Ways to Maximize the Relationship with Your Building Materials Marketing Firm

Successfully marketing brands in the building and construction industry is hard work for building materials companies. Partnering with a marketing firm is often a critical component for getting there. It is hard enough finding the right marketing firm for your needs, as the building industry can present unique challenges. And when you do find the right agency partner, you want to make the most of it.

At BLD Marketing, we focus exclusively on the building and construction industry. We enjoy strong and healthy relationships with our clients, and much of it is due to open communication, organization, responsiveness, and the desire to continue to find ways to keep the relationship healthy and productive. Here are a few ways we, together with our clients, make it work:

1. Establish Clarity with Roles, Strategic Direction, and Assignments
• Set clear objectives, budget expectations, and timing from the start.
• Agree upon clear roles and responsibilities for each party.
• Embrace the agency’s process and tools to guide the strategic and implementation journey.
• Commit to creating and adhering to approved creative briefs, SOWs, and estimates.
• Understand and accept the impact that changes to scopes of work, strategic direction, and projects can have on cost and timing.
• Set clear priorities based on budgets and timing.
2. Regular Communication Managed by Identified Champions
• Establish a “champion” to lead the effort on each side.
• For the agency, it is the assigned account manager. While the client has access to discipline leaders and agency leadership, the communication must funnel through the account manager.
• A similar “champion” is identified on the client side as the final decision maker and main point of contact.
3. Structured Meeting Rigor
• Establish a recurring weekly status meeting, monthly performance reporting review, budget check-ins, and periodic senior management reviews.
• Come to each meeting with a stated agenda.
• Continually deliver tasks on assigned deadlines (both agency and client), and communicate any divergence or barriers in advance.
• A structured commitment to meeting rigor builds accountability on both sides.
4. Measure Twice, Cut Once
• The agency provides deliverables that are well thought out and completed to the fullest extent for proper review and feedback.
• The client provides holistic changes to the fullest extent in each round of revisions.
• Together, client and agency work together, adhering to the approved parameters to make the delivery of each project as efficient as possible, all in an effort to meet deadlines and budget scopes.
5. Commitment to Performance Reporting
• Set a formal performance reporting rigor. Monthly formal reporting combined with weekly informal reporting works well.
• Work together to set proper objectives and KPIs to measure.
• Working together to develop the report format and data priorities ensures a consistent, meaningful structure.
• Review and discuss agency analysis and recommendations for optimization and improvement.
• Celebrate wins and collaborate to find solutions when activity is under-performing.
6. Access to Stakeholders and Decision Makers
• Give the agency access to senior decision makers and others to gain deeper perspective about the brand’s needs and business strategy related to the building and construction industry.
• Create a forum to share the work and performance reporting with key decision makers.
7. Access to Agency Leadership
• While working with your agency team regularly, it is important to have access to agency leaders and specialists, when needed. BLD Marketing has clients in several segments of the building and construction industry, and our broad understanding of the market can provide unique marketing perspective for the industry.
• The best scenario is when the senior leaders and specialists have a role on the business, stay informed, and can contribute when the situation calls for it.
8. Maintain a Transparent, Healthy Relationship
• Bring clear, honest communication from both sides to address issues before they fester into larger concerns.
• Celebrate wins and the partnership that achieved it.
• Actively and fully participate in annual agency/client satisfaction surveys. They are important.
• Consider a two-way agency/client scorecard, whereby the client evaluates the agency, and the agency evaluates the client.
• Make the investment to meet face to face occasionally to build the relationship.
9. Study the Macro Data
• Regularly review industry data with your agency partner.
• The building and construction industry is rich with data – US census information on housing, industry forecasts, emerging trends, and published studies on specific segments of the industry. Both client and agency should own a role in collecting and reporting on it.
• Make the time to collect and share data to uncover emerging trends and understand the potential implications.
• Formalizing data reporting efforts like this not only prepares both client and agency, but it can lead to incredible ideas.
10. Plan for What’s Next While Executing on What’s Now
• Have regular discussions about strategy and ideas for the future, while building and executing the current scope of work.
• Embrace a test-and-learn mentality to discover, test, learn, and adopt in an age where technology advancement occurs rapidly.
• By maintaining an eye toward the future, new ideas can more quickly be activated to maintain a competitive advantage within the building and construction segment.

If you share these values for a successful client-agency relationship, we should talk.