In the words of Forbes: Specialized agencies “aren’t just familiar with the industry, they’re part of it.” Today, agencies are encouraged to specialize to stand out. While that may be the best course of action for agencies, it can create a challenge for clients who need to find the right agency for each area you need to outsource. It’s okay to have an agency of record (AOR), a public relations agency and a niche B2B agency for your meetings, sports and travel trade.
Another challenge is then managing multiple agencies. This may feel like developing multiple personality syndrome; no one wants that!
See why you should work with multiple agencies and get timesaving tips on managing them to achieve the most benefits for your travel & tourism agency.
Why You Need to Partner with Multiple Agencies
There is no possible way to be an expert at everything. So, if you don’t know how to do something, hire someone to do it and support you!
Here are four reasons why you need a niche B2B agency on your roster of partner agencies:
- Gain Specialized Expertise & Planner Perspectives
- Extend Your Existing Brand Efforts
- Maximize Your Efforts with Strategic Collaboration
- Bridge the Gap Between What Sales Needs & Marketing Manages
Gain Specialized Expertise & Planner Perspectives
When you hire multiple agencies, you hire the best services and expertise from each of them. When you partner with Digital Edge, you gain 100+ years of collective conventions & group travel industry expertise, continuous collaboration and interdisciplinary approaches. For 13 years, we’ve been speaking to meeting planners — and we know how to engage them throughout the planning cycle. Group sales and marketing isn’t just what we do — it’s what we live and breathe, whether behind the purple walls of our office, on Zoom calls with our clients, out and about at industry shows or going in-market for site visits, to host familiarization (FAM) tours or develop a customer advisory board (CAB).
Not only does our expertise lend itself to success through our services for travel & tourism organizations, from creative and content to media and research, but also to strategy. When one of our clients started working on a new meetings & conventions campaign, they roped in Digital Edge to collaborate with their AOR during the planning process. We all came together in person to create the bones of the creative brief, ensuring the elements would resonate with the destination’s target audience. Since then, we’ve consulted on all aspects, from the messaging ideation to shoot location scouting.
Extend Your Existing Brand Efforts
In addition to aiding your AOR in strategic meetings campaign planning, Digital Edge ensures brand consistency through collaborative refinement and extension of your brand efforts for meetings & conventions, sports and travel trade.
When one of our destination marketing organization (DMO) clients got a new brand identity, we repositioned the branding from the AOR for the B2B audiences, finding the unique positioning specifically for the group side while keeping the integrity of the new branding.
We take the AOR’s branding elements and create marketing plans for future positioning designed to be adaptable and scalable, ensuring its relevance across future initiatives and market segments.
Maximize Your Efforts with Strategic Collaboration
When you have multiple partner agencies tasked with specific marketing aspects, you receive customized support through strategy. This takes the load off your internal teams, increasing their bandwidth to concentrate on additional impactful goals and objectives and rack up more wins. To maximize efficiency, create an environment where your partner agencies work as strategic partners — not competitors — without your destination organization having to act as a facilitator or mediator between them all.
For example, Digital Edge VP of Client Strategy & Development Mae Bodine is the conduit for one of our clients’ external teams. She’s at the helm of meetings & conventions between all the partner agencies so that they can discuss projects and other items everyone is working on for the greater good of the destination.
Bridge the Gap Between What Sales Needs & Marketing Manages
It’s a tale as old as time. Sales teams in the travel & tourism industry are constantly on the move, from pounding the pavement at site inspections to stirring around at shows. Marketing teams have a full plate, focusing on everything from brand management and creative development to integrated communications and impact to partners and stakeholders.
Identify the work you manage internally and where you can lead external teams to execute projects for you with their expertise. When you partner with a B2B agency, you extend your internal teams by providing extra resources for the sales team’s needs and brand management. Having a dedicated B2B partner to create solutions for meetings marketing (like digital sales kits and sales activity email and social media marketing), while having an understanding of your destination brand, gives your sales team the services and tools they need and supports marketing’s ability to do more, create more and reach more of your target audience. This prevents inconsistent messaging and off-brand materials that could hinder the effectiveness of the sales process. It also gives your marketing staff a hand by helping out with sales needs so that they can stay on top of their priorities.
Digital Edge bridges the gap and ensures everyone’s needs and priorities are being met creatively.
So I Need Multiple Agencies. How Do I Manage Them All?
Sure, it can help to have a partner agency that takes the lead in facilitating communication between you and all your partner agencies, but trust isn’t built overnight. If you’re looking to start from the ground up or are looking to add a new strategic partner, here are three tips on managing multiple agencies to make your life easier.
- Set clear boundaries.
- Focus on the expertise and unique attributes of each agency.
- Share important workflow documents.
Bonus: Host an annual or semi-annual agency roundup.
Set Clear Boundaries
When managing multiple agencies, it’s important that each of them understand their role, the platforms they manage and the audiences they target to avoid overlap as much as possible.
Focus on Unique Selling Propositions
Take the time to understand each partner agency’s strengths, weaknesses and areas for opportunity. Understanding where they have been, where they are focused and their growth plans will help you leverage the agency’s intel for your own benefit. Treat each one as a partner and have them share these insights with each other; don’t treat them like an item on your to-do list (one of our terrible, awful, no-good, very bad marketing mistakes). This will help everyone understand the value they are bringing to the table.
Share Important Workflow Documents
Sharing documents between organizations and teams has never been easier. Creating master shared docs that allow each agency to collaborate, review and contribute may be weird at first, but in the end, having open collaboration truly helps. Shared docs like media plans, content calendars, reporting and strategies are helpful so each team can further understand what the other is contributing and where they can pitch in.
Bonus: Host an Annual or Semi-Annual Agency Roundup
Since 2017, Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau has hosted an Agency Love Fest, bolstered by Chief Marketing Officer Andrew Wilson’s leadership and push for a collaborative dynamic among all the CVB’s partner agencies. Most of the agencies have been working with Atlanta CVB since the first Agency Love Fest, so trust has been built between all, and they have confidence in having the autonomy to do what their mutual client needs.
If you need a B2B agency that specializes in meetings, sports and travel trade and knows how to collaborate with your internal teams and partner agencies, that’s where Digital Edge comes in. Contact us to learn about growing a partnership.
