What does the current pandemic mean for brand marketing agencies?

Marketing agencies’ greatest challenge right now is aligning the demands of its brands to the needs of the market, and helping them achieve the desired eCommerce success. Embracing the right technology can help these agencies not only serve the brands but also help them achieve massive eCommerce success. By helping the brands and retailers manage operations through the right eCommerce management platform- agencies can solve all the challenges in one go.

The Covid-19 pandemic has shut offices and significantly affected our world, but it has also resulted in a massive shift in the business environment. Businesses such as Brands & Retailers globally are now realizing the need to digitize their processes and go Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) to achieve multifold growth. Marketing agencies are finding it difficult to retain & serve such brands and enable them to adopt digitization; while balancing the situation that the pandemic presents for them.

As various brands are looking to adopt newer strategies in these trying times, marketing agencies are faced with new demands from their customers. Hence, it has become a tight-rope walk for the marketing agencies in order to try and make sense of this new paradigm with utmost customer satisfaction.

Challenges faced by marketing agencies in serving brands:

“Marketing agencies’ greatest challenge right now is aligning the demands of its brands to the needs of the market, and helping them achieve the desired eCommerce success”.

1. Brands want to shift their presence from offline to online quickly:

With the majority of nations under complete lockdown, offline businesses are forced to cease operations due to governmental restrictions. However, businesses present on online channels have managed to run operations even in this tough situation. Brands selling essentials even saw exponential growth across multiple online sales channels.

Hence, brands and retailers now prefer to make heavier investments in eCommerce & want their agencies to show them the way.

2. Redirecting marketing spends from offline to online:

Brands now either want to cut their offline spends completely or want to divert them to online channels. But as the brands want quantifiable results from these spends, it is crucial for marketing agencies to measure the ROI for the online spends. A crucial element of measuring this ROI is to have the right tools to gather information from various online channels (marketplaces & webstores)

3. Brands ask for crucial consumer data:

“As eCommerce activities are managed through their distribution network or external agencies, they do not have central control over their data. But most brands have now realized the power of data, and have started asking for it”.

Crucial customer data helps brands create seamless customer journeys and boost sales. Data such as ‘what sells on which channels’ or ‘which channel is suited for which product’ can help brands define their core strategies. Also, data such as customer location, average basket size, frequency of purchase help agencies allocate advertising spends more efficiently, at the right time and at the right place. With marketplaces unable to provide this data, agencies face the challenge of retrieving, collating, and sharing this data with brands.

How can marketing agencies assist brands and help them emerge stronger?

“Crafting the right multichannel eCommerce strategy or helping the brands implement the right Direct-to-Consumer strategy can turn out to be a game changer for marketing agencies”.

Embracing the right technology can help these agencies not only serve these brands but also help them achieve massive eCommerce success. By helping the brands manage their operations through the right eCommerce management platform- agencies can solve all the challenges in one go. SaaS eCommerce management platforms that facilitate end-to-end eCommerce operations management can enable agencies to :

1. Get the customer data their brands want:

As marketplaces control the customer data, and what the agencies get in the end is not enough for the brands. But, with the right platform in place, agencies can get real-time dashboard or marketplace-wise filters and channel-wise reports, so that they can prepare shareable reports and analytics through customized dashboards with the utmost ease.

2. Help brands start their digital journey:

“In order to enable brands to achieve the desired eCommerce success, a unified eCommerce management system equipped with a single flow of information and multichannel selling is critically important”.

If a brand is operating on multiple marketplaces, a unified platform for inventory, orders, promotions, catalogues, digital assets, and logistics management can help them acquire a central control & visibility over their operations. A holistic view of each and every process ensures that brands can have control over their products, services and even manage different promotional activities. A unified flow of data exchange through product information management (PIM) and digital asset management (DAM) ensures the same brand experience without faltering the information irrespective of the host of selling points.

3. Offer more value-added services to brands:

In addition to all the above benefits, technology can reward marketing agencies to independently master highly customer sensitive information that can be leveraged into offering value-added services. Agencies can generate data such as complete customer lifetime value ( CLV), determine different interest clusters and service enabled zones of tolerance through the real-time reports. Thus, it can enable digital transformation for multiple brands.

The best part associated with new-age technology is that it will continue to remain relevant even after the situation gets better. Unfortunately, this pandemic has been the biggest call ever made for digitization and is poised to set the way businesses think of eCommerce forever. And this is exactly why enablers, aggregators, and agencies need to be prepared, as they will be the front runners in leading this transformation.