Getting the Most Out of Your Advertising & Marketing Agency

Posted in: Blog, News, Strategy
on January 4, 2011
Tags: advertising, strategy

The relationship you have with your advertising and marketing agency (AMA) is critical and unique. A healthy agency relationship means you entrust them with your brand and your image in the eyes of your clients and potential customers; they are responsible for ensuring that every communication piece placed in front of your customer is your best, carries on the dialogue, and enhances your relationship with your clients.

Diligence: hire the right team.

Finding the right team is challenging, but very possible. The right AMA must be an optimum fit for your brand, industry, and organization. Their output and expertise must match your needs, and most importantly, you have to be able to afford them. Good agencies often come at a premium; however, the talent and expertise will outweigh any extra funds spent via future ROI.

Focus your energy on finding the agency that takes ownership of your vision and has the talent (strategic & creative) to maximize your resources while building your brand. A few key “right agency” characteristics include:

Has integrity and character that are apparent; i.e. “go with your gut”.
Takes ownership of your goals and can translate them into quality campaign strategies and creative outputs.
Has a proven track record of results and satisfied clients.
Displays cutting edge creativity to apply time-tested brand building principles.
Has ample capacity to serve you well; i.e. not too big, not too small.

Transparency: Be honest with them and yourself.

You decided to change or augment your marketing & advertising efforts for an explicit reason: to build your organization, to go a different direction, or as an effort to regain market share from a competitor. These reasons are healthy strings that are attached to any agency relationship you engage in, therefore, they should be articulated clearly with expectations succinctly defined.

Sharing the back story with your agency will increase their focus on your true motivations, anxieties, and goals while allowing them to decipher the best use of your resources and time to bring about appropriate results.

Plan well: don’t underspend.

Steady results take time & resources. Speaking from an agency’s perspective, there’s nothing more challenging than trying to pull a solid returns with a one-drop mailer campaign mixed with a two day 30-second spot run on the local public access channel. In many cases, you may be better off taking your marketing budget and burning it for warmth!

On the other side of the spectrum, the same marketing dollars allocated alongside ample resources have the potential to boost results in tangible ways:

Allow for ample impressions and move your audience beyond the action threshold.
Get favorable media placement and generate better results.
Increase positive message retention through adequate campaign longevity and persistence.
Increase media rate & placement negotiating leverage.

All of the above are likely results of allocating the proper resources and can help ensure that your ROI goals are not short-circuited.

Summary

Your marketing & advertising agency contains talented people that know how to think strategically and create inspired work on your behalf. As a decision maker or manager in your organization, your challenge is to produce as many results as you can with the resources at your immediate disposal. By applying these tips, you should see a significant change for the better in your agency’s output, and accomplish your organizational objectives more efficiently and effectively.