2. What challenges do online marketing agencies face?

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Here you have a summary of the key points discussed in the third debate. I can tell you in advance that the critical and decisive nature of the professionals who are part of the agencies is surprising. Through the challenges we got to know better the real problems they encounter in their daily work and what solutions they propose to overcome the difficulties.



Communication between departments
Improving internal communication between the different departments of an agency was one of the first challenges that Elena Rodriguez from Internet Advantage put forward. Based on her own experience in large agencies, she told us that it is often difficult to unify the strategy between departments and that what is very important for some is not so important for others. Uniting and cooperating between departments that manage large areas within the same agency is quite a challenge .

The truth is that improving internal communication is applicable to any sector or company. It is important to avoid each work group isolating itself in its own little world and to encourage collaboration between everyone whenever possible. Breaking down the barriers between departments within an agency is essential to adding business value to each project.

More and more companies are considering innovative work models that allow independent professionals, entrepreneurs and SMEs from different sectors to share the same physical or virtual workspace. These are known as coworking or ecoworking models if they include environmental and energy improvement actions. It has been proven that the most productive work teams are those that exchange ideas and communicate directly. Our sector is potentially ideal for this type of mechanism, don't you think?



Communication between Agency-Client
A key challenge that Jorge Casasempere brought up for debate in his first turn to loadrunner protocol email address speak was to improve direct communication with the client, since, in his opinion, it is sometimes not done correctly. Jorge encouraged us all to reflect on how we speak and communicate with the client and to practice more active listening in order to understand each other better.

Language and technical terms play an important role in this sector. RT's, TT, KPIs, ROI, CRO, SEO, ADS… are acronyms and words that are familiar to us but not necessarily to the rest of us. It is essential to be aware of this and put it into practice as well as in reports and informative documents for the client.

Amel Fernández, director and founder of SocialMedier, supported Jorge's reflection and insisted above all on the information collected in the reports. In his opinion, the current reports are incomplete due to a lack of sincerity. They do not include data on the percentage of sales or results. Why does the return on investment (ROI) not appear in the reports? Amel wondered. Another mistake, in his opinion, makes communication and transparency difficult. The answer that immediately came up was that sometimes showing the ROI is telling the client that they are not selling and this can logically provoke a negative response. Which leads us to a new challenge: knowing how to clearly explain which channels are used to sell and which channels are used to communicate.



Sales channels vs. communication channels
As a general definition, we can say that online marketing groups together those actions that a company can carry out on the Internet to increase its sales and improve visibility and brand recognition. But which actions serve to sell and which do not? And what purpose do those that do not serve to sell have?

Ismael from Internet República is of the opinion that social channels such as Facebook or Twitter will hardly allow us to achieve a sales volume similar to that which we could achieve through sponsored ads ( SEM ), organic positioning ( SEO ) or even with Email-Marketing . There is no exact formula for selling on social media. Everything will depend on how you use it, taking into account the characteristics of the product or service, the type of client and the objectives.

Ismael told us about a brutal reality that he sometimes encounters: “It seems that if we don’t tell the client that they are going to sell with social media, we don’t get that project. That’s why we sometimes lose many clients. Expectations are so high that disappointment comes later.”

Let me put you in the situation of one of the examples that came up in the debate. Imagine that you are a blood bank, would you use Facebook to sell? Do you think it is the medium to do so? Well no, in fact the best thing in this case would be to use your Facebook page to offer information, retain clients, communicate directly with your community and monitor your reputation. To sell lots of blood you could use email marketing techniques, work on content to achieve positioning in search engines and promote your product to increase visits and conversions on your website.

In short, implementing a strategy and planning each action with a clear objective will save you time, money and more than one disappointment. There is a lot of confusion in this regard and it would be a mistake not to provide adequate information about the available alternatives.



Unification of analytics: is it possible?
For those of us who work in this world, web analytics is an essential element in the organization and decision-making of a project. Thanks to analytics, it is possible to measure the impact and behavior of users on the website . It is also possible to extract data that allows us to know which actions have worked and which have not, as well as to know which practices are decisive in meeting the brand's objectives. Implementing good analytics and periodically generating reports that summarize the status of the project can, to a certain extent, guarantee success with your client. Now, is this theory put into practice? Is it easy for agencies to generate this type of document for their clients? Do reports from different agencies have anything in common?

Considering that there are multiple measurement tools, as well as plugins and specific KPIs on each social network, finding the key to correctly measure what we want is a great challenge. Furthermore, as discussed in the debate, each agency does it in its own way and there are no agreements to share and discuss this, mainly because these types of documents are private and contain confidential information.

Amel Fernández from SocialMedier argued for the need to work together to create an agreement on the unification of analytics to shed light on the most successful metrics and strategies in agencies. In this way, we would avoid incomplete reports or bad practices by helping each other.

Standardizing parameters, knowing how often reports should be created, knowing exactly what tools others use and why they have worked for them, are, for example, some of the main points that should be shared in this treaty.

«Why not open the treasure chest? Let's be different because of how we do things, not because of the approach to results.» Amel Fernández