Choosing the right B2B agency partner is a crucial decision that can greatly impact your company's brand and GTM impact. When you're working with the right partner, a new energy forms in your marketing practice that can help you increase internal trust, support, and investment – which will in turn motivate your team, your company, and create momentum. Here are some important things to consider in choosing a partner:
1. Assess Industry Experience, Expertise, and Capability
An agency's knowledge of your industry significantly influences its grasp of your distinct challenges, trends, and opportunities—essential for developing a successful strategic GTM platform and steering clear of unnecessary repetition, lengthy revisions, and misaligned efforts.
Does the agency have a strong record of Enterprise and/or mid-market experience? What is their GTM service footprint – are they more regional, national or international? What are the beliefs that drive how they work and think? How strong are they in brand strategy? How strong are they in integrated GTM motions? How collaborative will they be with your team? What kind of reporting will they provide? What is their system for optimization? Who will be involved in your account? Look at an agency’s clients, and ask good questions about the agency’s track record and work.
Titan ONE has deep experience across various sectors including:
- Telecom: Expertise in navigating the complexities of telecommunications marketing.
- Data & Cloud: Proficiency in promoting data management and cloud solutions.
- Software & Technology: Experience in elevating software and tech brands.
- Cybersecurity: Knowledge in the specialized field of cybersecurity marketing.
- Logistics: Understanding of the logistics industry’s marketing needs.
- Robotics: Insight into the robotics sector’s unique market dynamics.
- Finance: Acumen in financial services marketing.
- Manufacturing: Experience in the manufacturing industry’s marketing strategies.
2. Evaluate Full-Funnel Support
Ideally, your agency should seamlessly integrate brand strategy with tactical campaigns to drive specific goals. This alignment ensures consistent messaging and effective audience engagement throughout the customer journey.
If the agency is focused on particular tactics, they may not be thinking strategically enough about how it all ties together. Brand agencies will advocate investments in strategy, creative, messaging and campaigns. They are typically not ideal partners for GTM impact, growth marketing, ABM, and RevOps. Campaign agencies will advocate investment in campaign-level paid media, inbound and outbound content and automation, and tactical deployment. They are typically not great partners for integrated wider brand strategy.
Our perspective is that both are critical, and we develop these synchronously to unlock more value as part of a wider integrated framework.
3. Review Track Record, Longevity and Culture
An agency’s history reflects its reliability and success. If an agency has been around for a long time, it stands to reason that they are good partners and deliver significant value to their clients. With nearly 30 years in business, Titan ONE has a proven track record of delivering impactful B2B marketing solutions.
Try to ascertain an agency’s true culture underneath its value prop, as this will significantly impact your team’s working relationship, as well as your own culture of collaboration.
After all, we need to be creating energy and enthusiasm in our collective efforts to feel inspired and generate momentum. That feeling within teams is invaluable.
4. Prioritize Trust and Service Delivery Model
Choose an agency that values long-term relationships and deeper partnership over upselling.
At Titan ONE, we 'do agency' a little differently. We are not pressured or incentivized to chase revenue. We are looking for strategic, values-aligned collaborations with our clients that lead to the creation of meaningful impact. When those elements aren't in place, we say no to revenue. A direct side effect of that has been that we've grown significantly – but in a way that feels healthy and inspiring for us and our clients. That intent is at the heart of our business.
5. Emphasize Collaboration and Team Structure
Ensure the agency’s approach complements your team’s development. Be cautious of agencies that delegate your account to less experienced staff. At Titan ONE, our seasoned professionals are actively involved in every project, ensuring strategic alignment and effective execution. We’re not here to chase top line revenue goals for ourselves. We’re here to do great work with our clients that we can all be proud of.
We believe that everyone client-side has valuable perspective and experience that can benefit both brand and GTM, and open collaboration is how we identify and unlock what we call 'pockets of passion' client-side to feed into our work.
6. Demand Transparency and Proactive Communication
A reliable agency provides regular updates without prompting. We prioritize clear communication, keeping you informed about progress and performance metrics, so you can confidently demonstrate value internally. Never settle for anything less.
Your team shouldn't be having to dig through email threads and send follow ups to multiple people agency side. We use shared PM boards the provide clear information on every initiative, task, owner, timeline and status. This reduces friction and time-to-value.
7. Seek Tailored Strategies Over One-Size-Fits-All Solutions
Be wary of agencies offering generic systems, or magic tools. Your brand’s uniqueness should shine through in your go-to-market (GTM) efforts. Titan ONE crafts customized strategies that reflect your brand’s distinct value proposition, people, and processes. We bring in the right tools to deliver on the promise, but dimensional strategy rules the day.
Things like marketing automation, ABM platforms, programmatic platforms, AI-driven intent functions, can all be valuable assets when leveraged correctly. But at the end of the day they are just tools. It's how you bring them together, what you feed into them, how you use and adopt them, who supports you in managing them, and how you measure impact that matters.
8. Ensure Expertise in Both Brand Strategy and GTM Execution
An ideal agency partner excels in both areas, aligning them to unlock value (traditionally, agencies are rooted more on one side or the other). We integrate comprehensive brand strategies with effective GTM campaigns, ensuring cohesive and impactful market presence. This ties into a unified, transparent reporting framework that we share, review, and leverage for optimization as part of our support. Consider the agency’s ability to align with your Sales team in integrated efforts.
9. Recognize the Importance of Originality
In an era of content overload, personalized, segmented - and original - communication is crucial. We focus on creating nuanced, empathetic, relevant and sometimes even unexpected content that resonates with your target audience, cutting through the noise and combating audience fatigue.
Our Creative Labs team thinks outside the box to generate memorable work that forges new pathways. It's a crucial part of generating energy and momentum for your brand.
10. Understand the Value of a Supportive Agency Partnership
We all know – CMOs and internal marketing teams too often face internal challenges in getting the support and investment that's needed. A great B2B agency amplifies your efforts, helping you create more impact with fewer resources. At Titan ONE, we stand by your side, providing the strategic insight and executional support needed to elevate your marketing initiatives. When you do this well, you always feel like you’re standing on solid ground.
So – there’s a lot to think about!
Selecting the right B2B marketing agency involves careful consideration of their industry experience, strategic alignment, collaborative approach, and commitment to personalized, impactful, strategic marketing that considers both brand and campaign objectives. By focusing on these factors, you can forge a partnership that helps you push forward in new ways. And when this is done well - you’ll find that your internal teams will be motivated, energized, and proud of how they are creating impact.
That’s momentum.
Remember – it’s not just about the Agency. It’s also about your people. Aligning them for successful partnership is a key consideration. Ask yourself: How ready are your teams to work constructively together with the agency to advance key agendas? Do you have good cross-team functionality? Are your teams strategically aligned? Are they good partners to one another? Do you have a solid process for review and approvals? Good support from leadership?
None of this needs to be (or ever will be) perfect, but will influence your ability to efficiently advance and deliver high-value GTM motions. A good agency partner will work with you to bridge gaps and move things forward, but they won’t be able to stickhandle those internal gaps entirely on their own. But – if you’ve got a great partner, you’ll be able to handle them together.
Looking for a B2B Agency Partner? Let's connect for a chat.
