Top CX challenges of the digital agency: What AI fixes in marketing

Nicolas Algoedt

May 16, 2018

Nicolas Algoedt

May 16, 2018

Table of Contents
  1. Deep dive into how AI-backed marketing technologies can help digital agencies overcome CX challenges

  2. Maintaining client loyalty is a balancing act

  3. Increasing ad spend efficiency to minimize marketing waste

  4. The rising number of point solutions and their blurring value propositions

  5. The light at the end of the tunnel

Deep dive into how AI-backed marketing technologies can help digital agencies overcome CX challenges

In today’s fast-changing marketing world, digital agencies need to be more data-driven than ever. Clients are obsessed with results, they’re constantly craving for higher ROI and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). That’s where technology comes into place, helping agencies deliver real-time and accurate results. In this post, we’ll deep dive into the CX challenges faced by agencies today and how AI-powered technologies can help them face these challenges once and for all.

Maintaining client loyalty is a balancing act

To be able to build strong and long-lasting relationships with their clients, agencies often invest a huge amount of time and effort (and budget), harnessing the best practices and solutions not to lose their hard-earned partners. On this slippery ground, maintaining client loyalty is a balancing act. In the meantime, keeping quality consistent while managing increasing workload has also become a challenge. That’s why partnering with the right technology provider, and acquiring top-notch digital tools, can make all the difference for agencies looking to target and excel in different industries.

In order to retain clients, agencies can take actions such as adding a CRO to their services offering to create new revenue sources that will, in turn, increase conversion rates for their clients as well. Once they can get their clients’ revenue to an increase, their services become indispensable for them, then it’s a domino effect: the more value the agency creates, the more likely they will continue to gain deep follow-up engagements with current and prospective clients.

Increasing ad spend efficiency to minimize marketing waste

With customers becoming more fluent in multiple online channels, many companies struggle to keep up with their advertising strategies. Eager to reach out to customers on all touchpoints, brands end up blind-targeting visitors, creating a massive bubble of marketing waste. This is a challenge agencies need to face as they also must manage online ads for their clients.

This means that the rise of programmatic advertising is changing the way agencies manage digital marketing budgets, especially for Adwords, Facebook and display ads. To be able to track customer behavior in real-time, and to optimize their ad spend avoiding marketing waste, agencies need more robust technologies that rely on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Mining real-time data is crucial but with the help of AI-backed technologies, agencies can now work with predictive segments.

Features such as Likelihood to Convert, for example, which is under Insider’s predictive umbrella, allow marketers to target customers who are more likely to make a purchase in the next 7 days. With this feature, marketers can create hyper-personalized messages to target customers through ad channels such as Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, Emails Service Providers, and others, to increase their ROI.

The rising number of point solutions and their blurring value propositions

Technology isn’t the only challenge agencies need to overcome to increase the know-how around industry specific demands. Finding related talent for their organization is of crucial importance for agencies if they do not wish to work with third-party tools. But such challenges can be beaten by gaining awareness of industry-specific know-how and best practices harnessing the right digital tools and strategies from the right partners.

Another big obstacle faced by agencies is the inability to differentiate business offerings due to too many similar third-party tools and lack of diversity in value propositions. This affects how agencies invest in new marketing technologies. With the market overflowing with multiple point solutions technologies, agencies struggle to manage fragmented technology and the data conundrum they generate. So it becomes even harder to standardize customer data, therefore any attempt to optimize ad spend efficiency and marketing strategies becomes infeasible. Instead of working with a number of fragmented solution providers, simultaneously, the best approach is to manage everything from a single platform to decrease workload and optimize time and budgets.

The light at the end of the tunnel

In today’s digital economy, agencies need to take a more sturdy approach to technology to optimize ad spend efficiency, target the right customers at the right time, and optimize marketing strategies. They need to become more data-driven in order to build long-term relationships with their clients, tailoring their business approach to customers, creating unique customer experiences across multiple digital channels. Investing in robust AI-backed marketing technologies, will improve ROI, ROAS and recurring revenue for their clients and also open new revenue sources for agencies themselves.

In sum, agencies need to embrace and understand the importance of conversion rate optimization and start maximizing it before it’s too late.

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Nicolas is VP of Marketing EMEA at Insider. Passionate about new technologies and e-commerce, Nicolas has held various position at leading e-commerce and tech companies including Groupon, Microsoft and Bwin.