If you’re working with a new client or planning for an existing client and you’re looking to accelerate their growth and your relationship with them, you’re in the right place. An April Six Pulse Survey found that 49% of marketers' main challenge when working with agencies is a lack of understanding of their market, audience, and business.
This article guides you through how to succeed in an environment with large clients with huge ambitions and complex challenges from a Media Solutions perspective.
Asking the right questions to win client engagement
To stand out and respond meaningfully to client challenges, we must take a step back and consider how we can create solutions to meet their needs. Media Solutions has built over 70 bespoke tools to do just this, from automated price comparison dashboards to AI-powered ad creation scripts.
Our client case study below is a great example of this: ingesting news and trend data, extracting themes and sentiment with ChatGPT and then creating draft search ad copy based on relevant global topics.
Here are the top themes of these tools to guide you in asking the right questions and spark your imagination in how we can solve your clients’ digital media challenges:
Leveraging competitor insights for effective media solutions
Do you track competitor media activity? Knowing competing brands’ channel allocation and budget levels can help inform your strategy and investment; the Media Solutions team can enable custom monitoring for any scenario.
What’s the overlap in activity, and how aggressive are competitors? Maybe there are price points we can benchmark across competitor sites to get a view into their pricing strategy and use this to inform campaigns.
Maximising data usage to structure media planning
Are there relevant third-party data sets? Depending on your client's sector, third-party data sets can offer invaluable insight into media action. These range from FX rates to weather, film screenings, and even internet service outages. Collating relevant data and automating this provides another layer of data to transform your campaigns.
Are your data sources integrated? Connecting different data sets (e.g., campaign performance, pricing data) often reveals performance insights and growth opportunities.
Do you have a complete view of performance for all types of campaigns? Platform reports often have gaps or opaque areas (e.g., Google PMax), which means custom views may be needed for full visibility.
Fully deploying creative assets
Are all your ad creatives correctly formatted for every placement? Managing many variations can be challenging at scale, and correct formatting is essential for performance and user experience.
Are you fully using your creative library across all formats and markets? To maximise impact, ensure assets are adapted (resized, localised, and translated) for all placements.
Building with consumer insights
By this point, you may know your client, but do they know their customers? How are customers talking about your client or their products on social channels? Turning this into an insightful sentiment dashboard could answer this question and provide a future-facing answer to an unfiltered view of customer feedback.
Do you analyse audience reactions to your ads? Tracking metrics like comment sentiment, beyond clicks and conversions, provides insight into brand perception and long-term impact.
What are their customers searching for? Looking at granular indexed views across different locations can tailor your marketing strategy to be ahead of the next trend. Your client has done a lot of work to understand their client lifetime value, and you need to optimise this in platform. Media solutions can integrate this data.
Working as efficiently as possible
Can your processes be streamlined or automated? Multi-step manual workflows with several handovers often cause delays and errors. This is where automation can improve both speed and consistency.
Can you proactively identify campaign issues at scale? Catching problems early allows for quicker adjustments and tends to improve your relationship with the client. Regular data pulls, budget management, creative uploads or changes, media reporting and auditing, and alerts are all common areas absorbing team time. Creating bespoke tools where media-wide automation doesn’t fit is an option.
Final thoughts for client retention strategies
Putting yourself in your client’s shoes is key to understanding their business challenges and needs. The questions above are all areas that we encounter and solve for clients with Media Solutions.
The Media Solutions team can support you by asking the right questions to build something bespoke for your client to solve their challenge.
Please reach out with any questions: dentsu_digital_innovation@dentsu.com.
Or if you’d like to hear about why Performance Media Needs a Unified Approach, click here.
