Meeting the needs of Procurement
As a procurement lead in the aftermath of COVID-19, your role is crucial. You’ll need to maintain or improve levels of service, but with increased quality. And for less cost.
You might be tasked with saving your organisation. Longer term, you’ll be looking to re-emerge stronger than ever before.
To achieve these goals, you’ll likely be reviewing your Marketing Category spend. Within that, you may be looking to increase the proportion of marketing spend towards digital media.
There is opportunity within this sector: Our mission is to support you. If you are considering a new agency, we think you’ll have a list of objectives like this:
- Removal of risk
- Savings
- Best in sector service and performance
- Social / corporate responsibility
As an agency, we are a more innovative solution, shaped to support these needs. We may look different from many of the other agencies on your pitch list, but we provide an advantageous alternative.
Removal of risk.
It’s likely you’ll be looking for financial stability from your partner agencies:
- Free of debt. We’ve not taken a loan or third-party investment.
- Free from burdening financial obligations. Excluding staff costs, we’ve no long-term financial commitments. Our agreement with our landlord is three months’ notice.
- Healthy revenue spread. No single client billing is over 15% of our total revenue.
- Guaranteed income. 64% of our work is from ongoing monthly contracts. Terms for those retainers include a 3-month notice period.
- Solvency. Our cash holdings are enough to cover the business for more than three months without any additional revenue.
- Good cover. We have high insurance coverage, including £1m PI cover.
Best-in-class service and performance.
You’ll be needing to guarantee quality from your agency. Details of our service (and sector) expertise, case studies, testimonials and awards can be found on our website.
But to highlight some key points:
- Sector expertise. 75% of our revenue is from charity organisations. The rest includes: Education, Health and Member organisations.
- Understanding of campaigns relevant to your sector. Our experience covers: fundraising, awareness, event marketing, gifts in wills, retail, lottery, campaigning.
- Responsive, nimble and innovative. We’ve moved quickly with the times into the areas that count: Analytics, Programmatic, automation and SEO to name a few.
- Demonstrable trusted relationships: We’ve kept clients since the year we started (2011) and we’ve grown significantly year on year since then on the basis of our reputation.
- Industry award-winning expertise: We entered two digital Industry awards in 2020: Most Effective use of Data and Non-Profit. We won them both. In 2021 we’re already shortlisted in the Campaign Media Awards, Charity Sector category.
- Added Value. There’s lots we have to offer, including: strategic conversations, knowledge sharing, access to sector surveys, training, bespoke dashboards, and data analysis.
- Evolved structure. Our expertise covers: account management, strategy, planning, data analysis, and a variety of media channels including SEO, content, digital PR, programmatic display, social media and paid search.
- Campaign governance. Our real-time data reporting enables us to maintain control over campaigns, and your marketing teams will have complete clarity on performance too.
- Agile and able to respond to client requests. We have a highly trained, passionate experienced delivery team. We also have senior involvement in all accounts.
We are not just incentivised to provide good service. Our reputation is invested in this sector.
Savings.
Beyond media spend, you may be looking for your agency to provide fee cost savings through:
- Low overheads:
- Our main office is outside of London, despite being on the tube network.
- We don’t have a top-heavy board of senior execs.
- We don’t have a sales team.
- We also don’t have a holding company or group of shareholders with high dividend demands.
- Appropriate cost for expertise. Where a day rate is appropriate, (such as with SEO), we provide a premium service at less than 1/3 the cost of many network agencies.
- Unbundling digital media and utilising a specialist. Good pier agency relationships, and proactive account management simplifies managing multiple agencies.
- In-housing. We are here to support your campaigns. Rather than take over your digital, we adapt; working with your internal resources. We also support upskilling where we can.
- Innovation efficiencies that reduce costs. We are committed to innovation in our operations and service delivery, which enables a cost effective, premium service.
Social corporate responsibility
You will likely be insisting on a socially responsible supplier for your digital media. We take our corporate social responsibility very seriously. We already have a green policy and a BAME policy. On writing, (March, 2021), we have started preparing for B Corp Certification which will hold us accountable to a stringent third party set of standards across “social and environmental performance, public transparency and legal accountability”.
We’ll often appear to be an innovative choice – and one that can offer significant benefits. Not all the detail can be given here, but we’ve got it ready, for whenever you might like to have a conversation.
An open invitation for a coffee.
Consider this your open invitation for a coffee or virtual meet, and a consultative chat on the agency landscape.
We have a shared interest to support positive organisations and to help them get the quality of digital media they deserve – and the value they need.
As the Procurement lead, you might not be looking for a new agency but want to chat with an independent voice to better understand our sector, to:
- Understand the mechanics of how an agency operates.
- Talk through the quality in the service you are receiving.
- Cross-check the results you are achieving.
- Know from the agency side what makes a good brief.
If you might benefit from an open conversation, please let us know. It would be without any expectation that you would be looking to tender. We’d still love to help and learn more about what Procurement professionals need from their agency.