The Agency Advantage: 5 Benefits of an Agency Treating Your Site as Their Own

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Tangent
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Every site needs an owner, but often an agency can fulfil that role even better than an internal hire. Here’s why the agency advantage is real…

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In an ideal world, every business would have someone whose ultimate responsibility is to hold the long-term vision for your site and drive progress towards it.

Their role would be to ensure your site always maximised its value to customers and produced results for the business. Maybe there’d be a technical owner, too, signing off on decisions.

Sounds nice, right?

In reality, this isn’t an easy role to fill.

Every website needs a visionary owner that thinks and acts in a long-term way. But this can be difficult for internal employees who are held to quarterly targets and annual budgets.

This is why, at Tangent, our strategic and technically minded project managers (PMs) often step into ‘own’ our client’s sites. Of course, our clients still hold the budgets and make the decisions. We just help them plan, prepare business cases and execute with that bigger picture in mind.

Here are five key reasons why, in our experience, this arrangement works so well:

The Agency Advantage

1. Specialist Technical Expertise

From working closely with clients from SMEs to enterprises, I’ve seen a repeated pattern. Businesses make a new hire in their tech team. They set an exciting vision for developing the site but then get waylaid by other ‘urgent’ priorities.

As digital transformation spans every department, there are always going to be multiple projects on the go. Dynamic people with digital expertise will always be in high demand to help.

Unfortunately, the website can suffer as a result.

Business is fast-moving; projects come and go, people come and go, and organisational structures change. But with an agency PM consistently steering your site, you can drive both short-term wins and longer-term transformation.

2. Specialist Skills on Tap

Running a site successfully doesn’t only require technical expertise. There are a whole range of other specialist skills that are difficult to find in one person – user experience, content strategy, digital marketing and design, to name a few.

A good agency project manager is often a jack of all trades; they know when each skill is required.

They also have experts to call on when needed and then manage that whole team with the bigger picture in mind, this is a huge agency advantage.

Agency Advantage - Puzzle piece fitting in

3. True Best Practice

In a recent meeting, I asked a prospective client what they envisioned for their website. They wanted the site to be ‘best in class’. And that was interesting. Why best ‘in class’? Why not ‘best’?

Most businesses compare themselves to direct competitors in their field and use industry-specific best practices to gain an advantage.

At Tangent, we work with clients across a range of sectors.

We’re not limited by industry best practices; we use technical best practices to create websites that are objectively great. Not just ‘great for the niche’.

4. Money Saving

When a website is managed internally, there’s a tendency to stick with the legacy system.

However, this can often come with heavy license fees or other ongoing costs. This can mean it’s not always possible to justify or make a business case for going after a new opportunity.

In our agency, we’re constantly testing technical solutions and know-how to spot and resolve budget-draining inefficiencies.

Agency Advantage - Piggy bank and plastic coin

5. A Fresh Set of Eyes

I think that one of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of businesses successfully owning their website is that they’re too close to it.

Your business has its own way of working. Even if you’re open to innovation, there’s always this ingrained ‘we do things this way’ mentality.

It’s almost impossible to distance yourself from it. It’s there in pretty much every business – but it’s not an issue for an external digital project manager. They can stay objective, keeping the bigger picture and longer-term roadmap in mind.

Working with all sorts of different organisations, we don’t have those same borders. We see your website in ways you can’t.

Give Your Website the Attention It Deserves

Websites are like living things; they need to be looked after by someone dedicated to helping them grow, with the right interventions at the right time. And they need ongoing attention.

At Tangent, this is what we love to do. We’re proud to ‘own’ our clients’ websites, to immerse ourselves in their organisations, and show what true transformation looks like when we work together towards a common goal.