In 2020, Agency Success = Agency Collaboration

“We’ve already got an agency. But perhaps you could work together?” Some marketing firms refuse to collaborate with other agencies. But Stamats appreciates these opportunities.

In this week’s podcast, CEO Peter Stamats discusses how successful agencies partner with each other in their clients’ best interest. Listen now.

Ready to learn more? Subscribe to Stamats Insights today.

Rather read the transcript?

[Start Transcript]

Mariah Obiedzinski: I’m Mariah Obiedzinski, Senior Director of Content Services at Stamats. Joining me today is our CEO, Peter Stamats. Welcome, Peter.

Peter Stamats: Good morning.

Mariah: Peter, one comment we often get from clients in our B2B business units is, we already have an agency, when we talk about our professional services, like our social media services, digital strategy and email lead generation. Some other organizations might take that as a big nope—we don’t want to work with you.

But Stamats is really amenable, in fact, oftentimes eager to work with our partner agencies for several reasons. Namely agencies that are more specialized in services like PR or a niche like health care. So really, we’re more agnostic across the board with our experiences that we provide.

Why would then Stamats partner with agencies rather than view them as competitors?

Peter: I think historically, we may have viewed them as competitors, but the landscape of what is being provided to clients has become increasingly complex. It used to be that a client could easily work with a single agency to provide solutions for all of its marketing needs. But in today’s more complex marketing world, they need to find specialists in certain sectors.

We offer a set of selective services, not across the board, but in a number of different areas. When we approach agencies with our marketing services, we can often find a specialization that they may not have that complements what they do in the marketplace. It provides a win-win-win solution for a client, the agency, and ourselves.

Mariah: Absolutely. And some agencies will argue that serving a specific niche market only, like health care or education, gives those clients a more focused marketing approach. I’d argue that model really blocks the creative process and the work that client can do in other markets. What do you think about that concept?

Peter: We were actually in that mold about 10–12 years ago, where the only market that we really served was higher education. Increasingly, what we felt we needed to do to be more constructive with current client’s solutions is bring in ideas from other marketplaces.

So, looking into the consumer market, and we acquired an agency that worked in that area. We found that cross-pollination of ideas was really helpful. We have built on that model in the last four or five years—changed our internal organization structure to have teams working together that serve multiple markets. And we’re seeing that fresh ideas from one market may actually serve a year or two later in another market to really provide a benefit to the client.

Mariah: Yeah, it kind of comes back to what we’ve talked about in previous conversations that we’ve had where it’s less business to business per se, but really businessperson to businessperson.

Peter: Yes, we’re all people. We’re all people at the end of the day. And we all have careers that we’re trying to move forward. We highly value a collaborative work environment internally. We try to project that in our engagements with agencies or with clients on the outside, as we move together in a partnership arrangement.

Mariah: That diversity and experience really is important. But there’s also some importance in having specialization as well. So, we have writers and designers who specialize in higher ed, we have some that specialize in health care, B2B, and so forth. Why is some of that specialization still so important?

Peter: You definitely need to have content and messaging that you can provide for a client in the market they serve that resonates with their audience. If there isn’t a strong understanding of that marketplace, of that audiences’ set of needs, then you won’t ring true for them. And the marketing efforts and campaigns that you provide won’t be successful.

Mariah: We always like to look into the future when we have these conversations. So how do you perceive publishers, marketers, PR teams and so forth collaborating over the next five to 10 years.

Peter: I think there’ll be a continuing merging of traditional publishing offerings with agency marketing tactics and techniques. We’re fairly unique in the world of agencies.

If you think about it in…that another part of our business has worked for over 50-years in the publishing sector in select markets. Having done so, we can bring that expertise in and we have a better feel for what the world of publishing has been and is moving towards, in conjunction with what marketing tactics and techniques today are being applied to provide solutions to clients. So that will continue to happen as things move forward.

At the end of the day, the consistency of messaging with little tweaks around the edges as we interact with a client on an ongoing basis, with campaign reviews, will be what makes the long-term success for the client work. Client solutions will increasingly become a blended mix of targeted messaging and brand development with targeted audience distribution through digital, social, and mass media channels.

Mariah: Thanks as always for joining us, Peter.

Peter: Thank you very much, Mariah. It’s been a pleasure.

[End Transcript]