How to Collaborate to Drive Growth: Aligning Media Planners and Owners
15 min
Executive summary
To drive sustainable growth, B2B agencies must bridge the gap between media planners and agency owners through structured collaboration and data-led strategies. This article outlines a practical framework for building high-performing, cross-functional teams that deliver measurable impact across campaigns.
Explore the full framework to unlock regionally relevant, data-fuelled collaboration strategies that elevate agency profitability and precision.
Important note:
This article is recommended for marketing agency professionals operating within the EMEA region.
For B2B marketing agency owners, a strong partnership with their media teams is not just beneficial, but a key driver of growth and profitability. When agencies and media teams align seamlessly, they unlock greater efficiency to elevate the impact of client campaigns.
Successful demand generation thrives on data-driven decision making and seamless collaboration to integrate insights into complex campaign strategies.
When media planners and owners work together, they ensure campaigns are not only creative, but also rooted in market intelligence, maximising conversion opportunities.
This high level of collaboration involves identifying shared goals and leveraging data to craft and execute media and demand generation strategies.
This article presents a 4-step framework B2B media agencies can adopt to optimise campaign performance through collaborative planning and aligning cross-functional teams, adapting to regional dynamics, and tailoring strategies.
4-step framework for B2B agency collaboration
Clear communication is the foundation of seamless collaboration, ensuring aligned goals, efficient workflows, and data-driven decision making.
Below is a 4-step framework to improve communication and cohesion between teams:
1. Collaborate on media planning
Unlock high-performing media campaigns by empowering cross-functional teams to collaborate on outcomes, not just tactics.
Effective collaboration is the cornerstone of high performing media strategies across the EMEA region. As agencies face increased pressure to deliver measurable results, aligning cross-functional teams—from sales and marketing to compliance and demand generation—has become a business imperative.
Below are several key factors that influence the effectiveness of collaboration.
Internal сollaboration
Agency owners can drive stronger campaign ROI by aligning internal teams through trust, visibility, and shared outcomes.
Best practices agency owners can adopt include:
Internal collaboration at B2B agencies also ensures that insights from all relevant departments—such as sales and marketing—are pooled together and aligned.
Methods for implementing collaboration:
ABM planning
Enhance ABM results by synchronising demand, sales, and media teams around intent signals and account intelligence.
Media budgets should be optimised to target key decision makers within specific accounts through programmatic advertising, intent-driven channels, and personalised content delivery. Sales teams can provide real-time insights into account behavior, while demand leaders use these insights to build tailored campaigns that align with the buyer's journey.
Leveraging shared data enables precise targeting, better resource allocation, and measurable pipeline impact. This integrated approach ensures media investments are focused, relevant, and directly tied to account engagement and conversion outcomes.
Collaboration across industry verticals
Adapt your collaboration model to sector-specific regulations and buying behaviour for higher campaign relevance and compliance.
Examples of how nuanced collaboration can be across verticals:
Manufacturing
Long sales cycles, global reach, and complex decision making units
Agencies co-create educational, buyer-led content with clients to drive brand-to-demand experiences
Fintech
Regulatory compliance, data security, and financial literacy
Agencies work hand-in-hand with compliance and legal teams to approve content and messaging, using structured planning tools to map out multichannel campaigns that align with GDPR and MiFID II
SaaS
Competitive differentiation and rapid iteration
Agile collaboration through shared dashboards to optimise mid-campaign and dynamically reallocate spend
Healthcare
Regulatory scrutiny (HIPAA, EMA), buyer hesitation, and long review cycles
Multi-stakeholder planning involving client’s medical, legal, and compliance teams. Agencies adopt more structured and formalised workflows to secure approvals
In addition, collaboration preferences can vary across regions. For example:
Agencies that invest in shared insights, adaptive workflows, and cross-regional alignment are best positioned to deliver precision-targeted campaigns that resonate across verticals and markets.
2. Have consistent feedback loops
Create always-on feedback loops to optimise strategies in real time and foster transparent, high-trust collaboration.
This mitigates misunderstandings, reduces operational friction, and aligns all stakeholders toward shared goals.
Method:
3. Integrate data and analytics
Maximise campaign precision by integrating data insights across teams—bridging client goals with performance metrics.
Media planners specialise in data-driven decision making and use analytics to track campaign performance, enabling them to make real-time adjustments. Integrating the owner’s client-centric perspective into this process creates a comprehensive view of campaign effectiveness.
Method:
Important: Privacy-first media planning
Strengthen compliance and targeting accuracy by championing first-party, consent-driven data strategies.
EMEA agencies operate under stringent data privacy regulations such as GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive, requiring media planners to adopt compliant, privacy-first strategies when collaborating across sales and demand generation teams.
By leveraging consented data collected through owned channels—such as websites, gated content, and CRM systems—planners can enrich audience insights and inform media buying decisions with accurate, lawful data.
GDPR-compliant tools widely used in EMEA include:
ABM and demand platforms
Data and enrichment tools
Business intelligence and analytics
Marketing automation and CRM
4. Implement a shared campaign dashboard
Structured shared dashboards enhance collaboration and create the cornerstone for long-term B2B campaign alignment by promoting trust, clarity, and shared commitment to goals.
Method:
It is important to note that collaboration styles and preferences can differ across regions.
According to the 6sense Buyer Experience 2024, media agency collaboration across EMEA is shaped by faster decision cycles averaging 10.2 months, a preference for buyer-led, self-paced engagement, and the need for culturally adapted communication.
EMEA marketers often favor structured, asynchronous formats like reports and email over real-time chats, especially when aligning with localised expectations.
EMEA trends indicate:
How to evaluate success and refine collaborative processes
Assessing collaboration outcomes is crucial for fueling continuous improvement and identifying critical optimisations to workflows.
Implementing collaborative workflows improve operational efficiency in the following ways:
How can B2B agencies establish shared performance metrics for demand generation campaigns?
Collaborative media planning sets the stage for clearer goal-setting and performance evaluation. By agreeing on KPIs upfront, all stakeholders remain aligned on campaign objectives.
It is imperative that agencies align their chosen metrics with client goals, ensuring they track KPIs that demonstrate success. In the case of demand generation, these should include outcomes such as prospect quality, cost per lead (CPL), and conversion rates, alongside traditional KPIs like CTR and CPC.
Last, but not least, create a single source of truth where all team members can access up-to-date performance data through a shared dashboard. Include qualitative feedback from sales and client-facing teams to complement quantitative metrics, ensuring a holistic view of campaign performance.
Adapt based on results
Post-campaign reviews are opportunities to analyse what worked and what can be improved.
Scrutinising internal workflows and communication processes can uncover these opportunities for improvement and point to the root cause, informing corrective actions if a campaign underperforms.
Below are 3 practical steps for evaluation:
Key takeaways
UNLOCK YOUR AGENCY’S POTENTIAL WITH DATA-DRIVEN DEMAND
INFUSE demand experts help you design high performance programs that integrate collaboration and demand strategies, optimising key performance metrics like engagement, conversion rates, and ROI for your clients.
