirement plans continue to prize remote or flexible workers highly as salary. Recent data from HR software maker ICIMS found that half of the companies had removed or loosened location requirements for new hires, meaning companies will increasingly have to compete for talent with companies that let workers work from wherever they feel most comfortable.

If remote or Hybrid work is an option for your organization, it may be time to consider adding that to your list of benefits.

Partner with a staffing firm

Developing a strong competitive employee compensation program is not an easy task, with a higher risk of stakeholders losing their interest in the place. That’s where working with a staffing firm with deep expertise in compensation and its impact on employee retention can place you on the fast track to stretching your organization.

Retaining Top Talent

While the job market in some industries and regions favors employers, candidates with in-demand skills likely won’t have to wait long to find a new opportunity. Many companies never stopped recruiting talent during the pandemic, and many others have picked up the pace of hiring in recent months.

If you sense your business is at risk of losing top talent, you need to move fast to shore up your employee retention strategies. Here are 10 areas where deliberate action can help boost employees’ job satisfaction and increase your ability to hold onto valued workers:

• Onboarding and orientation

every new hire should be set up for success from the start. Your onboarding process should teach new employees not only about the job but also about the company culture and how they can contribute to and thrive in it. Don’t skimp on this critical first step. The training and support you provide from day one, whether in person or virtually, can set the tone for the employee’s entire tenure at your firm.

• Mentorship Programs

Pairing a new employee with a mentor is a great component to add to your extended onboarding process, especially in a remote work environment. Mentors can welcome newcomers into the company, offer guidance and be a sounding board. And it’s a win-win: New team members learn the ropes from experienced employees, and, in return, they offer a fresh viewpoint to their mentors.

• Employee compensation

Companies need to pay their employees competitive compensation, which means employers need to evaluate and adjust salaries regularly. Even if your business can’t increase pay right now, consider whether you could provide other forms of compensation, such as bonuses. Don’t forget about improving health care benefits and retirement plans, which can help raise employee satisfaction, too.

• Perks

Perks can make your work stand out to potential new hires and re-engage current staff while boosting employee morale. According to research for our salary guide, flexible schedules and remote work options are the perks many professionals value most. In addition, about a third of the professionals we surveyed said paid parental leave is a big plus.

• Wellness Offerings

Keeping employees fit – mentally, physically, and financially – it’s just good business. Many leading employers expanded and improved their wellness offerings during the pandemic to help employees feel supported and prioritize their well-being. Stress management programs, retirement planning services, and reimbursement for fitness classes are just some examples of what your business might consider providing to employees.

• Communication

The shift to hybrid and remote work has undercovered the importance of good workplace communication. Your direct reports, whether they work on-site or remotely should feel they come to you with ideas, questions, and concerns at any time. And as a leader, you need to make sure you’re doing your part to help promote timely, constructive, and positive communication across the entire team. Make sure you proactively connect with each team member regularly, too, to get a sense of their workload and job satisfaction.

• Continuous feedback on performance

Many employers are abandoning the annual performance review in favor of more frequent meetings with team members. In these one-on-one meetings, talk with your employees about their short and long-term professional goals and help them visualize their future with the company. While you should never make promises you can’t keep, talk through potential career advancement scenarios together and lay out a realistic plan for reaching those goals.

• Training and development

As part of providing continuous feedback on performance, you can help employees identify areas for professional growth, such as the need to learn new skills. Upskilling your employees is especially important today as technology continues to change how we work. When people upskill, they gain new abilities and competencies as business requirements evolve.

Make it a priority to invest in your workers’ professional development. Give them time to attend virtual conferences, provide tuition reimbursement or pay for continuing education. Also, don’t forget about succession planning, which can be a highly effective method for advancing professional development and building leadership skills.

• Recognition and rewards systems

every person wants to feel appreciated for the work they do. And in today’s “ anywhere workforce, an employer’s gratitude can make an especially big impact. So be sure to thank your direct report who goes the extra mile and explain how their hard work helps the organization. Some companies set up formal rewards systems to incentivize great ideas and innovation, but you can institute compelling recognition programs even if you have a small team or a limited budget.

• Work-life balance

What message is your time management sending to employees? Do you expect staff to be available around the clock? A healthy work-life balance is essential to job satisfaction. People need to know their managers understand that have lives outside of work and recognize that painting balance can be even more challenging when working from home. Encourage employees to set boundaries and take their vacation time. And if ate nights are necessary to wrap up a project, consider giving them extra time off to compensate.

Costs of employee turnover

Frequent voluntary turnover rates hurt your organization in more than one way.

• Turns down morale

One of the first changes you’ll notice is a decrease in employee morale. As more employees leave, the ones remaining may have lost a valuable work friend, which matters more than you might think.

If an employee leaves, the culture and the commitment your remaining employees have to the organization and their role can be severely affected.

• Decreases productivity

Losing employees also leads to decreased productivity, quite simply because you have fewer team members to get work done. As the remaining employees get overwhelmed with more work to help make up the difference, their stress levels rise, making them far less likely to perform at their best.

This kind of hit on your employees’ productivity is also a hit to your agency financially.

• Financial cost

Perhaps the biggest concern employee turnover presents, from recruiting and training new employees to replace the ones you’ve lost. While the exact cost of turnover rates varies, there’s no question it’s something employers need to manage.

The average cost of losing an employee can cost thousands of dollars.

Some studies predict that every time a business replaces a salaried employee, it costs 6 to 9 months’ salary on average. For a manager making $60.000 a year, that’s $30.000 to $45.000 in recruiting and training expenses. However, turnover seems to vary by wage and role of employee.

For example, some reports the average cost to replace an employee:

• $1,500 for hourly employees
• 100% to 150% of an employee’s salary for technical positions
• Up to 213% of an employee’s salary for C-suite positions.

Recruitment Costs: The direct costs of hiring a new employee including advertising, interviewing, screening, and hiring.

Onboarding costs: The cost of onboarding a new person, including training and management time.

Lost productivity: It may take a new employee one to two years to reach the productivity of an existing person, resulting indirect costs to your organization.

Customer service and errors: New employees take longer to complete their work and are often less adept at solving problems.

Training costs: Over two to three years, a business likely invests 10% to 20% of an employee’s salary or more in training.

Lost institutional knowledge: When highly skilled or longtime employees leave, your organization loses some institutional knowledge, or the combined skill set and experience of your business.

Cultural Impact: Whenever someone leaves, others take time to ask why.

One of the reasons the real cost of employee turnover is a mystery is that most organizations don’t have systems in place to track exit costs, including recruiting, interviewing, hiring, orientation, and training, lost productivity, potential customer dissatisfaction, reduced or lost business, administrative costs, and lost expertise. Calculating this amongst all employees for a total annual cost takes collaboration among departments’ tools to measure these costs and reporting mechanisms.

How much money an agency has to invest in new Talent?

• The cost of hiring an employee goes far beyond just paying for their salary to encompass, recruiting, training benefits, and more.
• Integrating a new employee into the organization can also require time and expenditures.
• It can take up to six months or more for a company to break even on its investment in a new hire.
• Benefits should account for an employee’s investment requirements, not just that employee’s salary.

Conclusion

When an employee leaves your agency, it can be a big blow to your organization’s morale, productivity, and budget. That’s why implementing strong retention strategies from the beginning is so crucial, including offering quality benefits to take care of your employees.

Remember salaries should be your top investment. Keep your employees happy and everything will go down smoothly.

The post Employee Retention: Strategies to Retain the Most Valuable Assets in your Agency appeared first on COR.

In this article, we will share some of the most useful features in the industry which will dramatically improve your productivity. We will also introduce the Google Apps script, a powerful tool for automating workflows and extending Google Shetts’s functionality and sustainability. Google Sheets’s advantages and disadvantages will also be covered.

In addition to listing the advantages, we’ll also cover the negative aspects of these. There a just a few, especially two to stand out: one of them would be that the benefits depend on collaboration with other subscribers or employees, and here you will find that the uneven uptake in the organization will place limits on how fast you can take some of the features into use.

When Google gets in Google’s way

The rise of Google Now, a feature that proactively delivered information to users to predict information in form of informational cards, showed as a prime example of Google having something exceptional and then failing to follow through with it.

With its first time appearance in 2012, young people heralded it in social media as “ the predictive future of search”. It brought countless tidbits Google knows about our every day and our world together in a fantastically useful way – a way no company other than google could try to pull off.

Nowadays, disclaimers have rebranded it as “ the feed” and are just another stream of news stories you can scroll through.

Why did that change happen? By all counts, Google gave up on its unique vision to chase competitors like Facebook or Linkedin in the race for cheap attention. In doing so, it once again lost that special spark.

There are countless other examples of Google acting as its own worst enemy and failing to follow through with a commendable initial vision. Look at the company’s never-ending messaging mess, for instance, or the awkward implementation of Apple-like app shortcuts in Android 7.1. In the latter case, as I said at the time, “ instead of thinking through what’d be the most sensible and user-friendly way for a feature like this to work, Google seemed to just emulate the way Apple did it. “ See the pattern”.

To a certain degree, a company is flexible and open to the evolution of its products – even when said transformation blatantly revolves around “borrowing” inspiration from other sources – can be an asset. But there’s also something to be said for having the stones to stand by the value of your ideas and remaining to recognize when you’ve got a good thing going, even if that requires a mix of refinement and promotion to reach its potential.

Unless Google manages to master the art of commitment and conviction, this pattern is doomed to continue – and the company is only going to keep getting in its way.

Why should you move to Google Sheets?

• Collaboration

The most immediate benefit of using Sheets is the ability to collaborate in completely new ways. The “old style” of working would be using a master file that someone has to “own”, which is then ( in the best case) kept on a shared network folder, or painstakingly emailed around.

Here is where Sheets shines. There are several different modes of collaborating, ranging from asynchronous where you work independently and mostly at different times, in the same file, to real-time simultaneous collaborative editing. With asynchronous editing, you can use the comment feature to alert people and assign them tasks that they can mark as completed.

Editing a spreadsheet live with other colleagues is a powerful way of working. The productivity of two people who are all highly skilled with Google Sheets quickly building out a financial or operating model together in real-time is a sight compared to the old way of working. The multiple cursors in different colors, moving across the screen at the same time to build a model, is almost like a time-lapse video of a drawing.

• Working at Scale

One of the primary misconceptions about the working environment was the notion that Sheets are fine for small calculations, but not useful for larger models or datasets: Turns out that is wrong. Using it for larger operating and valuation models over the past years and am very impressed with the performance.

• Creating Charts and Linking to Google slides

Raw spreadsheet work is an important part of the finance professional’s daily life, but even the best analysis is of limited value if you are unable to communicate your findings in a cogent and compelling way. This brings us to two other staples of the finance toolbox: charts and presentations.

Presentations in the G suite are made in Google slides which, unsurprisingly feels like PowerPoint. The link between Sheets and Slides works very well and makes it easy to ensure that charts and tables in your presentation are always up to date through an “Update” button that pulls up the latest data of the underlying modeling, calculations, and assumptions.

When starting any large project now, one of the first things I do is create two documents: one in Google Slides and the other in Google Sheets. These go hand in hand cleanly throughout the project, providing that “ single source of truth” for all data in the project.

• Version Control

If you have ever had the painful experience of a spreadsheet crash beyond recovery, resulting in hours of lost work, you might have developed a habit of savings new files frequently.

• Linking between sheets in Different Files

Cloud Productivity makes link functionality far more elegant and ensures that it works! It is possible to reference other workbooks in the offline Excel world, of course, but that tends to be brittle and breaks once files are moved out of their original folder location. You will often see cells containing obscure references to a folder structure on someone’s hard drive.

The Importance function in Google Sheets allows you to link seamlessly to other Sheets files: Irrespective of whether the file gets moved or renamed, the data will always be linked and remain one less problem for you to worry about.

• Working with plugins

One reason why a large number of people in agencies still use Excel is that several plugins aren’t yet available for Google Sheets and Slides.

Nevertheless, Google Sheets and Slides have wide-ranging functionality named add ons which fills a similar role to the plugins of the Microsoft world. unfortunately, there is barely any support for enterprise applications and the homebrew nature of the add-on ecosystem means that some of the offerings have questionable quality. This means that within a corporate context when working with sensitive data, I am at times hesitant to use add-ons.

• Connecting to External data sources

Getting data into a spreadsheet to work with is a fundamental need, and without some of the corporate plugins being unavailable, what is then possible? Well, fortunately, there are many options. Aside from having backward compatibility with excel files, Sheets offers endless possibilities through XML, HTML, and RSS queries.

There are a few more interesting options worth mentioning specifically for harnessing data in sheets. For finance professionals, the Google Finance formula can be useful to learn about, which allows you to pull data directly from Google Finance. Although not comparable to a professional service, it is nevertheless an excellent tool for public stock and currency information.

There are other, more general ways to get data from the web. The functionality to extract an HTML table or list directly from a website can, for example, be useful when it comes to financial, market, or other information publicly available that you want to retrieve and continue working on.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Google Sheets

Google Sheets allows users to edit, organize, and analyze different types of information. It allows collaborations, and multiple users can edit and format files in real-time, and any changes made to the spreadsheet can be tracked by a revision history.

Advantages

• Real-Time collaboration: if you work with a team on the same matter, you can use Google Sheets to add data at the same time, wherever you are.
• It has a very simple interface, so individuals with beginner computer skills, so individuals with beginner computer skills would feel more comfortable working in Google Sheets.
• Everything is saved automatically, no need to worry whether your computer will crash. If you have a slow or old computer, Google sheets is a safer option.
• When you store data and documents online, your computer doesn’t lose memory.
• It’s free to use

Disadvantages

• If you deal with big data, Google Sheets may work slower than Excel.
• Google sheets don’t have a wide range of data visualization options, unlike Excel.
• For complex accounting and bookkeeping, formulas in Google sheets are not good enough.
• Google sheets documents are on the cloud, so if someone hacks your business email, your data may leak. If you worry about data safety, Exxcel is better for preserving important and confidential documents

Can Google sheets do everything that Excel does?

Both of these programs function similarly, and for the bulk of users, you won’t find anything that sheets can’t do that Excel can. However, once you start moving up into more complex functions and more extensive datasets, excel is a little bit more useful in the long run. Most skills will transfer between programs, so don´t let that impact your decision of which to use too much.

Google Sheets is constantly updated and will one day surpass Excel in functionality too. But, Excel is still an extremely powerful program and it’s right. Truth be told, you will be fine with either one of them.

Google Sheets is better for collaboration but Excel is currently a more powerful program for more complex functions. Google Sheets is easier to use than Excel, but, if you have a lot of experience with the Microsoft suite then go with it, you may still prefer Excel.

Unfortunately, there are still some Excel functions that don’t work in sheets, but since Google is constantly updating its software suite, it’s only a matter of time before they catch up.

Differences between Google Sheets and Excel

Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are the two best-known spreadsheet applications available today. They are pretty much the same when it comes to formulas and calculations. This implies that many of their features are the same.

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application that has been developed and maintained by Microsoft. Using Excel, you can perform a multitude of functions such as run calculations, and make lists, and charts. it also helps analyze and sort information, track financial data, and much more.

Excel has advanced functionalities, unlimited storage space, execution speed is fast, and contains more options for data visualization, but it has difficulties when troubleshooting, it makes collaboration harder and you cannot access the sheets from computers other than your own.

Google Sheets is a spreadsheet program offered by Google. Google Sheets can be in the form of web applications, desktop applications, or mobile applications.

Google sheets are free and easy to use, they are primarily built for collaboration and have a built-in revision history and a real-time chat window, but the loading time of the document increases, the data increases, and limited visualization options, customization, and formulas.

In nutshell, Google sheets are the preferred application for collaboration. Excel is a superior product in the case of statistical analysis and visualization, while Google Sheets if you want to perform analysis, you have to do it manually. Excel can be used while being offline, while Google sheets can be accessed both offline and online. To end with, Excel doesn’t have chatting facilities while Google Sheets has a chatting facility available on its sidebars.

Why convert Excel content to Google sheets

• Efficiency

Users may edit, organize, and analyze many types of data using Google Sheets. It supports collaborations as we’ve said before, and many users may edit and format files in real-time, with a revision history to monitor changes made to the spreadsheet.

• Tools

Users may utilize the Explore tool to ask questions, generate charts, visualize data, construct pivot tables, and color code the spreadsheet. For example, if you’re creating a monthly budget and have entered all your costs into the spreadsheet, you may utilize the Explore tool to find out how much food, travel, and clothing cost.

• Offline as well as Online

You can still your sheets offline if you’d prefer, however, some of Google’s beneficial tools will not work without being connected to the internet, such as the aforementioned Explore Tool.

Offline editing is available in Google Sheets, and users may modify the spreadsheets on their mobile devices. To allow offline editing for Google Sheets and other Google applications on the desktop, users must use the Chrome browser to install the “Google Docs Offline” Chrome extension.

Users must utilize the Google Sheets mobile app for Android and IOS, which supports offline editing while using a mobile service.

• Compatibility

Google Sheets accepts a variety of Spreadsheets file formats and types, including:

• .xlsx
• .xls
• .xlsm
• .xlt
• .xltxm
• .ods
• .csv
• .tsv

Google Sheets allows users to open, modify, save, and export spreadsheets and document files in all these different format types.

• Integration

Other google products such as Google Forms, Google Finance, Google Translate, and Google Drawings, may all be connected with Google Sheets.

If you want to construct a poll or questionnaire, for example, you may enter the questions in Google Forms and then simply and efficiently import the form straight into your Google Sheets file.

To convert existing Excel spreadsheets to Google Sheets, you will have to :

1. Head over to your Drive and create new Google Sheets files. Open your Sheet, then select File, Then Import.
2. Click Upload and follow the on-screen instructions to upload or drag and drop it. Sheets documents contain two crossed lines, While Excel documents have an x.
3. Choose the best choice in the Import file box and then click on “ Import data”.

Conclusion

In the case of Excel vs Google sheets, both software is great in terms of their core features. If your business requires some serious calculations, then go for Excel. If you want to collaborate on your spreadsheet, then Google sheets are the right choice for you.

If you’re looking for a good enough spreadsheet tool to start with, without any complex features, you can start with Google Sheets, but if you’re ready to invest some money to get more power and data analysis functionalities, you should go for Excel.

There are huge productivity benefits from the collaboration features and other innovations that come along with using web-based applications. There are also immense benefits from learning to use these tools past the elementary level.

Google Sheets advantages have multiplied across the huge number of hours spent with these tools, which can add up to tremendous gains, benefitting both the individual and the organization. If you haven’t worked seriously with it yet, we highly recommend that you take it for a spin

The post Why Should you Move to Google Sheets appeared first on COR.

There’s no arguing that the quality of the client-agency relationship is the single biggest predictor of success. Get it right and you’ll enjoy fame, leads, customers, and awards. Get it wrong, and you’ll waste heaps of money, miss incredible opportunities, and probably end up hating your job. It’s just not worth letting this relationship fail.

Research from R3, recently revealed that the industry average for the length of a client-agency relationship is 3.2 years. It also showed that the average length of the 40 best client-agency relationships is 22 years. A good relationship tends to result in the loyalty of the business.

Every marketing agency dreams of having a successful, long-lasting relationship with its client. And every client wants a solid agency partnership. So, how do you make sure you’re set up for success from the start?

Agency-client relationships are just like any other relationship: they go through their up and downs, and to keep maintain them, both parties have to put in an effort.

In recent years, the agency-client relationship has morphed, and things aren’t as simple as they used to be. An increase in competition hasn’t helped the matter. Just like the millennial generation has a reputation for job-hopping and lacking loyalty, so do brands; in fact, 2/3 work with three or more agencies simultaneously. On top of this, many brands are now starting to bring their digital marketing expertise in-house, meaning that they have fewer reasons to outsource the work.

What does this mean to you as an agency? Does it mean you’re going to have to work increasingly harder to keep clients happy and with you for years? Not necessarily; with just a few optimizations here and there, you can get a client-agency partnership, instead of a client-provider, which is so much better, right?

Regardless of your predisposition, lines of communication must be kept to ensure a strong relationship with your client. We will now dive into some key assets about this.

What is a client-agency relationship and why is it important?

A client-agency relationship is a tangible and intangible agreement between an organization and the company that is providing marketing, video, animation, search, advertising, or public relations services. The relationship starts when the agency receives a phone call and the brief is detailed and continues through the pitch and selection process to when the work is awarded and a contract with clear expectations is signed.

The relationship goes so much further than this, to cover how the client and the agency work together. This includes what the deliverables are under the agreement; the rhythm of the meetings, reports, and interactions; how ideas are brainstormed, agreed and implemented; how much collaboration there is between the two parties; how feedback is delivered, and how the contract ends.

The client-agency relationship is key to high-quality work and successful marketing campaigns, client’s goals are prioritized as well as their happiness is ensured which will result in team members going to work with a smile the following morning.

What makes a good client-agency relationship?

Both the client and the agency have an equal role to play here in the development of a successful client-agency relationship. The best relationships share some common characteristics: trust, collaboration, chemistry, mutual respect, regular communication, and honesty.

The agency’s objective is to help and satisfy their client needs. The client must work within the agency to facilitate this.

As some key bullets of the agency’s role, we can highlight the following:

• Learn the client’s business: To deliver the best work possible, an agency needs to understand the client’s business, their objectives, their USPs, why their customers have chosen to work with them, and what the client needs from the relationship.
• Set clear KPIs: These should be carefully thought out and they should be realistic, achievable, and agreed upon with the client in advance. It’s highly unlikely that the agency will deliver outstanding work that leaves the client delighted if success hasn’t been defined.
• Hire and train experts: New clients choose agencies with specialists, judging them by their skills, network, and knowledge. So it is incumbent on the agency to ensure that their team is up to the task.
• Have the right systems in place: The only way an agency can deliver a consistently high level of service is by having the right marketing strategy services and systems in place. Good systems then prevent costly mistakes.
• Get into writing: Whatever piece of work the client agrees to, make sure they agree on writing. This ensures that everyone is on the same page. If an approach has been decided verbally or discussed in a meeting, the agency should follow up with an email outlining their understanding of what was agreed upon and don’t start the work until this has been confirmed by the client.
• Report back honestly: Keep the client informed with regular reports. These should cover progress toward KPIs, but they should also include qualitative feedback on how the project or account is going. If a journalist hated the pitch, the agency should tell why. If the designer thinks their brief is too boring for the target audience, hold a focus group and feedback to the client.
• Be creative, enthusiastic, and opportunistic: The best agencies are constantly challenging the status quo, looking for opportunities to delight their clients, and just generally loving the work.

From the client’s perspective, they must try and collaborate with:

• Trust the agency: For an agency to do the best possible job, the client needs to trust them enough to share their confidential information with them, knowing that they will keep it confidential.
• Help them: The client knows their business better than any agency ever will. The best in-house marketers will recognize that this can be a mutually beneficial relationship, and working with an agency can be invaluable in helping them achieve their marketing and career objectives. They know that both parties will benefit from a great client-agency relationship, so they help their agency out. They remove roadblocks and help them access the right people in their business to make the marketing strategy a winner.
• Provide honest feedback: When you spend a lot of time with someone there are bound to be differences in opinion. Couples quarrel, and likely so will clients and agencies. The client-agency relationship isn´t always a smooth one, and bumps are bound to happen. Be honest about any issue that may arise, as that’s the only way for them to be resolved.
• Be responsive: Clients should respond to agency queries and give them feedback on ideas. Approve the copy they send over or argue with them about it.
• Pay on time: chasing clients for money is so awkward. There is a contract, and the agency is meeting its end of the bargain. The client should meet theirs and pay on time.
• Respect the business: Agencies are businesses too, which means they can’t gift their clients unlimited resources to work on disorganized campaigns. There will be a certain number of hours or certain deliverables in the contract and there will be some room built in for flexibility. But it won’t be unlimited.
• Respect the agency’s relationships: Agencies spend years building great relationships with journalists and influencers. These relationships are key to that agency’s ability to deliver their work but they can be easily damaged by clients for not showing up for interviews, being rude, or not delivering on a promise. That affects the agency’s whole business.

Advantages of a good client-agency relationship

Relationship management is one of the most important and useful tips for any client-agency relationship. Agencies play a vital role in their client’s communication with their audience. Thus client-agency relationship must be strong. Agencies carry forward the client’s vision to their target audience. Sales and marketing depend on the performances of agencies.

Agencies are the right hand of their client if you are smart enough you can get the most from them.

Hiring the right agency for your company is a far-sighted vision. It benefits you in a long run. After the contract, agencies study your business. They build a strong understanding of your business its goal and its target audience. After going into the depth of your business they set their goals according to the need of your business. They retain your company and work hard to take your business on a larger scale as in the end client’s success will be the agency’s success.

Agencies are more updated than their clients in terms of the usage of new technologies. They know about SEO tools. Know how to capture a large audience keeping trends in mind. Agency’s priority is not to take their hands away from the target audience. They discuss and mold all the marketing plans according to the trends. Agencies put in their efforts to keep the client updated. They explore and suggest the best that could suit the client.

Agency knows every bit of their clients and they honestly suggest what is best for the client. They meet, discuss and plan all the strategies, keeping clients’ goals in mind. When two of them, the client and agency discuss all the pros and cons of every strategy it ends up with multiple plans. If you want to work smart, work as a team. Agencies work day and night with brand managers or marketing managers of the company and come up with a new result oriented.

If client-agency relation is strong. You can ask as much as you can from your agency. Agencies freely discuss the marketing plan. It creates a healthy trusting work relationship between the two. Keeping relationships outside the work also helps in bringing more motivation towards work and the agency becomes as active as its client.

Relationship building takes time but it is essential for both agency and the client. Agencies highlight the problem of target audiences and attract them by providing solutions. They make different strategies to bring more and more business. The strong relations between client and agency result in flourishing the business on top. In the end, what counts is how much you have spent on the agency and if they are doing justice with every penny you have spent.

Reasons why your client-agency relationship might not be working 

Relationships are fragile things especially when money is involved. Clients can switch agencies for several reasons. Maybe you made a mistake or haven’t been giving them enough attention without realizing it. Either way, you’re left with one less client and some lost revenue.

Don’t let it come to that! To help, here’s a list of some of the most common causes of a failing client relationship and the steps you can take to patch things up.

1) Your agency made a big mistake

Everyone slips sooner or later. The stakes are so much higher when you’re an agency. everything you do impacts a client’s brand image and reputation. That’s a lot of responsibility, and we don’t always do it right.

Clients can have dropped agencies for a single mistake. It doesn’t matter if you consider it a minor issue. If the client thinks it is a big deal, then you could be out of the door!

Follow the following steps when you think things get out of hand:

• Find out everything about the issue

Get a full, first-hand disclosure from your account manager on the incident at hand. It’s a good idea to hear it from your client because someone on your team could attempt to cover their back.

• Be the bearer of bad news

Get the highest-ranking person on your client’s team on the line and set up a meeting as soon as possible. If the matter is urgent then call them. You should break the bad news to them instead of them finding out from someone else.

• Make a good deed

Be prepared to compensate for your agency’s error. You might have to sacrifice some agency profitability or revenue to satisfy the client. Be prepared to rationalize whatever amount you volunteer. Some clients may not see it as commensurate to the damage.

• Hold your team accountable

Owning up for your mistakes is tough, but necessary. If one of your colleagues makes a mistake then it’s paramount to fix it and hold them responsible for that error.

Some people believe that a level of anonymity is an effective management style. However, many will argue that those who don’t take ownership of their mistakes will never learn how to avoid them. Ownership helps you learn from your mistakes and advance your career.

Your management style should be left up to you. However, do keep in mind that firing an employee should be your last resort. Your client might push for it, but it will severely damage agency morale.

One helpful alternative is to assign a more senior person to take over the account rather than axe your employees. The client will be happy to see a change in leadership, and your team will understand how to learn from their mistakes by working on a new project.

• Follow through

Get any agreements you make with the client in writing and follow through with them. It’s equally important to make sure the account team is fully aware of those agreements.

• Contain the damage

The client may want to fire the agency in extreme situations. If the client is part of a large corporation that has multiple brands or accounts, your goal is to contain damage and salvage other bands or clients not directly connected with the issue at hand.

If the client is still around after the dust has settled, take pains to ensure this mistake doesn’t happen again. The client will be more sensitive to future mistakes. They’ll remember the previous incidents long after you think they’ve forgotten.

2) The relationship grows lukewarm, and trammeled

Most agency-client relationships start with parties in good spirits. It’s a honeymoon period where everyone is still excited at the prospect of working together. Everyone is full of energizing new concepts.

But even great agencies can’t keep up the momentum forever. Things will get eventually routinary: ideas get recycled, the novelty is gone, and minor complaints begin to appear. The client distances themselves from you, and quietly without you knowing, they start searching for a different agency.

If you suspect this is happening, you should immediately do the following:

• Conduct a thorough account review

Meet up with your client to do a comprehensive examination of everything you’ve done to date. This includes minor requests and issues. Be prepared to show metrics and KPIs for everything.

Next, compare current projects to early ones. How are they different? What’s the current status? How are they performing?

Get your client’s honest opinions on whether or not they are still excited by your work, and uncover the reasons for their answers.

The objective of an account review is to get an accurate picture of how your client views you right now, and how likely they are to continue working with you.

Don’t settle for hugs and shrugs and “we’re doing OK” answers. Try your best to probe. Explain that constructive criticism is the only way that can make your services better for them.

• Host an agency-wide brainstorming session

Creatives who have worked on the same project for a long time might fall out of love with it. This happens all the time. We’re only human. There are only so many days you can eat pizza in a week before it loses its luster.

Humans are very susceptible to boredom and boredom is yet a powerful thing, it can be a necessary evil to spark creativity!

One of the most effective ways to conquer the boredom is by conducting company-wide brainstorming sessions to gather new ideas. This can help your team find new ideas that your client has never tried before. Getting inspiration from new perspectives is an effective way to reinvent a strategy and a brand.

• Shuffle assignments

Clients can tell when a team loses enthusiasm for an account. And while you can’t force a team member to be enthusiastic about something, you can switch them out for someone else who will be.

Switch up account assignments to bring new perspectives and a fresh voice to the client’s projects.

• Pitch the client as if they were new

Make the client fall for you again!

Introduce the new team and pitch the new idea to your client. Give our client a reason to believe that you’re still a creative and innovative agency.

Remind your client of past successes to help reinforce the positive aspects of your relationship. It can be easy for a good client-agency relationship to get to your head.

The reality is that an unhappy client might not remain loyal. This is a good reason for you to always be on your game!

Actively engage them throughout the pitch and get them talking about what they like and don’t like about the idea and adjust your plans accordingly.

Once you breathed new life into a rut by conducting regular account reviews. Use critical thought and criticism to your advantage. Get into this habit to help you look at all your accounts with a fresh set of eyes.

3) Your client has unrealistic expectations

Agencies can sometimes market themselves unclearly. This happens if your agency’s mission or collateral is vague or ambiguous. It’s also possible your agency upsells its ROI.

Although it may seem as harmless, it can lead clients down the wrong path. They could expect you to deliver outcomes or services that you don’t provide.

Sometimes, clients are so enamored with marketing agencies that they think their agency can solve all of their business’s problems.

The last thing you want is for your client to have unrealistic expectations of your agency. It might lead them to believe in misguided expectations of how the industry works, or how much your team can do to help them.

Disappointed clients are dangerous. When clients like these don t see the results they were expecting, they can take it out on you. They might spread unsavory sentiments with other business owners and sour your reputation, or even take their business elsewhere.

Here are some ways to help you manage the situation:

• Give an Optimistic reality check

While you need to tell the client the truth about what you can deliver, you don’t want to sound all negative.

Focus on telling him or her the best possible results of working with you and what can you achieve. Temper it with all that needs to be done first in terms of effort. You’re setting realistic expectations of what is required from each of you.

• Switch batters

Perhaps the team assigned to the account just didn’t get it. Or maybe they and the customer in this instance will serve to both provide a new, fresh take on the project. It’s also a visible gesture that shows the client you’re taking their concerns seriously.

Conduct these reality checks multiple times to emphasize the reality of the situation. Clients have a hard time letting go of their assumptions, especially if multiple people on the client side share this opinion.

10 keys to a Successful Client-Agency Relationship

• Gather “hard” and “soft” information

A strong agency-client relationship starts before the client even becomes one. You know that you need as much information as possible to come up with a winning proposal. The solution you come up with isn´t going to establish a meaningful connection between you and your potential client. It’s how you present that solution concerning both the business’s goals and the personalities and values of the team you’ll be working with.

As “hard” info we can mention:

• Products and services.
• Target audiences and the end users of their product or service.
• Top three competitors.
• Goals, in order of importance, and challenges.
• Strategies that have worked and not worked in the past.
• The software they are using.
• Budget.

As “soft” info we can mention:

• What they define as success; is their “dream” outcome.
• Their future hopes and anticipations, like scaling, and adding on new offerings.
• The company’s mission, beliefs, and values, distinguishing characteristics they’re proud of.
• What makes them different from their competitors?
• Hobbies, interests, and preferences of the individuals you’ll be working with.

Building emotional intelligence about the team you’ll be working with will help you to make communication more personalized as you move through these initial phases of your journey.

• Internalize that information

This is the information you’ll be not only included in your proposal but applying throughout your actual execution and ongoing communication with your client. Take the time to internalize it so that it shines through organically in everything you do.

• Gather the information in person: Body language and facial expressions say a lot. Take note of what gets them excited. Also, be sure to send out a list of questions you’ll be asking far in advance so the client can have time to think about answers and produce follow-up questions.
• Iterate back: As you listen, iterate back to your client what you have interpreted so you can make sure you’re crystal clear on the information you’re receiving. Remember, incorporating the tiniest details into your proposal and execution is what will give your clients confidence that you truly understand their needs.
• Templatize: Have an internal templated document where you can collect all the information you’ve gathered in one place. This gives every team member something to continually refer back to, and the uniformity makes it easier to internalize.
• Go above and beyond with your proposal

From a project standpoint, your proposal shows what you’re going to do to achieve your client’s goals. From a relationship point of view, it’s your opportunity to reinforce, once again that you have a deep understanding of your client – both business and its team members. Speak to both the client’s business goals as well as the more personal pain points and desires of its employees.

This strengthens that partnership feel. You’re not just looking to drive goals, you care about the individuals impacted by them.

• Have a boarding process

This is one of the key customer retention strategies. Once you get started, there will be more points of contact added to the roster for both sides. A streamlined onboarding process will set the stage for the clear communication and seamless execution needed for a strong and long-lasting client relationship form.

• Treat clients like partners

Trading your client like a business will make your relationship purely transactional. Trading them like family leaves too much room for miscommunications and unmet expectations.

Treating your clients like partners, on the other hand, sets the stage for a healthy mix of personal, purposeful, and transactional encounters where both your and your client’s identities are preserved, and each of you supplies the essential ingredients for success.

• Be proactive rather than reactive

Be sure to make your team proactive:

• Share ideas and propose new campaign strategies.
• Forewarn about upcoming platform changes and any action required.
• Educate the client to further empower them.

• Be empathetic rather than defensive

Let’s put up the following scenario. Your agency is doing fine, performance metrics are climbing, but the client is upset because they are not seeing any new businesses.

If this happens, don’t go the lazy way and tell them the business is doing fine. Instead, let them talk it out and listen to them. This may even lead them to discover the problem is in their other marketing or sales team.

Take the approach of teaming up together to come up with a solution. Position yourself as a partner in their campaigns. Value their feedback. Even if you’re an expert in your thing, allowing them to work with you will help build a long, trusting relationship.

• Establish structure and communication

Being always available, whether through slack or other forms of direct communication, blurs the ever-important work-life balance. It can also distract you away from other clients.

Instead, establish weekly or bi-weekly meetings to check in, review performance, and answer questions. This keeps you accountable and responsible for the things you deliver; ultimately it helps build trust with your client.

• Share concerns at an early stage

This one is particularly relevant and growing in the advertising world lately. The scenario here is that your client has big plans and aspirations, and you want to say yes to everything they want. But in the back of your mind, you don’t know if that is a real thing to do. You’re unsure of how it will impact you.

Practice sharing your concern. Be transparent and ask them for their trust. Most of the time, you’ll come out as the person who helped them navigate through uncertainty and they won’t forget that.

• Embrace small talk

Small talks often get a bad rep, but it helps in building strong client relationships. It may feel a little cringy or uncomfortable at first but go with the flow. You’d be surprised at how receptive clients are. Next thing you’ll know, you´ve got a great rapport going on and the summary at the beginning of meetings becomes more meaningful.

Clients are people who like to work with real people who also have personalities and personal lives. If you don’t show a bit of personality, it will be harder to stay connected and demonstrate your genuine care, outside of campaigns and metrics.

Conclusion

Strong agency-client relationships are built on virtues like trust, reliability, transparency, and personability, which result in greater results than you may ever imagine. If you find you’re lacking in productivity, loyalty, or the overall feeling of harmony with your clients see if you can adopt or improve any of the strategies mentioned.

The post Essentials of a Strong Client-Agency Relationship appeared first on COR.

What you get in return are all questions, doubts, and concerns: a little optimization might be needed after they tell you that the copy is far too long and a rough edit must take place; the data you requested doesn’t go too well; the volume of work you handled exceeds what was accorded in budget. Suddenly everything is a mess and your team members have no time to come to your rescue.

Calm down! Thankfully, these issues are surprisingly easy to avoid. All it takes is a bit of understanding of what variables in the creative process can make your team deliver high-quality work. It comes naturally the more closely you are in contact with the creative workflows and the more projects you get under your belt.

What we’re going for in this article, from the agency’s or the client’s point of view, is to highlight the pain points and run through some of the most pertinent questions and common pitfalls to look out for throughout the process.

What are Pain Points though?

Simply put: pain points are problems.

Each pain point refers to a specific issue your client and its target market are facing. Ideally, you want to position your new business as a solution to that problem.

Here’s the thing about pain points: the biggest challenge comes when you realize they have the power to make or break your deals. They play a vital role in the success of your digital marketing agency.

If you know exactly what your customers struggle to do, you’ll know how to pitch your product or solution in a way that solves their problems.

If you know exactly what your customers struggle with, you’ll know how to pitch your product or solution in a way that solves their problems.

Simply acknowledging a customer’s pain shows you value your customer experience and their overall satisfaction. Often, it can lead to an entirely new marketing campaign project.

For instance, say your potential customer is a watermelon lover. But what this ideal customer doesn´t love is sticky fingers and the time it takes to slice through thick skin.

Enter a giant watermelon slicer. Or maybe your new customer now loves a good tailgate but hates lugging around a clunky cooler. The solution would be to bring a single-serve cooler.

See? Pain>solution>sale.

Obviously, for many companies, especially b2bs, the pain point process won’t be that simple.

The problem is that far too few companies take the time to do their customer research. Or worse yet, they assume they already know their customer’s most pressing issue.

We all know what happens when you assume, right?

In the end, a clear understanding of your customer’s pain points can be what positions you ahead of the completion, and win you over new clients, by the end of the day, it helps you seal the deal, visibility being key for that.

How can your agency become more visible?

Before any potential client can engage with you and buy a product or service they need to be aware of your brand. If no one knows about your company, you’ll never be able to build a customer base, which is why improving your agency’s visibility is essential for success. To get your startup in interesting your target audience, take a look at these five steps to make your agency more visible.

1. Upgrade your SEO strategy

Telling people your URL isn’t an effective way to drive traffic to your website. More than two-thirds of online experiences start with a search engine. When your site ranks highly for related keywords, you’ll see a spike in targeted traffic reaching your website. However, this isn’t the only metric that will see a positive jump.

When you choose the right keywords, you can ensure that the traffic you gain consists of users who are actively looking to make a related purchase or engage with a company. This means you’ll find it easier to optimize your conversion rate when you have a first-class SEO strategy in place.

2. Be active on Social Media

With so many platforms to choose from, it can be tricky to know which sites to focus on. However, social media is second to none when it comes to increasing agency awareness. There are plenty of studies out there that confirm which platforms are most popular within specific demographics. Simply find out which social media sites your target audience use most frequently, and you’ll have a good idea of where to focus your resources.

3. Use Varied Content

If your agency wants to be more visible, vary the type of content you’re using. While blog posts and articles are extremely effective tools, videos, images, infographics, and eBooks can help to capture the interest of a wider audience. Furthermore, publishing different types of content allows you to leverage the reach of alternative platforms. When you begin making video content, for example, you can increase brand visibility on major sites like YouTube.

4. Target Local Customers

If your company has bricks and mortar premises, you’ll want to factor local marketing into your strategy. This can be done online, using tools, such as local SEO, or offline, using billboards, posters, flyers, and events. When you combine online and online offline marketing, it allows you to maximize results and increase awareness across a wide demographic.

5. Forge Partnerships

Partnering with another business allows you direct access to its customer base and target audience. By choosing to partner with a company that complements your own, but isn’t in competition, you can gain the interest of their existing clientele and vice versa. With a strategic approach, corporate partnerships can be lucrative for all parties involved.

Overall, make sure your target audience is aware of your agency, it’s the first step to acquiring new customers, but it doesn’t stop there. Now that people are aware of your brand, you’ll need to ensure that they associate you with attributes, such as reliability and authenticity. With strategic branding and effective marketing, you can ensure your increased visibility leads to significant financial gains.

Does Project Management help?

Pain points emerge in project management also. Gone are the days when a project team consisted of a close-knit of workers in the same location all closely monitored by supervisors and their project manager. Now, managing a project in the modern world of remote working, outsourced providers, and online collaboration brings its own distinct set of challenges.

This new way of working has introduced a unique set of potential pain points, that can hurt your project, not just in isolation, but repeatedly. The first step to avoiding these potential pain points is identifying them. Only then can they be effectively controlled and managed.

• Planning and Organisation

The organization of a successful project is often the most challenging part of a project’s delivery. When dealing with remote workers and outsourced providers, planning and keeping track of tasks can be particularly problematic. Planning, delegating tasks, and then keeping track of those tasks, are all processes which are vital to a project running smoothly. Once these processes have been established, the project manager is then able to switch to other important responsibilities.

Getting this organizational aspect of a project manager’s job together is a great basis for good practices to be set in motion. Organizational tools, such as those for effective resource management or capacity planning, help them ensure teams stay on target and stay organized without requiring the constant supervision of a project manager or for someone to have to remember each action item that is delegated to a colleague.

• Accuracy when estimating

Estimates are a forecast of the length of time needed to complete different project elements and accurate estimates will determine the overall profitability of the project and achieve ROI.

To produce accurate project estimates you need to rely on your data and the quality of that data. Understanding the importance of data in your project and how this will impact future planning is one of those project management pain points that is also a data issue.

Despite the complexities involved, it is still important to do the very best job with your project estimates. Faulty estimates mean missing deadlines, breaking budgets, and leaving your clients less than impressed.

The first step to creating accurate project estimates is to define:

• What you have to deliver;
• When you are expected to deliver it by;
• At what stage the project is considered complete.

Once you have this essential information, you can start creating project estimates.

• The need for constant follow up

Staying up-to-date with who is doing what and whether each element of the project is on track is an essential part of the project manager’s role. Keeping up with each member of the team, particularly those working offsite and with third-party providers, can eat into your working day.

Although these can seem boring and time-consuming, they are a critical part of the project manager’s experience. They are essential so that any project manager can have an idea of the overall state of the direction of the project is going on.

Project managers must ensure that the follow-up process becomes easy to deal with. This helps keep things on track in the long term. The use of online project management software can be an asset for this, allowing project managers to save both time and efficiency.

• Assigning Accountability

This can be the hardest aspect of project management for people to deal with it. It requires those who have had a task delegated to them to carry it out to the best of their ability. No one likes to feel responsible for things that can go wrong on a project.

Ultimately, it is the project manager who is accountable for the successful delivery of a project, but determining who is accountable for each task can be a lot more complicated. When several individuals are working on the same task, one employee needs to be made accountable so all parties understand their roles and know what to expect.

Project managers need the skills to be able to allocate accountability to their colleagues without any opportunity for misunderstanding. This allows for a clear chain of command and transparency about who is responsible for ensuring which task is completed.

• Evaluation

Providing feedback is a key responsibility that is a vital role in project management. Project managers can only fulfill this responsibility when there are established processes that collect data on a colleague’s performance.

But evaluation needs to be supported by evidence and must be analyzed so that team members feel the project manager has their best interests at the forefront of all activity. Online management tools can offer ways to provide feedback to colleagues based on performance and overall task completion which allows a project manager to give thought but, more importantly, fact-based evaluations.

Accurately evaluating an individual’s role, and supporting this evaluation with evidence, is a key responsibility for project managers. Collecting accurate data on a team member’s performance can be difficult, but it plays a vital role in the delivery of fact-based evaluations that team members will value.

• Providing feedback

Running alongside evaluation is feedback. Providing valuable feedback can be problematic for project managers who dislike confrontation. While it’s easy to offer feedback to colleagues who are doing well, the project manager must also be able to deal with situations where there is improvement required.

Telling someone they are doing well and encouraging them to “ keep up the excellent work” is far simpler than the fact and finesse needed to reassure someone that while they may need improvement, not all are at loss and that they can be supported to do better.

Colleagues must feel they have time to improve their work and then be able to come back to their project manager with improved performance results.

Providing honest feedback can be difficult for project managers who dislike confrontation, but it is an essential part of the project manager’s role. Telling someone they need to improve their performance is not an easy thing to do, and to be effective, it must be done in the right way.

• Visibility

Having visibility of project resources, individual tasks, and the project as a whole will make a project manager’s job much easier. Having an individual location where information is stored is a fantastic way to keep track of the progress of tasks and inform the participants of changes at the same time.

Making sure information is available to all those involved in a project is vital. Sometimes it may not always be readily available and this can cause communication mix-ups. When everyone is privy to the same information, it generates healthy transparency within teams and leads to continued improvements.

To sum up, while 7 pain points are difficult to deal with, the old maxim holds, practice makes perfect. Projects managers should strive to use their skills and experiences to make sure these pain points become a routine part of their daily processes, preventing larger issues with both projects and colleagues.

5 ways to solve this problem every agency faces

With more budgets shifting from traditional to digital marketing, there’s a lot of opportunity out there at the moment for digital marketers, but there are a lot of challenges too. Despite becoming a central focus of the strategy in so many organizations, agencies continue to face several significant pain points.

Here’s a rundown of some of those obstacles, along with some of the best ways of solving them.

1. Winning new businesses – do what you best

Ironically, despite all the money being pumped into digital campaigns, more than half of all digital agencies say their biggest challenge is winning over new clients. One of the reasons for this is competition. Today, everybody wants to be a digital marketer and with more firms looking to international markets for growth opportunities, digital agencies must be able to stand out to make an impact with potential clients.

As with any business sector, convincing new clients to come on board takes patience, focus, and planning. So you need to look at every stage of how you do that and be highly objective about it. Put yourself in the prospect’s shoes and go through your pitch and sales process from start to finish. If you’re truly objective, you’ll quickly pinpoint anything generic, cliched, or simply unappealing for prospects.

You should also see what you’re doing right. Build on positives and eliminate or improve the rest. What doesn’t feel comfortable for you probably isn’t working for clients, Here, a second opinion from an industry peer could be insightful.

In a competitive marketplace, the key is not to do what everyone else is doing but to focus on your niche strengths. Showcase what you can do that other can’t.

59% of CFOs say that business intelligence should be a priority. Invest in data and analytics to identify your target audience market and carry out in-depth research into potential customers. Find out what they want to build the answers to their problems into your pitch. It´s only when you understand their pain points that you can create the solutions they’ll want to buy. Differentiate yourself based on your strengths and their pain points.

Visibility is important too, but with so many competitors using the same digital marketing keywords, that can be a challenge. Again, focus on your niche, on what makes you different. Your market strategy should be all about how you define your offering. Use content to demonstrate you are the expert in your specialism and get your message out to the wider community on professional platforms such as LinkedIn.

If a client thanks you for the completion of a successful project, don’t wait for referrals, ask for them. While you’re at it, get testimonials for your website, or if it showcases a particular expertise or service, make it into a case study. By doing so, you’ll proactively build your reputation and get more business coming your way.

2. Clients, can’t live with them, can’t live without them

Clients can be a constant source of stress for agencies for a host of reasons, but it’s unrealistic to expect them to understand all the moving parts of a digital campaign when they’re focused on their own business.

Three of the most common issues experienced by marketers are:

Unresponsiveness: As many as 55% of agencies cite unresponsiveness as a pain point. There is a good reason for this. While that client might be a large part of your overall efforts and take up as much as 50% of your agency’s time, it’s a much smaller part of the overall picture when it comes to its own operations, taking up much less of their time.

Set clear expectations from the outset. Let them know that without timely follow-ups deadlines will be impacted. Never end a meeting without scheduling a follow-up and put a contingency plan in place if clients still fail to respond. It can help to get acquainted with your client’s schedules too. Like you, they’ll be busier at certain times throughout the month.

Scope creep – Around 40% of agencies go over budget due to scope creep. And if this isn’t addressed early on, it can lead an agency down the slippery slope to unprofitability. To avoid it, make it clear in the initial contract what’s included and what‘s included and what isn’t before you start work.

Dissatisfaction: Much of the time, this is down to a client’s lack of know-how in the digital arena. But client dissatisfaction can be difficult to navigate, and can lead to deteriorating client relations, even if you’ve been delivering solid work and results. But there are very simple things you can do to show the clients that you’re committed to helping them succeed.

Losing the wrong client can be the single most costly thing for an agency to experience. If the future of the business hinges on one big spending client, then that client needs to be prioritized. There’s no point in giving all your clients the same level of support if one is delivering more profit to the business than the rest put together. So make sure big-spending clients are prioritized with a dedicated account manager to provide extra support when they need it. Some clients may have multiple touchpoints throughout the agency, so there needs to be a single point of contact that makes it easy to get the solution they need straightaway.

Arrange regular catch-ups. A senior member of the management team should get on a call at least once a month to make sure the client’s needs are being met and to find out what else the agency can be done to improve value further.

Some clients may need to be gently educated, especially as many businesses are now running their basic campaigns in-house, using the likes of google ads and Facebook. Let them know what you’re doing is more complex and the results will be equally far-reaching. Make sure they understand that when it comes to digital marketing, there’s no such thing as overnight success. It takes time to deliver results in an increasingly competitive market. Invest in a good reporting platform that demonstrates the difference your efforts are making. Focus on demonstrating the value of what you do. At the same time, it’s better to underpromise and over-deliver than vice versa.

3. Be a trendsetter

When you’re busy running a digital marketing agency, it can be difficult to find the time to stay on top of trends and innovations. Digital marketing is constantly evolving and you must keep up to remain relevant. As the expert in your niche, it’s your role to identify trends before they happen, so you can offer new winning strategies to clients first. In doing so, you’ll grow your business and your reputation, while outpacing the competition.

Newer technologies can even help you find solutions to your pain points. Today, digital agencies need to be more data-driven than ever and technologies such s AI can help drive the return on investment (ROI) technologies can help marketers work with predictive segments, tracking customer behavior in real-time and creating highly personalized messages to target customers through the likes of Facebook, Google Adwords, and other formats. That’s something you can even use to target new customers for your own business.

It’s not easy keeping up to date with everything, so don’t try to do it all. Focus on what specialize in, but be the absolute expert in that. Don’t be content to keep pace with trends: predict them and aim to set new ones others will follow.

4. The skills gap – create your talent pool

As you’d expect in such a rapidly evolving sector, there’s a big skills gap in digital marketing. Most agencies are struggling when it comes to finding staff with the most up-to-date skills. If you can’t source or afford the best staff out there, hire those with the most potential and create an in-house program to develop the right talent for your needs.

According to Gallup, only 34% are still engaged in their jobs. That’s not good for business. Engaged employees will add more value, proactively creating solutions to business challenges and helping the business become more profitable. The best way to keep staff fresh, inspired, and enthusiastic about the business is to make sure they have the development to keep growing their skills and contribute even more to the firm down the line. Feedback mechanisms can help too. Find out what your employees want and act on that to improve engagement, retention, and productivity.

5. Get to grips with due diligence

The rules regarding data and privacy seem to be constantly changing especially if you’re operating across several different jurisdictions. It’s a headache for many digital agencies but something you have to stay on top of to avoid falling foul of regulations or being hit with financial penalties.

That’s where diligence comes in: the establishment of rules and processes helps your agency remain compliant with the ultimate goal of safeguarding business interests. It might sound profitable in terms of time, effort, and resources, but it’s about avoiding serious losses that could occur as the result of minor errors in operational procedures.

Diligence isn’t just something you look at during start-up, a restructure, or expansion into new markets. It’s something that needs to be part of everyday business practices. Fortunately, there are tools out there that can help. Most agencies are now opting for due diligence with secure cloud-based digital archives to store and track important business documents. This can help your team have the right documents and files at their fingertips, so decision-making is faster and your business can become more agile as a result.

Once you’ve developed the corporate governance practices you need, it’s simply a matter of making sure your employees and partners are happy with them and are kept fully up to date when changes happen. After that, due diligence should merge seamlessly into your day-to-day work processes.

Conclusion

As with so many things in business, pain points can become opportunities. By recognizing, analyzing, and understanding the challenges your digital marketing company faces, you begin the groundwork that not only resolves those issues but creates new avenues for growth.

With the right mechanism in place to solve your pain points and begin to create new ideas that can help you find your niche and attract new businesses, take your digital marketing agency to the next stage of its potential.

The post Top Pain Points for Creative Agencies appeared first on COR.

Calculating production line capacities is one of the basic steps manufacturers can take to understand the maximum output of their customer demand.

Furthermore, market demands rely on production capacity figures to make sound financial plans and meet demands. Businesses need to properly calculate production capacity and inform supply chain management to make accurate business decisions.

In this article, we’ll talk about capacity planning strategies to improve your agency manufacturing operation’s productivity and efficiency.

But first…

What is production Capacity?

Production capacity is the maximum manufacturing process input an agency can produce using its human resources over a specified amount of time. These metrics are important because it informs over some time the value chain of the manufacturer’s decision-making in both the short term and long term.

For Instance, if a manufacturing business initiatives fulfill a higher quantity of orders, the decision-makers need to know if the operation can sufficiently meet the increase in demand. Additionally, manufacturers’ incentives use production capacity to inform labor utilization as well as Capex decisions including their raw materials and facilities.

Therefore, manufacturers need to know their operation’s production capacity because it informs both administrative and facility decisions, enabling businesses to maximize the procurement of production efficiencies.

How to Increase Production Capacity

For businesses looking to scale up their operations, there are a couple of different options they can explore to increase production capacity. A few examples include:

• Add more work shifts

A manufacturing business can increase production capacity by lengthening the amount of time available for production. Manufacturers can do this by instituting overtime pay to encourage employees to work extra hours.

Alternatively, manufacturers can adopt a shift-based operation. Different groups of employees ensure that the machines run longer, increasing production capacity significantly.

• Outsource Production

Sometimes, your machinery might be working at its peak, but not enough to meet consumer demand. Manufacturing businesses can increase production capacity by outsourcing the work to a contract manufacturer to help meet demand in the short term.

• Adopt lean manufacturing practices

Lean manufacturing practices ensure that production operations run as efficiently as possible, eliminating different forms of waste that can take place in a manufacturing facility.

As a result, all inputs go towards ensuring that machines and employees are working towards delivering more products.

• Improve equipment effectiveness

Adopting proactive machine maintenance ensures that the equipment is always in good working condition. Consequently, there’s less machine downtime to interrupt the production operation.

By maximizing overall equipment, businesses can marginally increase production capacity.

• Invest in new technologies

Whether you can afford lower prices or higher prices in machinery, you must have the machinery to increase output. This is more feasible when the existing equipment is. This is more feasible when the existing equipment is already working at full capacity but still doesn’t meet your capacity requirements. These types of Capex are important to consider in case studies for businesses looking to grow over longer time horizons, whereas outsourcing may be a better option for businesses looking for a short-term fix to their production facilities as a result of seasonality, for example.

3 Capacity planning strategies you should know

There are three types of capacity planning strategies you need to know as a project manager: lag, lead and match. They differ depending on how far into the future you want to look, and each carries pros and cons.

Let’s look at the different capacity planning strategies in more detail.

1) Lag strategy

Lag capacity planning involves increasing your capacity in reaction to an increase in demand. for example, imagine your digital marketing agency has a capacity of 10 graphic designers. When you have already booked all 10 and a new graphic design task comes in, you can hire an additional graphic designer to fill in the blanks.

This may be the most appropriate capacity planning strategy if you operate a stable business where resources are not often affected by unexpected demand. This type of strategic planning prevents excess inventory and resource wastage, such as idle employees, because it is based on actual customer needs.

However, this new product or system is called lag because there is a lag between the demand arising and the resource being found. It may not be recommended for agencies with unpredictable demand forecasts, and it adds stress as you try to find quality content at late notice

2) Lead Strategy

Lead strategic planning is a more aggressive capacity planning approach than lag strategies because it’s based on the potential or future demand.

To go back to our graphic design team, this might happen if you decide to start promising your client’s a 24-hour turnaround on design projects. Noticing that your 10 graphic designers are sometimes booked up, you decide to add another five members to the team in anticipation of demand for your new service.

Taking a lead strategy approach to resource planning is focused on gaining an edge over market competitors since your organization already has additional capacity in anticipation of high demand. Your maximum capacity is high and your production capabilities are ready to be employed. All you need now is customers!

However, the risk with this workforce capacity strategy is that you have excess capacity sitting idle while waiting for demand to rise as forecasted.

Not only does this draw on your budget in the short term, but if the increased demand does not materialize, you may regret your decision to hire more staff.

3) Match Strategy

The last of the three capacity planning strategies is the match strategy. This dynamic strategy involved steadily adding to your current production capacity to match the demand that’s coming in

Let’s go back to the 10 graphic designers scenario. As you start negotiating a new contract, you also start recruiting and onboarding one or two additional. designer to meet the additional design capacity requirements. You’re ready for the consumer demand to surge, but you aren’t depleting your budget for the demand that hasn’t materialized.

The match strategy is the most used by organizations during capacity management because it is less risky than the lead strategy and has more prepared resource capacity that the lag strategy.

By monitoring market trends, establishing an adjustment strategy, and keeping track of actual versus forecasted needs, your agency can meet anticipated demand while optimizing resource utilization.

Benefits of Capacity Planning

Strategic planning is essential to an organization’s capacity management. Here’s why:

• Improves project results

Having a carefully planned capacity strategy brings more precision to the deliverables of the project. When you have the right resources for the job, every step can be completed on time and by the person with the right skills.

On an internal level, capacity planning also helps to improve transparency among team members, as they are more aware of their roles. This helps avoid setbacks and unplanned changes in the project execution. Long Term this will reflect in your agency’s reliability and reputation.

• Boosts employees morale

The process of capacity planning gives you a long-term view of your resources, which can change the way you make a day to day decisions for the better! Rather than encouraging staff to work outside their skill set to get a job done, you’ll know when you need to upskill, hire, and utilize different resources.

In this way, capacity planning helps improved team utilization, which prevents burnout, boredom, and unrealistic expectations among your team. The result? employees who are more skilled, productive, and engaged.

• It is cost effective

Not having a capacity plan presents some serious risks to your company. If your current capacity doesn’t provide enough resources for the future project, the project’s success, and your reputation, are at risk. Conversely, if you have too much capacity and not enough work coming in, that depletes your profits.

Effective capacity planning enables you to increase margins by being prepared for your future resource needs. This allows you to improve your resource management, and market share, optimize the actual capacity of each member of the team, and ensure you meet customer demand every time, and avoid bottlenecks.

• Make data-informed decisions

When you lay everything in a resource planning tool – whether that’s a spreadsheet or resource planning software you can see how your projects, budgets, and staff connect. Seeing all that information in one place helps you make decisions based on concrete data.

• Budget more intelligently

Over-servicing clients is an easy way to go over budget. Capacity planning can help you:

1. Avoid putting in more labor hours than necessary on a given project.
2. Eliminate uncomfortable conversations with clients about unexpectedly high invoices.
3. Justify negotiations when asking for a budget or rate increase.

When understanding how much each employee’s labor costs for each project, you can make smarter decisions about staffing and assignments. For example, entry-level employees with lower billing rates can work on low-lift tasks. Then you can save expensive, experienced employees hours for more complex, high-level work.

Understanding everyone’s labor costs will help you assign the right people to the right decisions and projects at the right time while sticking to your client’s budgets.

• Avoid burnout and boredom

Capacity planning helps you make sure you have enough staff to complete your projects without working them overtime. It also helps make sure that your current team has enough to do so they feel challenged at work. And finally, it helps your bottom line by ensuring that employees aren’t tacking costly busywork onto projects just so they have something to do.

By laying out all of your expected project hours in a capacity planning tool and comparing them to the hours you can expect from your staff, you can keep employees happy, avoid constant team shifts and new hires, and make sure you’re not overservicing.

• Stay on Top of skills

Part of the capacity planning should also include a skill inventory so you know which employees can complete which tasks. Many organizations keep track of skills informally. For example, they can expect all junior staff to work at a certain level, while senior-level employees can work on more complex tasks.

Resource planning enables resource managers to consider the team member’s skills and interests before task allocation hence, enhances team engagement on every project and assuring improved productivity.

Understanding your team’s skill set can help you ensure that you always have the right amount of knowledgeable employees on hand for difficult or high-stakes work. It can also help you make sure you employ the right amount of cheaper junior staff to complete basic tasks.

• Make better hiring decisions

With a better understanding of your project workload, your team’s availability, and the skills available to your company, you can make smarter hiring decisions.

If you’re debating whether to take on a new project, you’ll be able to see immediately if your current staff has enough time to take it on. And if you realize your team lacks a skill you know would be useful, you can better evaluate whether you need to hire a contractor for a specific project or whether a new full-time hire would be useful for long-term work.

• Leave Time to grow

When you have the right amount of people with the right skills to complete your projects, you can start considering your company’s future.

With the necessary time budgeted for billable work, you can keep everyone happy by ensuring there’s still time to improve. Employees will appreciate the opportunity to expand their skill sets. Clients will love the new services you’ll be able to provide and the level of expertise each of your employees has. And let’s be honest, you’ll love how satisfied clients and employees will impact your profit margins.

How can your agency measure production capacity

As earlier discussed, production capacity provides key management personnel and business executives with vital information to make wide-ranging decisions regarding their operations.

Determining a manufacturing business’s production capacity varies depending on the kind of operation at hand: For instance, calculating production capacity for a high mix, low volume operation will be quite different than a high volume, mass production type business.

The first hurdle to getting your production capacity is determining machine hour capacity. This refers to the potential number of hours that a machine can be used to create products.

Machine hour capacity = number of usable machines * number of working hours

With this in hand, you can calculate production capacity for an operation that produces one type of product by factoring in the time it takes to make just one item.

Therefore, the production capacity formula:

Single item production capacity= machine hour capacity/ time taken to produce the item

Let’s take an example of a textile company making graphic t-shirts. employees work 8 hours a day using 20 design-to-garment printers to make t-shirts. It takes workers 15 minutes to complete one t-shirt.

Machine hour capacity = 8*20= 160 machine hours

Time to make one shirt= 0,25 hours

Production Capacity = 160 / 0,25 = 640 t-shirts per day.

When is Capacity Planning Required?

Capacity planning is useful and required any time you’re trying to ensure and required any time you’re trying to ensure that your supply meets demand. This means whether it’s a week, month, quarter, year, or more, capacity planning is always a good idea and a rule of thumb to stick to.

For many businesses, leaders and managers have a lot to handle. Among some of their responsibilities are:

• Keeping track of autonomous teams.
• Being aware of changing priorities
• Preparing for unpredictable tasks.
• Matrix structures.
• Handling remote workers
• The space between actual work and planned work.

With so many moving parts, it does make sense to go forward without a plan. Having a capacity planning strategy is a great way to get ahead of the challenges that are sure to arise.

Capacity planning is a great way to invest in your time because it helps you address possible future issues, take advantage of the benefits that come with planning, improve team performance and streamline your business tasks for increased efficiency.

Implementing COR software will only help in better Capacity planning, with its Project management, resource management, and Time management features, you’ll see how the platform copes perfectly.

Conclusion

Capacity planning will help you feel more confident in how your business is run. With the ability to see the project workloads and budgets and the availability of your staff, you’ll be able to make smarter decisions more quickly.

You’ll understand when you can take on more work without decreasing quality or increasing team burnout. And you’ll know when to hire new team members or focus on skill development based on the work you need to get done.

The post 1 out of 2 Agencies Do not Know their Production Capacity appeared first on COR.

Marketing and sales departments automate online marketing campaigns and sales activities to increase revenue and maximize efficiency. When automation is used effectively to handle repetitive tasks, employees are free to tackle higher-order problems, and human error is reduced. 

Automation in the advertising world helps with lead generation, nurturing, and scoring, as well as with measuring overall ROI on campaigns. The time-and-cost-saving effects of automation increase as an organization grows in size and complexity. Good marketing automation systems are designed to scale alongside your business. 

In its most basic form, marketing automation is a set of tools designed to streamline and simplify some of the most time-consuming responsibilities of modern marketing and sales roles. From automating the lead qualification process to creating a hub for digital campaign creation, automation is all about simplifying a business world that is growing far too complex and much too quickly. 

Marketing automation let you implement a digital marketing strategy without having to manually press “send” on every email, message, campaign, or post you create. Good automation tools help you identify your audience, design the right content, and automatically trigger actions based on schedules and customer behavior. Once your campaigns roll out, you can focus on other tasks, then analyze and tweak your marketing plan as results start coming in. An automated marketing strategy can save time and resources, driving revenue and ROI while you focus on growing your business. 

Automation works by collecting client data through many interactions: emails, websites, visits, app usage, social media, and so on. 

From there, automation does all the work: streamlining segmentation and targeting processes to determine the right audiences, quickly and at scale. Tailoring messaging to each customer automatically based on their profile. Creating relevant and personalized messaging across email, mobile, social, web experiences, and beyond with a few simple clicks. Deliver personalized experiences for your customers, whether you have 100 or 100 million, efficiently and effectively. 

Client journeys are the sum of individual personalized experiences with your brand. With marketing automation, you can tailor every interaction based on customer data to create ongoing, seamless journeys through every brand touchpoint. 

Marketing automation creates relevant content and messaging at scale across many channels, Send email messages with dynamic content that personalizes far beyond sticking a customer’s first name in the subject line. Integrate mobile messaging with your email and social campaigns through SMS/MMS, push notifications, and group messaging, Generate digital ads that appear for the right person at the right time. Plus, recommend the right products on your website to each user automatically. 

Automating processes in advertising can make you reach clients along their journey no matter where they are in the client lifecycle from acquisition to advocacy. Deliver timely, relevant content that reaches customers when, where, and how they prefer converting prospects into lifelong brand advocates. 

Among the best practices to keep in mind when designing your marketing automation strategy: 

• Define and present your goals: Use real numbers to justify the investment in a marketing automation platform to your stakeholders. 
• Collaborate with other teams. Your marketing automation strategy will touch several teams in your company. Get their input and buy-in before you begin. 
• Create process visualizations. Use detailed diagrams of your marketing automation workflow to relay your entire agency -efficiently and effectively. 
• Prepare for database segmentation. Consider your customer data. Think about who you’d like to engage, and why. 
• Prepare your content strategy. Build your content library. Create interesting, engaging, and relevant messaging designed for each stage of the customer lifecycle. 
• Plan for a slow rollout. The world’s most successful marketing automation firms stagger their launches. Test early and optimize the next block of programs to give yourself the best chance of success. 
• Analyze as you go. See what’s working and what’s not. Use some of the time you get back from automation to dig into the analytics and make the changes that will grow your business. 

What is Zapier?

 Zapier software lets you automate workflows between multiple apps that don’t communicate with each other. You may end up copying and pasting the same information in multiple places, it’s annoying and repetitive. Zapier allows its users to connect web apps and automate workflows and it’s an easy way to automate tasks. Tackle the things you care about by automating with this software.

Automation is a technique used to operate something automatically; it saves time, eliminates human error, and most importantly, solves problems. Automation is all around us; most of the services taken for granted have been thought of and been automated such as the machine that serves our coffee in the morning, when we go to the supermarket the door opens by itself, letting us carry our bags with both hands. These are the things we have accustomed to because they have already been automated, we never think about them, it’s subtle, and they make a great difference. 

They may solve problems you never realized existed, because of automation. Zapier is at the heart of automation, and everyone can learn just how trustworthy it is.

When do you know you have to automate? 

• It’s a task you have to do frequently or on a schedule. 

For example, you may send a greeting mail to clients when you contact them. It’s a nice gesture, it will always be welcomed and it will always be appreciated. The part is that it can be automated. 

• A task that involves moving information between apps. 

When you first contact a lead, you surely enter that information in a spreadsheet from one app to another; that procedure can also be automated with Zapier. 

• A task that is easy but repetitive and time-consuming 

A task is a candidate for automation when it takes you away from what you want to be doing. Automation is not only about saving a few minutes here and there. Think about how time adds up over the long term. How does that apply to cost per hour? Sure you’ll save a buck, but automation lets you ultimately focus on what a human can only do, and stop wasting time on things that are not important. 

How does Zapier work?

We use apps every day. When we are at work, dialogue between many apps is used to do our job correctly: we go around Gmail to see the emails our clients have sent to us, and we use excel for a specific database and social media because that is what lets our agency to be seen in the world. There is a place where all the apps we use at work are displayed it is called User Interface or UI: it’s basically how we humans interact with a computer by clicking buttons and writing texts. Each app communicates with others with the application program interface or API. Every app has its code, a behind-the-scenes where there are no clicks and information just passes by in code. Software like Zapier lets you change automation rules without the need to write computer code in the “behind the scenes” section.

Before talking about how Zapier benefits you by automating your workflow, we must talk about the logic module, understood as a formula for your project to be successful. There are a couple of questions that are good starting points before automating your work: 

• Decide what you want to accomplish 

What problem do you want to solve? You want to be as detailed and precise as possible.

• Decide what apps are going to be involved

These are apps you are probably already using. 

• Create the rules these apps need to follow 

This is the principle of automation in your work environment. Guiding yourself with the following logic:

When getting new leads on Facebook, then send emails to your salespeople.” Always be mindful of the “when” and the “then” to follow the logic of automation. In Zapier language the when is a trigger and the then is an action.

• Make sure the data between apps understand each other 

You are just telling the apps you use at work what data to send and where to send it.  

When you know all the information that these key points show, then you’re ready to automate a workflow, that is what we call a Zap, connecting your apps and services, having always a trigger and a consequent action. Every automation a Zap does successfully is called a task which is only associated with actions. When building a Zap you get to decide which field you want, a field being a placeholder where you can visualize information, more specifically, a task, and where you want that information to go.  

Now we’re ready to create our first Zap. First things first, go to the website and click on “create a zap”. Select the app or service you want as a trigger, for any Zap to launch a trigger must come first. Then you must decide where you want your data to go when you customize an action event. 

Now check if they are working correctly. The easy way to do this is by checking your task history and corroborating that what you are trying to automate is going down smoothly. 

Why is integrating Zapier with COR a good idea for your business? 

Learn how to integrate with Zapier to carry out massive registrations of clients, projects, or tasks without the need to manually transfer that information. COR already automates lots of processes in the Project management, time management, and Resource management areas, to benefit efficiency and profitability. With Zapier all the small tasks that take your time from important things, will be dealt with. You will achieve speed and make your productivity skyrocket. Let’s see how to do these integrations.  

In the first place, create a user in Zapier. Now, to integrate apps with COR, you must use Zaps. A Zap as we’ve said before needs a trigger and then an action. To do this, you must have client, project, and task creation permissions to be able to create Zaps. You will be able to integrate COR with any app from the marketplace of Zapier such as Google calendars, Google sheets, and GitHub among many others. This will allow a faster workflow with other apps you use while working at COR. This software already tries to concentrate all workflows within a single place, so everything you automate with Zapier, will have huge benefits on your overall work performance. 

How to connect any app to COR using Zapier?

Creating a Client on COR

When in Zapier, click on “Create a Zap”. Choose a name for your client and an app that will contain the event that will trigger that ZAP. Then select a type of event and continue to select an email to gain access to the corresponding permissions that you need. To choose the trigger, you’ll have to set a “drive” and a “spreadsheet” app where the data that will be transferred is displayed. Then you’ll have to click on “test trigger” to see if the information is correct. 

Then you’ll have to go to action and select COR and within the type of the event, choose the option “create a client”. Now, you’ll have to associate a COR account to Zapier and click on allow to permit the integration. Fill up the rest of the information with the data from other apps and continue. 

Once the platform has validated the action, the Zap will be activated and send the information to COR. To confirm that it has been a successful operation, go to the main menu in the Zap section and you’ll notice that the action is active, a green dot that says “0n” will be your guide. 

From within COR, go the to client section module, and check for the client you created on Zapier. If everything went right you’ll find the client you’ve made and now the operation is complete and successful. 

Create a Project on COR 

This is a similar process to the one we’ve already described. 

1. Create a Zap that contains the event that will trigger it, in this case, a Project import. 
2. Select a type of event and press on continue. 
3. Choose your account associated with Zapier and then continue. 
4. In this case, to set the trigger, select your drive archive and the specification sheet that contains the data that will be transferred.
5.  Click on the test trigger to validate the information. Have a read on the project that will create and then click on continue. 
6. In the action menu, select COR and the type of event, and choose to create a project. Complete the name of the project by choosing among one of the options displayed. Fill out the client ID and then continue. 
7. Lastly, zapier will test and validate all the information submitted. If everything goes down well, click on “turn on zap” and the data will be transferred to COR. 
8. To check everything is well, return to the module of Zaps, and check if the action is active with a big green dot that says “on”. From within COR, in the client module, you’ll see the new integration created before Zapier. 

Create a task on COR 

If you want to create a task follow the same steps as shown before, but with the exception that in the first step, introduce a Task import, rather than a project import, and follow the same steps. Step six also changes, instead of creating a project, create a task. Insert then the ID where all the information of the tasks will be transferred. Zapier will test the validation of the information submitted and if everything’s okay. A Zap will be created and the data will be sent to COR. Go to the main menu of Zaps if the task creation has been successful and you’ll see a green dot beside the task that confirms. Then go to COR and validate the task creation and that would be it. 

Conclusion

There are many benefits of automation within the world of ad agencies. Automating processes add value to your business, whether you operate an SME or work within the marketing team for a large multinational corporation. 

Marketing automation helps small businesses stay relevant and competitive, whilst it enables large businesses to keep up with the demands of their many customers within their respective industries. Therefore, we will highlight five big ones: 

• Time Savings – Campaigns can be scheduled ahead of time, meaning you can channel your working hours into other projects. Whilst that is possible with other platforms, with a marketing automation system you have the added benefit of being able to schedule different posts to different audiences.

• Increases productivity – Marketing automation frees up your marketing team’s time from performing repetitive tasks and gives them the capacity to brainstorm new ideas and boost productivity in other areas. 

• Personalization – You’ll have the ability to create a tailored and unique experience for each client, thereby increasing engagement and boosting sales. 

• Multichannel campaign management – Keep track of all your campaigns across all your marketing channels from one platform.

• Improved ROI – By targeting customers more specifically, your marketing spend is being used wisely and efficiently. 

This tool is all about optimization –  optimizing the client experience, the efficiency of the campaign process, and optimizing your marketing team’s time. 

Zapier follows down this line, of optimizing integrations between apps for a faster workflow. It allows a faster visualization of data and a place where all the data can be seen and followed. While working with COR, you can create projects, clients and tasks using Zaps. These require a trigger and an action to be operational. Once that is defined you can link information between apps you are currently working with COR and this will help you to automatize workflow and write down information once and not waste time introducing the same information in different apps, for example.

The post What’s the Importance of Automating Processes in the Advertising World? appeared first on COR.