As 2019 comes to a close, businesses everywhere draw the line to evaluate what they did well in the previous 12 months, along with what needed more work, and the biggest challenges they faced and overcame.
Agency and marketing professionals are ending another year marked by fast market developments and new requirements in terms of advertising, search engine optimization, marketing trends and more. Despite the ups and downs, many firms managed to weather the storm and even come out on the other side with a few lessons.
These 15 members of Forbes Agency Council share a look at their year in review, and the lessons they learned from the challenges they faced. Hopefully, their insight will inspire others to follow their example.
Members discuss their biggest agency challenges of the year and what they learned.
Photos courtesy of the individual members
1. Overcoming Scope Creep
More than once in the past year, our agency has suffered from unplanned scope creep. This is to be guarded against because it can lead to difficult conversations with some clients or underbilling as a result. Agencies can’t afford to forgo revenue and must, like us, improve contract practices and onboarding to mitigate the headache and save the revenue. – Greg Demetriou, Lorraine Gregory Communications
2. Educating All Levels
A strong economy means considerable turnover at client companies as people advance their careers internally or across companies. In times like these, making sure your efforts and successes with a client are understood and appreciated by those both above and below your primary contact is essential for withstanding the inevitable change in personnel. – Brian Sullivan, Sullivan Branding
3. Managing Business Cycles
This past year, two-thirds of our client work was focused in a five-month period. We conquered this challenge through the use of freelance and contract resources, which allowed us to best bend to the needs of our clients. Our goal moving forward is to expand current client relationships and add clients whose business cycles offset those of our current project mix. – Robert Macdonald, Impact Communications
4. Needing To Scale Up Quickly
Our company was fortunate to have some rapid growth periods this year, and we needed to scale up quickly. We found that a delicate combination of structure and flexibility was needed from each team member to properly onboard new staff while also being responsive when clients required us to be. It’s helped build a collaborative environment we hope will lead to even more growth in 2020. – Hannah Trivette, NUVEW Web Solutions
5. Relying On Organic Marketing Strategies
In the past few months, Instagram came up with big algorithm changes that killed organic growth. All my strategies stopped working and I was losing clients every day. I figured out Instagram ads, which helped me save my business, but that took me two months and I lost most of my clients. The biggest lesson I learned was to always have alternatives when your business is dependent on social media channels. – Vishal Jain, Sunshy Group Of Companies
6. Changing SEO Trends For SaaS Industry
We only do content marketing and SEO for the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry, an industry which Google fundamentally changed the ranking trends for over 2019. We’ve had to adapt our approach and that of all of our clients over the course of 2019. There are still some hesitant to change, but for those that did adapt, we’ve seen significant results. – Sean Smith, SimpleTiger LLC
7. Restructuring For Better Delivery
Even though we’ve always been an integrated agency, we found that a bifurcation had developed in the account team between those more comfortable with PR clients and those more comfortable with digital marketing or web design clients. Through restructuring and training, we’ve been able to break down that wall to better serve clients and reduce friction on project teams. – Scott Baradell, Idea Grove
8. Working With The Right Clients
One of the hardest things for me to do is be choosy when determining what clients to work with. In the early days of our agency, we’d work with anyone who threw money our way. That mentality has come back to bite us. There are some clients that no amount of money will make it worth it to work with them. We made money, but it ruined our lives. This year, we got serious about who we worked with. – Greg Trimble, Lemonade Stand
9. Losing Our Biggest Client
We lost our largest client. We knew it was coming — a new CMO who had an agency background himself was the catalyst. It was a matter of time before he brought his people in. It forced us to double down on new business efforts and not only did we replace the client, but also brought in a number of others in the industry. Revenue is up and we are much more diversified and financially stable. – Sandra Fathi, Affect, Inc.
10. Building The Right Attribution Model
We found that tracking, measuring and building the right attribution model was the most challenging aspect of any campaign we ran in 2019. Last-click attribution is a thing of the past and does not account for the top or middle of the funnel. Top and middle of the funnel tactics like influencer marketing or radio and TV cannot be accurately measured by using last click attribution. – Matt Frary, SmarterChaos.com
11. Managing Growth In A Service Company
Service companies aren’t scalable organizations by nature, and when you try to make it, you run into lots of challenges. We’ve reached a place where we had to redesign our support system from the ground up to serve more client layers. Managing expectations of the team while making sure you still offer an exceptional, delighting experience for your clients was quite challenging, as well. – Solomon Thimothy, OneIMS
12. Finding The Time To Give Back
One of our biggest challenges was finding time and ways to give back to the community. To fix this issue, we created a separate division of our company that focused on helping nonprofits succeed online. In the year ahead, we plan to utilize our digital marketing expertise to better support the community around us. – Charles Mazzini, Hyperlinks Media, LLC
13. Adapting To The Shrinking Media Universe
The biggest challenge in PR is the shrinking media universe. There are fewer publications and fewer reporters at those that remain. That means a PR agency can’t rely on securing interviews as their most important metric. We’ve addressed this by shifting our emphasis to more thought leadership bylines and content marketing programs, while also continuing to secure high-value interviews. – Jodi Amendola, Amendola Communications
14. Streamlining The Onboarding Process
As a rapidly growing company in a fast-paced industry, onboarding new employees quickly and efficiently is a constant challenge. Something we’ve worked on in 2019 is prioritizing experienced candidates who will likely require minimal initial training. Our goal for 2020 is to streamline our onboarding process even further to reduce the need for dedicated training from several weeks to several days. – Adam Binder, Creative Click Media
15. Turning Turnover Into An Opportunity
We faced significant turnover in 2019. Instead of simply refilling seats, we took a step back, evaluating not only the roles and candidates, but the bigger organizational structure, as well. We asked ourselves how we can restructure and use the strengths we have. How can we re-engineer our team to be smarter and more effective? This effort has built a stronger foundation for 2020 and beyond. – Matt Doud, Planit
