Agency alignment

Let's talk about how to change your business today to optimally align your agency with all the great things Kentico is working on.

Roel Kuik, Kentico MVP from Aviva Solutions, opens his post Grow your agency with Xperience by Kentico with a challenging statement - "change your business" and "align your agency [with Kentico]". Is Xperience by Kentico really that different of a product that it justifies an agency or marketing team to re-think their process or strategy?

it's no longer just about the technology itself, it's about the solution you provide for your clients. How it adds value to their processes. It's not about you as an agency making a project as technologically intricate as possible. And that might require a shift in mindset for some agencies.

This is the key foundation point in my eyes. Why? I worked for 10 years for a Kentico partner agency and when I started there, we were almost 100% focused on building websites as a technical solution to a business problem. Often, this was related to digitizing an inefficient process or replacing old and unsupported software. We also built websites as a digital doormat for brands but didn't go far beyond that - the website solved the "problem" by itself, right? Well, sure, if the problem was "we need a website".

Those were simpler times and years later, when clients would tell us "we need a website", the president of my agency would ask them, "why?". A website, like any other investment an organization makes, should serve some well defined and measurable goals. I think Roel is warning against focusing too much on building the website and missing the why, because that means you might be trying to solve the technical problem and not the goals of the marketing team.

CMS vs DXP

most agencies were perfectly capable to technically build the platform. But as soon as the development was done, they handed over the keys to their client and ran towards the nearest exit as fast as possible. Setting up Email? Activating marketing automation? Leveraging personalization? Don’t call us, we will call you.

A DXP solution is never free, whether that's licensing or implementation cost, which means the cost needs to be justified by the benefit it brings, but an effective DXP solution is a force multiplier for the marketing team that uses it and pays off that investment with commercial growth for an organization.

After a year of trying or not having touched on digital marketing at all, your client realizes that they are paying for a heavily overpriced cms.

So, now we understand that the difference between a CMS and a DXP isn't the features they provide but what they enable for a marketing team. You can deliver a wonderful DXP solution but if a marketing team is only using it as a CMS then they will have a difficult time justifying the cost. It's not doing enough to help realize the sales pipeline and commercial results expected from that marketing team by the rest of their organization.

Help your clients grow

how can you as an agency take this as an opportunity to grow and drive your clients digital maturity to greater heights? It may have something to do with your own digital maturity.

And here we bring it back home - you might need to change your business and re-align with Xperience by Kentico's product vision. If you don't know how to enable a marketing team beyond content management, you are doing them a disservice and holding them back from achieving their commercial goals.

Basic knowledge is that it's easier to generate revenue through your existing clients than it is to find new clients. If done correctly, you are not waiting for your clients requests for change, but you're generating your own demand. And they will pay you, because you are continuously adding value to their business.

If the marketing team you are supporting is able to leverage the full suite of capabilities in Xperience by Kentico, they will get more out of their content investments, have the metrics to prove they reached their goals, and you will have a much easier time turning that into a convincing story about the value you bring to the table.

Roel goes deep into the details about how an agency (or implementation team) can change their perspective, tactics, and use of digital marketing technology (Martech), so I recommend reading the post yourself. But, I did want to reflect on one last thought of his.

There’s no point in starting to talk about personalization with your client as a short term goal if they now even struggle to send out a simple newsletter twice a year. Instead, get a grip on where they stand now and start working towards a digital maturity roadmap that will allow for steady digital growth based on their increasing maturity.

This is where the agency digital maturity comes in - even though delivering only a CMS solution isn't enough, you can't just throw an "everything turned on DXP solution" at every marketing team. Instead you need to know which features support their goals and meet them where they are, growing and evolving the solution over time as the team sees success and has an appetite for new tactics.

Wrap up

You can read the full post over on Aviva's website and I highly recommend doing that, whether you hold a technical, strategic, or project management role - there are a lot more great insights that resonated with me and I think you'll like them too.

I've had many conversations with people in the Kentico community over the past year, trying to communicate my thoughts about where the real value is with Xperience by Kentico as a product, how teams can be successful with it, and how to "think differently" (a topic from the Partner Day 2024 event) about solutions for clients built with Xperience. I like to think that Roel's post speaks to some of the same ideas, challenges, and opportunities, but from the agency's perspective. That perspective is something I really appreciate and value, so I'm happy to listen if you want to share your thoughts in the comments for this post.