How to get Better Value Across Your Agency Fees – 5 Key Tips

May 22nd 2025

Are you getting the best value from your agency? 
 
We know how difficult it is for marketing procurement teams to balance driving growth and delivering savings. 
 
We’ve put together our top tips for how to get the best value across your agency fees – and the best part is that all of this is easily achievable using our Agency Scoping Tool 

 

  1. Consistent Language

Put in place a consistent structure and language across your scopes of work. Details on output, deliverables, frequency and volume should all be standardized. If your remuneration model is time & materials, you’ll want to make sure job titles and seniority levels are consistent across agencies too. This will allow you to compare and benchmark across scopes.

 

  1. Transparency

If you are looking to achieve better value on your agency fees either with existing or prospective agency partners, ask for a break down of fees across direct labour costs, overhead, and markup. This will allow you to compare against industry benchmarks and be equipped for negotiations.

 

  1. Asset Based Pricing

Asset based pricing is a fixed-fee model where agencies are compensated for delivering specific, predefined outputs rather than billing for time or headcount. By only paying for the actual work delivered, brands can predict costs with no surprises and have complete transparency of fees. Consider using this approach.​

 

  1. Data Centralization

If you have multiple brands and agency partners – you’ll want to make sure you have a centralized system to house all of your agency scopes of work. This is exactly what our Agency Scoping Tool does – allowing you to analyse across brands, identify saving opportunities, reconcile projects and compare fees to industry benchmarks ​of $2.1bn agency fees

 5: Negotiate Fairly

If you are asking for transparency from your agency, as the client you need to be transparent too. Using aggressive tactics in negotiations won’t deliver value for your brand and isn’t fair to your partners – instead, use benchmarking data to assist and evidence your negotiation​ strategy.

If you’d like to find out more about our Scoping Tool, and to organise a demo, fill out the form below. 

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