EP 322: The 2021 Agency Edge Research Series with Susan Baier

Understanding how clients view the agency relationship is key to making the most of that partnership. Every year since 2014, AMI and Audience Audit have brought you The Agency Edge Research Series to hopefully give helpful insights into what clients and prospects are looking for when working with agencies. The 2020 research correctly indicated that 2021 was going to be very robust for agency business. This year’s study was built to better understand the thinking behind this growth on the client side, in particular how this explosion in engagement affected how they thought about their agency relationships. The Agency Edge Research Series is a collaboration between AMI, Audience Audit, and Dynata. Where other studies focus on industries or the size of client companies, we were interested in how these clients were feeling about a handful of topics. Audience Audit’s Susan Baier is here to give an overview of the 2021 findings. In this episode of Build a Better Agency, Susan and I explain the methodologies used in creating the Agency Edge Research Series. We give an overview of the three client segments that revealed themselves, explain how an agency can diagnose clients and prospects in order to best serve what they are looking for. In the show notes below you will find a link to the 17-page executive summary and we hope this information will help you make the most of your client relationships.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• The methodologies used in the Agency Edge Research Series
• The insight that revealed itself for the first time this year
• The focus of this year’s study
• How the three segments of this study are defined: Committed, Concerned, and Close
• How agencies can diagnose clients and prospects to know what segment they are in
• Ways to work best with each segment
• How agencies can manipulate the data for their own needs