This week, MarketPro made one of the biggest announcements of its twenty-year lifespan. We were finally able to unveil a new division: MP Modern.
Put simply, MP Modern provides a way for you to quickly and efficiently insource a custom-built marketing agency right into your business.
But why would you want to bring an agency in-house? And why did we decide to take on the mantle and develop this new service?
The answers are simple, and they all stem from the fundamental reality that marketing is changing–fast.
Supplanting an Outdated Model
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Being a marketing recruitment firm has its perks. One of them is that we get to regularly engage with top marketing talent and businesses across the country, in a wide variety of industries. We get to learn about their opportunities, their goals. Their problems.
Over time, you start to notice certain common trends emerge. Through the last few years, one consistently growing complaint that has spiked recently is frustration over the results marketing agencies provide for their cost.
They’re not producing the value they promised. Communication is too slow. They cost too much. They just aren’t fitting into the larger business strategy.
Why the growing dissatisfaction?
After seeing these complaints come through time and again, we’ve come to the conclusion that the problem lies not with the agencies and the professionals who power them. After all, we regularly engage and recruit extremely talented marketers who come from agency backgrounds, and frequently serve agency clients that by all accounts seem to be full of extremely smart, capable experts.
Instead, the problem seems to come from fundamental weaknesses in the traditional agency model that have been exaggerated in recent years by the quickly-changing state of modern marketing. To be successful in today’s marketing environment, you must be…
- …fast and responsive. But agency channels and processes add extra steps that slow things down. For example, consider the process required to make a simple request like an updated website banner or a new email send. You formally contact your account manager at the agency, who then puts in an order with the managers of the relevant department, who send it to project managers who delegate it to the appropriate production team members who will eventually get to it once they’re done working on projects for clients who put their orders in first. Then everything has to get approved and go back up through those channels before finally ending up back in your hands and ready to use.
- …well integrated and consistent. At a time when it’s critical for marketing strategy to be integrated across channels, you can no longer afford to have your left hand not knowing what the right is doing. But that’s what happens when you have one agency handling your SEO, one managing your PR, and another overseeing your direct response campaigns. They’re almost never communicating and collaborating, which means your messaging and customer experience aren’t consistent and optimized at all touchpoints. Furthermore, they’re removed from your company and don’t fully understand your corporate values, culture, and workplace expectations.
- …efficient with your spend. Marketing leaders are under more pressure than ever to provide demonstrable, meaningful return on investment. And with constantly improving analytics and attribution capabilities accompanied by an ever-growing buffet of alternatives, it’s becoming harder and harder for them to justify agency markups.
Why MP Modern?
We’ve watched the growing dissatisfaction with agencies with interest for some time now. We kept expecting an entrepreneurial agency to fix their model, or a disruptive innovator to break the market.
It didn’t happen. Most agencies continue to operate more or less on the same model they did years ago.
We saw a clear demand in the market that no one was filling, and finally realized that we were uniquely positioned to provide a solution. MarkePro has built its brand off the back of a long legacy of placing high-quality marketing talent within all kinds of businesses. If we could help clients bring in specialized digital marketing staffing or a cutting-edge CMO, then why not empower them to bring in an entire agency?
Our experience in marketing recruitment process outsourcing has shown our expertise in hiring large, carefully selected teams of marketers. Clients get the advantages of a customized agency built specifically for their needs, but get better responsiveness, closer collaboration, and more manageable costs. The agency fully integrates with the client’s culture and workplace procedures for optimal results. And it’s all backed by the unique MarketPro recruitment methodology, which guarantees high quality talent thanks to our own background and expertise in marketing.
So MP Modern was born. And we’re extremely excited to share it with you, our amazing clients, partners and our incredible talent base. Check it out and let us know what you think. We’d love to hear any comments or questions about the model. Just leave a comment, ping us on social, or contact us any time!