Whether you’re an agency, a media company, or an influencer, being fully transparent by providing full disclosure to your advertising partners, is the right and ethical thing to do. It earns you respect and improves the value of your relationships.
Transparency is more than just making a commitment to your clients that you will engage in open and honest conversations, it should be integrated in your business from the way you communicate with your clients, how your contracts are written, to the core values your organization executes.
Many advertisers won’t work with agencies, or marketing “partners” who are not completely transparent about their practices.
Agencies that provide greater visibility reinforce the importance of transparency while holding advertisers and publishers to a higher standard.
With so many Agencies’, publishers and advertisers in the mix, and varying degrees of transparency, it can be hard to distinguish where to invest your resources to reap the most from your efforts. For these reasons, there need to be more consistent approaches to transparency.
Four ways to be transparent:
Be transparent in your agreements.
To build long-term high-value relationships with your clients based on trust and integrity, it’s essential to lay out expectations, terms, and conditions in your agreements with them from the start. Address and define the role of your agency’s direct and indirect partners.
Build relationships rather than just conduct transactions.
Take time to ask questions, listen, and get to know them personally and professionally. When you are invested, you naturally adopt a habit of full disclosure. In turn, both partners benefit.
Align incentives so clients pay for performance.
If companies can’t see where the money went or how it contributed to marketing success, it generates suspicion toward their partner agencies. Pay-for-performance marketing depends on creating visibility into marketers’ actions. Rather than invest upfront, a company compensates the agency based on measurable campaign accomplishments or benchmarks. This approach incentivizes marketers to refine their skills and knowledge of the marketplace, as it requires excellence.
Focus on long-term performance partnerships
Long term performance partnerships are transparent, valuable relationships that companies seek from Agency marketing partners. They represent what companies should strive for in all of their marketing programs, as the overarching principle is transparency. An effective system handles all the marketing data and allows both partners to see what the other is doing. When they have access to this information and trust in you, the relationship leads to smarter, more strategic campaigns.
