Marketing communication agencies have always been at the mercy of their clients’ budget. In recent years, big-spending-brands have begun to adopt the ‘in-sourcing’ approach, where they set up in-house teams to handle needs for which agencies were previously hired.
This trend has been reported much over the past five years. In 2018, the Association of National Advertisers in America (ANA) found that 78% of its members had in-house agencies, up from 58% in 2013, and 42% in 2008. According to Digiday Research, 38% of 214 brand marketers said that going in-house is about increased control. Now, it’ll be reasonable to expect this trend to continue, especially with all the challenges that 2020 threw at the marketing and communications industry.
When brands are under financial pressure, the marketing budget is usually the first to be cut, unfortunately. Of course, this means the death of many agencies. So, how do agencies escape this client budget trap, and become self-sustaining businesses? One answer is in innovation; B2B and B2C product development.
With technology being the greatest enabler of innovation and fuel for scaling businesses, it has become imperative for traditional agencies to start making the mental and strategic shift to becoming ‘product’ companies. Unfortunately, most agency people are not trained to build products and generally lack the technical capabilities for tech product development. So, how will comms people build products if they can’t code?
Enters the NoCode Movement. NoCode Development Platforms (NCDPs) allow non-programmers to create application software through graphical user interfaces and configuration, instead of traditional computer programming. In the past couple of years, the rise of the NoCode movement has started to change the landscape of tech, providing more opportunities for non-technical people to create and build minimum viable products (MVPs) for their ideas.
With NoCode tools like Retool, Bubble, Google Cloud’s AppSheet and others, marketers – the so-called “suits” – can now drag-and-drop and connect application components to create mobile or web apps without writing a single line of code!
Agencies, big and small, will need to behave more like product companies in order to survive the next decade. Mastering and adopting NoCode tools will help communicators navigate the unfamiliar waters of technology product development.