Impress Guide to: Identifying the right agency for you
Choosing the right type of agency to work with can be daunting, so in this article, we’ll try and outline the types of agencies out there and why they may, or may not be right for you.
The word ‘agency’ is commonly used in our industry, but the types of businesses it refers to differ wildly. From the single-person, work-from-home operation to a multinational brand with its logo on the high-rise facade, ‘agencies’ can come in many shapes and sizes.
But ignoring the size element, trying to distinguish one agency from the next is often complicated by the liberal use of labels in the industry, especially in the growing digital space. Like the Prince in Sleeping Beauty, fighting his way through the forest of thorns, trying to know if an agency is the right fit for your business needs can be a real battle.
There’s always going to be a little crossover, on the fringes of these descriptions, but for your clarity and reading pleasure, here’s our handy guide to deciding what type of agency you might need.
Advertising/Marketing Agency
An ‘advertising agency’ or ‘marketing agency’, is dedicated to creating, planning, delivering and handling externally focused communications for its clients. And mostly with the objectives of driving the awareness of, connection with and conversion of the client’s product or service.
It’s often a one-stop-shop for the various ways advertising can take place. This could take the form of new promotional materials, print ads, radio scripts, television commercials and digital assets for social. The larger the advertising agency, the more in-house specialists in various areas they will have working on your project, from the research phase, through strategy development to the creative execution, these agencies can be like a food-court of creative expertise.
Depending on the agency, they often also negotiate and ‘buy’ available media slots across various platforms on your behalf. Make sense? Let’s surge on!
The Benefits: Strategy and creative tend to work hand-in-hand (or at least they jolly well should) and relations with media companies also tend to be stronger, helping with the available rates for any media buys. Ad agencies often have long tentacles that allow them to tap into an enormous network and even if they aren’t part of a global collective, most smaller agencies have people working in them with extensive specialist skills and connections. These are best utilised when making high-profile communication investments, and ‘big-shift’ efforts like a re-brand or a product launch.
Limitations: Ad agencies work very well in the large, long-term project space. But dealing with a specialist in every area means high costs, and a lot of double-handling across contributors. They can also be expensive and out of your budget range and the queue for the studio can be long, so consider the impacts of small copy tweaks and version changes on your overall spend. The reality is that large proportions of your communications will be more detail focused and short-term, which may lean towards efficiency, familiarity and practicality rather than discipline speciality. In other words, not every marketing effort needs a ‘big bang’ budget to back it up. You go to the GP, not a specialist surgeon, to deal with your everyday medical concerns, right?
Design Agency
In the land of comms, how something looks can help the audience understand or engage with your message. A design agency is focused on bringing a message to life through strong visual aesthetics. Quite often the strategic direction will have been established and agreed upon before the brief is provided to the design agency to bring that vision to life visually. Agencies in this category will work on specific execution elements of a project, like the signage, a social graphic, a document, presentation or video production.
Benefits: Depending on the agency, they can be specialists in one, or many of the various forms of design media, including videography, photography and artworking for print or social. They also tend to be smaller in size, and more responsive, even when the requests are more ad-hoc. So if you know what you are trying to deliver, have the strategy and audience insights in your grasp already, dealing with tighter focused skills may make the project delivery more efficient.
Limitations: Sometimes agencies like this can extend themselves into areas where they aren’t specialists, so beware of asking them to do something that isn’t quite their expertise. The smaller the team, the greater chance you will be dealing with generalists, rather than specialists in delivery. This isn’t always a bad thing with certain design jobs, but there are some design disciplines, like artworking for large format print, or designing technical reports and long documents that need someone who is an expert, rather than someone who has done it a few times before.
Digital Agency
The clue is in the title! Digital agencies focus their efforts on the use of digital screens to communicate to their audiences. Using platforms such as social, web, email marketing (to name three), often combine the expertise of strategy, creative, and in some cases, technical development, similar to an advertising agency, but specifically for digital media.
Benefits: Usually on the cutting edge of the technology they are specialising in, agencies like this can often point you in the right direction in terms of platform capabilities and trends. They will either advise on where to put your money or have partnerships in place to help guide those decisions. Digital is an ever-evolving beast, and your agency should be as flexible as an Olympic gymnast, to deal with any eventuality or seasonality. For example, many annual marketing plans focus on social media and SEO at the start of the year, and shift more focus towards eDMs and paid advertising towards Christmas and high volume sales periods (or vice-versa).
Limitations: You saw this one coming. If you’re looking for a holistic plan of attack, you may want to broaden your horizons to ensure a comprehensive approach is taken. Digital engagement is great, but it’s now becoming so saturated, that often the retro forms of communication can be hip again, like Rick Astley! Importantly, very few businesses are in the position to leverage the true ‘cutting-edge’ of a particular technology or media type, as most don’t have the budget to experiment or take risks. So be careful eyeing off being more innovative than everyone for a short span of time. If a more practical option covers a greater spread and will serve you better, do that.
Public Relations (PR) Agency
Sometimes your reputation can enhance, or tarnish the product or service you are spruiking. Some PR agencies can be purely reputation based, or cross over into the advertising realm, but will generally look for ways to influence the ‘conversation’ around your brand or product, rather than being direct with the comms message. PR is Marketing, but not all Marketing is PR. You with me?
Benefits: They provide planning and executing a strategy to gain better unpaid (known as ‘earned’) news or media coverage and develop press kits and crisis management plans to manage your public image when things go wrong. If your company or brand isn’t the most credible voice, or the advertising space is too costly to cut-through, then PR specialists can help get your message to your audience in a less direct way.
Limitations: Most PR agencies will need to be provided with the production assets to publish, rather than managing the creation of them. So they will likely be one of the agency types you deal with, rather than the only one. PR is also a complex investment to measure, as the line between what you spend, and what it delivers, is not always as linear as it may seem. How do you assess the value of a stack of media releases, articles and social media posts about your brand? Click-throughs, web-traffic or simply direct sales?
Where to from here?
Every type of agency has its pros and cons, and there is no definitive right and wrong. Just like the dating world, there is a Mr and Mrs Right out there for everyone, so consider what matters to your business, the budget you have, and the way you like to operate.
Consider what people/skills you have in your organisation. If you have the capabilities to tick off the strategy and thinking, an agency with an execution-focused team of resources may be a better use of your budget. Alternatively, if you need some concrete poured into the foundations of your brand, product or service, an investment in a more holistic approach will serve you well.
The final consideration will be how often will you ‘go to the well?’ And, how much of the hard work do you want to ‘carry to the well’ each time you visit? Specialist or platform-specific agencies will serve you less effectively if you communicate across a range of mediums and platforms, as you will work with them less often, and you will need to be the conduit between the range of service providers you are managing to deliver one project. If you want to brief one contact and see your vision come to life across a range of platforms, then multi-disciplinary agencies are going to be a huge time-saver.
The main focus should be to partner with agencies that will always be clear and transparent about the types of customers they work best with, and the disciplines they have the most expertise in. This should form the majority of your initial conversations, along with discussing their customer service values, and the processes and infrastructure implemented to deliver on their claimed service standards.
Looking to partner with a new agency? Drop us a line: hello@fortheloveofcomms.com
