Decoding Marketing Agency Costs: How Much Should You Pay?

It is essential that marketing departments get the most out of their budget as possible and for many brands a large portion of this budget is spent on agency fees. There are a range of marketing agencies that companies can utilise; Production, Digital, Media, PR, CRM, and Social. The benefits of hiring a marketing agency include; improved strategy, increase in time efficiency, cost efficiency compared to a full time marketing department, better quality creative ideas, and valuable insights for the future! 

The process of choosing the right agency for your company is by no means an easy task, and it is paramount that you end up with the right one or you face taking two steps back and loosing some of advantages that an agency can give you such as increased efficiency and cost effectiveness. The process is a lengthy one from long listing to short listing agencies, developing a detailed and specific scope of work, sending out a request for proposal, actioning chemistry sessions, organising pitch meetings, gathering commercial submissions, and analysing and negotiating everything submitted and presented to you to then make your final decision!  

Flock is fully equipped and happy to help with every stage of the process ensuring each step is carefully organised and analysed by our consultants and project team to ensure your company ends up with the perfect agency. Flock has helping some of the leading brands in industry such as Ford, McDonalds, Helly Hansen, EY, IKEA and the list goes on!

Flock has run 75+ pitches across Creative, Production, Digital, Tech, PR and Media, in 36+ marketing and across 35+ agency units. 

One of the hardest aspects of the agency pitch process is the gathering, understanding, analysing, comparing, and ensuring you are getting a good deal in terms of the fees that the agency has proposed against your scope of work. As agency fees account for a significant amount of marketing budget within organisations. It is no surprise that key marketing stakeholders such as procurement and finance want to know that their fees are good value and transparent. 

As well as our expert analysis and consultative insight and advice, one of our most valuable tools that we can bring to clients is our Flock Agency Scoping Tool. With our tool all of the fees submitted by the competing agencies are gathered in one place and are easily accessible via a dashboard. In the dashboard agency fees can be compared against others and split out via region, seniority, job title, deliverables, as well as compared against previous round submissions to easily see the money that is being saved via Flock’s negotiation.  

As well as comparing against other agencies, the fees submitted can be compared against Flock’s Benchmark! This benchmark consists of the $1.8 billion of agency fees in our database as well as 1.0M data points for agency comparison. This benchmark ensures that the fees submitted are competitive with what other agencies have submitted in your industry and ultimately ensure that your organisation gets competitive market rates, something that is very hard to gauge without access to such data! 

You can benchmark submissions against over $1.8 billion of live negotiated fees, gaining 30% of fee savings for same team and scope.

–Flock Agency Scoping Tool

If you would like to know more of what was discussed in this blog or more details on how Flock can help with your agency selection and pitch process please don’t hesitate to get in touch using the form below.