Working with a professional marketing agency can be a great way to improve your messaging and extend your reach as a business. A full-service ad agency can help you with website development, online and print advertising, graphic design, social media, blogging and much, much more. Read on for some things you should do, and not do, to get the best possible results from your agency partner.
- Have clear goals. With so many possibilities in the online and offline advertising world, it’s easy to get overwhelmed or become tempted to take on too much at once. It’s important to have focused, scalable objectives that you can work on over time. While your agency is (or should be) an expert on marketing, you’re the expert on your business. And as such, you’re in the best position to know your goals for sales and growth. Once you’ve identified them, we can work together to help translate your goals into a specific strategy and set expectations about how long it’s likely to take to start seeing results.
- Be decisive. Don’t fall victim to analysis paralysis. Advertising is an iterative process. New landing pages are added to websites, direct mail campaigns are refined, and brand messaging is honed over time. If you take too long trying to perfect your message, the opportunity cost could be ground lost to competitors. So while it’s important to have and share your opinions, it’s equally important to be decisive and willing to set campaigns and marketing initiatives in motion rather than shooting for perfection.
- Set a realistic budget. We understand that cash flow can fluctuate, but it’s important to have a realistic budget that you can stick with to meet your specific goals. Moreover, you don’t want to stretch your budget too thin across multiple marketing channels to the point that you’re not getting any traction on any of them. Most types of marketing tactics require consistency to achieve results. If you pull back on your marketing efforts too often, you lose that consistency and risk losing credibility, trust and engagement of potential customers.
- Assign one person to sign off. While it’s often helpful to get multiple opinions from within your company, progress can slow considerably when your account manager receives five different emails with conflicting feedback from your team. The best approach is to come to an internal consensus, and then communicate that to your agency. Otherwise, you may end up going down a lot of dead ends and burning through lot of billable hours.
- Show us what you like. It’s often said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Show us examples of advertising that you find appealing. Of course, we’ll always customize the work to your business and customers — but this can serve as an effective shorthand to communicate creative preferences. Have a central location where decision makers can gather ads, social media campaigns, blogs or any other marketing collateral that might be useful as inspiration. And it’s perfectly fine if the ideas are very different or even contradictory. Often those types of discrepancies can reveal a unique angle for your business.
- Be honest. Any ad agency should have a thick skin — we know we do. Ultimately, we want to make you happy, and the only way to do that is if you provide honest feedback. You won’t hurt our feelings, we promise. Just remember it’s equally important to look at objective sales and conversion data. Sometimes what we like isn’t what works best.
- Plan ahead. It’s critical to give your agency a heads up on any major changes coming to your organization, such as a new product launch, expansion, leadership change or new strategic partnership. Projects can have a long lead time in an agency pipeline, and we want to make sure the work we’re producing will be effective no matter what changes are coming down the pike.
Kymera values the partnerships we’ve developed with our clients over the years. In many cases, they’ve gone from business relationships to friendships. We’d love to talk to you about your business, your marketing needs and how Kymera can help you achieve them. Contact us today.
