How to get the best from your Marketing Agency.
Tags: Public Relations, Marketing, Communications Strategy, Marketing Agency, Branding

As a Marketing, Branding or communications Manager, one of your biggest headaches will be justifying your marketing budget and constantly answering the question regarding value for money for most of your Advertising, Public Relations, and Marketing campaigns.

For the past four years, I have been working with agencies to execute campaigns and one thing many of my professional peers note is that agencies are the most preferred partners to execute Advertising, Public Relations, and Marketing. Agencies play a very big role in ensuring our marketing calendars are being executed in creative ways but one thing you will learn quickly is that there can be a disconnect in what you want or desire, from what you’ll receive.

As someone who has worked for an agency before, I do understand how they operate. Their work culture, customer service, pressure, and deliverables are very familiar to me but that may not be the case for you who encounters them for the first time.

So, you’ve just landed your marketing, branding or communications gig and the company wants you to do a campaign for a new product or service, how do you go about it? This is not a strategy article but its simple tips and tricks on how to get the best out of your marketing agency without overspending, fighting the agency and not under delivering the campaign.

UNDERSTAND THE OBJECTIVES OF YOUR CAMPAIGN.

Understanding your campaign is the number one most important rule when working with a marketing agency. The confidence of saying yes or no to agency proposals will be purely based on how well you understand your campaign and what deliverable you expect. Create a project plan that allows you to crosscheck if everything is according to plan, meeting budget goals and simply delivering as you desire.

FAMILIARISE WITH YOUR AGENCY STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES

To achieve your goals, you need to understand the people you are working with. Depending on your budget and the frequency of jobs you give your agency, you will have the opportunity to make mental notes of specific capabilities of your agency. You will realize the pitch and deliverables can differ but knowing how to manage them will allow you to get favorable results for your campaigns. One simple trick is to categorize their services into Digital, Web, Artworks, PR, printing, Events, and Launches.

Communicate areas where you feel they need to improve as per the services they are offering you because if they keep sending you things you don’t like, issues will come up that will affect your overall campaign goals.

DO NOT ACCEPT MEDIOCRE WORK

Unfortunately, due to time constraints and approvals issues, agencies are constantly working under pressure to deliver miracles for clients but this does not mean you should accept anything sent to you. Follow your gut, if you don’t like work sent by the agency, reject it with reasons. Call your account manager and explain to him/her why the work sent is unacceptable.

To avoid such issues, I have learned to do the following,

Communicate very clear copy to the agency, use illustrations, drawings, pictures if possible. Request the Art Director or creative working on the project to be part of the meeting. This allows the creative to hear directly from the source. Once they have a meeting to discuss the brief, he/she will have an easier time understanding what to execute. Explain the objective of each campaign to everyone involved with your project in the agency. Do not assume they will understand what you want at the end of the day.

FIND COST CUTTING OPPORTUNITIES

Don’t accept every quote sent to you. If you work with many suppliers for different jobs, request for quotations and compare. Question why there is a huge difference if any. If you work with printers on other bigger jobs, find out if the agency can work with your existing printers to reduce the cost for the printing of the flexis. Your executives want you to execute a dope campaign but at the same time want you to not spend every single coin simply because money has been allocated.

UNDERSTAND YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY CLIENT.

This is more of a mental note than anything else. You must understand the agency isn’t working on your job alone. They have other clients they are servicing. Depending on how much you pay in agency fees, you can actually figure out where your company has been placed in their priority list. Find out how busy they are and when they have scheduled your work. You could be expecting a response within 5 hours but your job has been scheduled for the following day.

IMPROVE ON YOUR SKILLS.

If you forget any of the recommendations above, don’t forget this one, improve your skills. I personally live by this code. Over-reliance on marketing agencies can at times work to your disadvantage if you don’t handle them well.

Below is a list of skills that you need to have and always work at perfecting them:-

Graphic designing — Important Softwares to learn Indesign, Illustrator, Photoshop and Premiere Pro. Presentations — Powerpoint (Your presentations must stand out) Digital Marketing — How to execute an entire social media campaign from start to finish and how to generate reports.

If you’ve been following hiring trends, you’ll note the above skills feature in the requirements section among others. You will quickly learn that very few schools will teach you the above skills but depending on your goals, Youtube, udemy, https://www.lynda.com and many similar skill sharing platforms will teach you skills that will help you improve your overall skills.

The above skills allow you to be part of the process, you will understand everything being pitched to you by the marketing agencies and most importantly, you will be able to communicate easily with your executives/management team in the business language they understand, ensuring you get the necessary approvals for your campaigns.

Probably you don’t have the time to learn new skills or you’ve seen it all and prefer to manage the agency without getting your hands dirty or you prefer to hire junior staff who will do the above for you, more power to you, but remember, we live in a fast-paced career era where what you bring on the table matters. Don’t leave the fate of your trade to brokers.

Question the broker, push the broker, support the broker until you achieve the goals you desire for each year’s campaign goals.

I will be sharing more insights on how you can improve as a Marketing, Branding, and Communications professional and you can also let me know in the comments section what specific areas you’d like me to tackle in this competitive Marketing, Branding or communications jungle.

BE DOPE AT WHAT YOU DO.