7 best practices for SMBs while dealing with the ad agency

7 best practices while dealing with the ad agency

Large corporations understand advertising and branding very well. They have their own in house team to deal with multiple vendors offering them marketing and advertising services for multiple platforms of media. SMBs have limited resources and generally work with singular marketing or advertising agency for all their marketing communication needs. With this article, I want to help you SMBs in getting most out of these agencies.

Here are 7 things you can do to get best results from your marketing agency

1. Give your business inputs and latest trends

This is the most important thing an SMB should do. Your agency will not understand your business. Hence, it is important to communicate with them how your business works. Your consumer profile and your product range. The market that you are targeting will keep evolving make sure every time you are updating same to your agency, try to do this at least 2 month prior so that they can think of some campaign before you start doing business in that new location. Make sure that your agency is also aware about the latest trends in the market and they are using same in their communication, this you should keep on reviewing at least once in a week. I have experience that many of the times changes happens in the business but are not communicated to the agency.

2.Sales head and marketing team meetups

Make sure that your sales head communicates with your marketing team on regular interval. Your sales head understands your consumer and your brand the best. He will be able to pinpoint the key benefits that your product or service offers that helps them close a sale. This feedback will help your agency design the perfect communication to target your clients. Sales head should review all the communication happening on all the platforms and audience profile, because they are the best person to review it.

3.Work towards shared goals

Ensure that your entire marketing and sales setup is working towards the same goal. This could mean sharing monthly targets for sales or leads. Bringing the entire team on the same page will ensure a continuity in marketing communication and sales communication. It will also ensure that your marketing agency works towards increasing your sales. The final outcome of all advertising activity should be increased revenue for your company.

4.Read and understand your agency’s analysis reports

This is the first and foremost step to ensure better campaigns every time. Ensure that your marketing communication agency sends you a jargon free and clutter less report that you can easily understand.

Ensure that this report highlights the key objectives of the advertising campaigns, its reach and its impact. Ask them to give proper conclusions to these campaigns with what lessons the agency has learnt.

Every campaign is a learning experience for your agency. Make sure that they take lessons from every campaign to their heart.

Whenever you are doing marketing report analysis make sure you have given proper dedicated time and all your leaders especially sales leader are involved in this meeting.

5.Make a list of dos’ and don’ts

After reading the report and discussing it with your agency make sure that you make a list of dos’ and don’ts with them. This will bring your marketing or creative team on the same page as you. This list will ensure that there are no repeat mistakes. It will give your agency an understandable framework to work with, which in turn will ensure that your business gets the highest returns on investments.

6.Focus on relevant products

Your agency will treat your product range equally until you inform them about your priority. Whichever product you’re pushing in the sales cycle make sure that your agency knows about it. They should be aware about your hero products and the range of benefits that product has to offer. Ensure all the communication highlights the benefit of your product in some way. There are some products which are seasonable in nature and their demand also come in their respective seasons, make sure your marketing team is well aware about those products.

7. Divide your budget in three equal parts

The budget that you assign to your agency should be in three equal parts.

First part is for the visibility and awareness of your brand. In this part your agency should give you creatives that will register your brand in your audience minds and this will attract audience towards your brand.

Second, is for engaging your audience. Here, the relevant audience to your business must be engaged through quirky marketing material or promotional activity. These activities are important to retain your brand audience. Engaging activities ensure that visibility translate into memorability.

The third part of your budget should be dedicated to push sales. Sales promotions are effective only if your audience is already engaged to your brand communication.

Conclusion:

With these simple things, you can ensure that you get the most from your agency. The impact of advertising campaigns or marketing activity is driven by your interaction with your marketing agency. Build your brand one piece of communication at a time with your ad agency. Make sure that people in agency have a sense of ownership about your brand. This will bring out the best creativity in them.