Assessing Corporate Clients’ Expectations on Relationship Building with a Digital Marketing Agency – A Qualitative Approach

In an era of massive expansion of digital communication, companies around the world and across industries face the challenge of engaging in fruitful and impactful online conversations with their customers. Within this context, a new need has emerged from companies eager to be present in online conversations that lack the inhouse willingness and power to dedicate resources to this around the clock activity. Such companies choose to establish partnerships with external digital marketing agency as a safer way to keep on reinventing themselves in the digital noise using the support of professionals in this area. This choice was the source of a new industry’s birth: the digital marketing professionals and their agencies, a constantly growing and rapidly expanding market. Since corporate clients have now multiple alternatives to choose from when selecting their digital marketing agency, a question has emerged as to what the expectations of corporate clients really are when referring to their relationship with their digital marketing agency. In order to discover the corporate clients’ perspective, a qualitative research was developed aimed at unraveling the depth of corporate clients’ expectations based on who they are and also on their previous experiences. Data was collected through in-depth interviews, a choice determined by the need of privacy when approaching sensitive topics like motifs, past experiences and future plans. The research results showed that among the most common expectations of corporate clients include attention to the clients’ specific needs, experienced staff of the digital marketing agency dedicated for their account, proactive approach and initiative of their digital team. In addition, when choosing their digital partners, corporate clients put great emphasis first on their fellow industry colleagues’ recommendations and second on the awards of their potential future partners. As a trend, corporate clients tend to have more than only one digital partner as a way to secure their partners’ eagerness to be competitive in the long run. Future research directions might approach the same subject from the other side, from the digital marketing agencies’ sides as means to compare and contrast perspectives and expand communication opportunities from both ways.