Benchmarking for Marketing and Advertising

Increasing Agency Value through Budget Optimization and Relationship Management

Benchmarking Services for Marketing and Advertising Spend

Corcentric’s marketing and advertising benchmarking services ensures you’re getting the most from your agency, establishing best-in-class agreements at competitive rates, and properly allocating your budget.

Whether you are evaluating how your supply base ranks in the competitive landscape, looking for leverage before entering negotiations, or establishing best-in-class agreements with your vendor, benchmarking is a valuable exercise for any part of your organization.

When it comes to marketing and advertising, it is not uncommon for marketing departments to work with the same agency for long periods of time because of the close relationships they form. Over time, contracts are often simply renewed without any comparison to market standards, causing many companies to miss opportunities for more competitive contractual agreements and rates.

Benchmarking exercises specific to the marketing and advertising categories encompass more than reviewing standard terms and conditions or evaluating the competitiveness of hourly rates – there is the added element of reviewing the category-specific components of the agency relationship, including the following:

Full time equivalent (FTE) staffing plans
Allocation of FTE hours
Campaign budget optimization
Performance metrics, ROI, and SLA, including which activities are most and least effective, and how sales are impacted
Competitiveness with industry trends.

With these elements in mind, Corcentric develops a comprehensive review of your entire agency relationship. With decades of benchmark data readily available from internal databases, partners, subscription services, white-labeled and licensed eSourcing tools, and market research, our marketing sourcing experts are equipped to provide an in-depth benchmark of your current marketing category.

Our marketing benchmarking process includes the following steps:

Reviewing supplier contracts, SOWs, and rate cards to understand the current state of the relationship
Comparing contract terms and conditions against market trends and industry best practices
Analyzing FTE hourly rates compared to those seen in the market for similar services and equivalent positions
Reviewing FTE hours from SOWs for services performed in comparison to industry standards
Evaluating agency performance through metrics, SLAs, and ROI
Developing recommendations for improvements in contract language, hourly rates, FTE allocation, invoicing procedures, and other value-added services
Providing detailed report outlining current state, rate card comparison, and recommendations

Corcentric has been providing clients with meaningful market intelligence through benchmark reports for decades. Our sourcing experts have the resources necessary to provide you with the relevant information to fit your needs. Combined with our category expertise in the marketing space across a variety of industries, our marketing sourcing experts are able to develop valuable and actionable reports for your marketing category needs. Our custom benchmark reports will provide you with insight into your standing within the competitive marketplace, recommendations for areas of improvement, and leverage for negotiating a best-in-class, competitive agreement with your agency.

Corcentric understands the necessary components of benchmarking marketing services and can help your organization achieve a competitive advantage through these services. We can ensure that you have a best-in-class agreement with your agency, that your rates are competitive compared to the current market, and that your agency is allocating and optimizing your budget properly.

Contact our Benchmarking experts today to learn how marketing and advertising benchmarking can impact your marketing budget.

Innovative Marketing Solutions

Marketing Spend Category Management

Marketing Agency Audit

Monitoring your agency relationship for contact compliance and conducting detailed audits can be a major challenge, especially when managing several agency relationships. However, assessing agency compliance is crucial to not only making sure these agencies aren’t duplicating their efforts, but also to ensure they’re meeting service and budget requirements. At Corcentric, we have an entire team dedicated to performing marketing and advertising agency audits. Leveraging our internal databases, market intelligence, and research, we’ll provide contract reviews, compliance testing, fee reconciliation, full media audit, risk assessments, and agency relationship management to make sure you’re getting the most value from your agency relationships.

Agency Audit Services

Media Buying and Planning
In today’s media-focused environment, there are a plethora of options when it comes to ad space and marketing channels. Considering costs and ROI, establishing the ideal media placement strategy can be demanding. It requires a team of devoted researchers, negotiators, and strategists to continuously assess buying opportunities and monitor the market for changes. In partnership with your marketing team, Corcentric’s our marketing sourcing experts can help establish a media strategy that meets are all of your media buying and planning needs including: Media Plan Development, Market Research, Media Channel Monitoring and Analytics, Media Buying and Placement, and Traffic Advertising.

Media Agency Services

Print and Promotional

Critical to any business strategy, print services are essential to driving sales through marketing materials and campaign aids. Our highly collaborative strategic sourcing process creates relationships between internal marketing teams and print service agencies to deliver best-fit solutions. Our team can assist in various aspects of print services including fulfillment, mailing, storage, rush services, and acquiring postal discounts.

Print Sourcing Services