Your company has identified that it needs assistance with marketing and advertising, but now the big decision is—do you expand your own marketing department or seek out an agency? You could spend days, weeks, or even months searching for the people you think you may need to have a fully-staffed marketing department, or you could choose an agency that has everyone you need in their arsenal already.
Members of the marketing village
One of the greatest benefits of working with an agency is gaining access to different types of individuals and their expertise. A sole person cannot single-handedly and properly concept, research, copywrite, and design all the marketing assets a company needs. It takes an integrated team of people with different perspectives and depths, who work together daily, to create the great marketing you see out there today.
Agencies are built to have all the key team members you need for well-rounded and successful marketing: Account Management, Content Creators, User Experience (UX) Strategists, Web Developers, Public Relations, and Media with specialties in traditional, digital, social, and search. Within those departments, agencies have mentors that help make sure deliverables are always elevated to meet that department’s standards and best practices. Typically, a client’s in-house marketing team is very lean and wouldn’t have more than one or two people in charge of a certain department. If the department is too lean, they won’t have the bandwidth to focus on keeping one another accountable.
When you work with a non-integrated team, there’s a greater chance for the work to look inconsistent. A lot of work can be done with tunnel vision, which means no one is there to take a step back and think of the strategic big picture that needs to be achieved. Your agency partner makes sure work is consistent with all other projects in the queue that involve your brand. What you really want is a partner to not be a yes-man and order taker, and instead have that outsider’s perspective of asking: Is this the right move? Is there anything that was not considered? Does this integrate with everything else we are doing? Will this make sense to the general public?
A perfect gate keeper of this is your Account Manager at an agency. They are in charge of being fully integrated with their clients’ brands, legal requirements, messaging requirements, logo requirements, pain points, budgets, and so on. They educate all key players in the agency on this to ensure all the work we produce falls in line with those requirements.
The agency is also extremely focused on making sure we meet clients’ budgets, timelines, and scope of work requirements, all while balancing our overall workload. We know that if something is held up for too long, there’s major implications to timelines and possibly budgets. Understanding that time costs money, we make sure we are as efficient as possible to keep work within budgets and constantly moving. It’s rare to see on the corporate side someone considering the hard and variable costs of every marketing piece and what that does to the bottom line, not to mention, the implication of being hung-up on something due to being too close to it.
While yes, agencies should be your integrated marketing partner, we have the ability to take a step back and see things from higher level views. We have the depth, resources, experience from other clients, and the latest marketing industry knowledge that allows us to make efficient and strategic decisions in the best interest of our clients. This gives our clients the advantage of leveraging what other business have done well, and not so well, through us.
This means we are also in the business of being proactive versus reactive. We stay on top of what is newsworthy and the latest marketing tactics that capture people’s attention because that’s what our clients want and expect from us. Our clients are in charge of running their business, we are in charge of the strategic marketing oversight they may not have the capacity to step back and see. However, we can’t do all that without you.
Clients should live in the village too
Since advertising agencies are secured to help various types of companies, it’s just as important for the client to be a part of our village due to their deep knowledge of the intricacies of their company. When we work in silos, constantly coming in and out of touch, one party always gets surprised at the other’s response and the process can, in turn, take longer and become bumpy.
As your agency partner, it’s important to us to make sure the village meets your marketing needs so you can focus on what you do best—running your business. While we can offer a great outsider’s perspective to help guide some of your work, you are the one on the ground making it all happen and in charge of seeing it through within the organization. All of the marketing we develop for you would be for nothing if you weren’t on the other side.
It’s a lot – but it’s worth it
It might sound overwhelming when you see it all broken down like that, right? While yes, it takes a village; each member of the village is dedicated to doing their job and doing it well. Working with an integrated team at an agency allows everyone to stay focused on their respective roles. This means we can all offer our talents and focus on what we know best, instead of being spread thin and giving less than one hundred percent on the task at hand—including you, our client.