Martech Agency – 2
In a recent series on the coming martech era, I wrote about the progency:
The next generation of agencies will be built atop proprietary digital experience platforms and will focus on customer retention, growth and reactivation. This new agency is what I call “progency” – product-led agency. Like the adtech agencies, it will charge based on performance. This will ensure measurement and accountability – two key tenets for outsourcing core activities.
The customer journey involves multiple stages: new customer acquisition (lead generation, onboarding), retention and cross-sell to ensure growth, reactivation of dormant customers, and driving referrals. The progency is ideal for focusing first on reactivation followed by referrals, and then on using first-party data to optimise new customer acquisition.
I also described the various elements that needed to come together to construct a progency: proprietary platform, multiple skills and success-based pricing. I identified the first use cases that a progency could address: reactivation, referrals and (targeted) new acquisition. I also gave the example of Red Ventures which had built a very successful model for new customer acquisition.
I ended by saying: “The coming martech era needs a new type of agency to make the best use of the Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and complement the marketer’s focus on the daily drive towards more transactions. By working at the edges for reactivation of the “lossy tail” (Test customers) and focusing on referrals and smarter new acquisition, the progency can be a very powerful partner to the marketing department in the quest for exponential forever profitable growth.”
There are many questions still left to address – and for these, we will need to switch tracks to look at the view of the progency from the lens of the creators: Who will build the progencies? How will a progency persuade a brand to use it? How would the use cases work – for example, how would a progency drive reactivation better than the brand’s own marketing team? What would be the business model? How would the progency interface with the internal marketing teams?
