Appointing a marketing agency, part I
For small businesses, the prospect of finding and appointing a
marketing agency is daunting. Where do you start? How do you know if
you’re talking to the marketing agency that's right for your business? And
what is ‘right’ for your business anyway?
By Martin Jones, director of AAR, which matches businesses with marketing firms.
Click here for part II
When appointing a marketing agency what is important: is it their experience or cultural fit or, more importantly, both? Wherever you are in the process, having the right mindset before you start the search will pay dividends.
There are a lot of parallels between finding an agency and choosing somewhere new to live. Most people wouldn’t dream of going into an Estate Agent and saying “Hello, I’d like a home, please”.
The request begs too many questions. Are you buying or renting? Do you want a house or a flat? How many bedrooms? Do you want a garage or a garden? What local amenities are important? What is your price range? What about location?
Like most business projects, more research at the beginning will lead to a better brief and ultimately deliver the best results. The process of finding an agency can follow the same basic steps as those you’d go through when buying a house.
- Firstly, decide on the sort of agency you think will suit you (size, location, type).
- Then start to narrow the search collating written specifications for those that are available and meet your initial criteria.
- Once you’ve looked through these, you’ll want to go and visit a few of them to see how they feel and whether you could be comfortable there.
- Finally, start to get some detail on how they like to work, what they could do for you specifically and how much it will cost you. Then put your offer in!
With over 30 years of experience, we’ve learnt a thing or two about appointing and working with agencies, so here are our 10 Top Tips to make the process as stress free as possible.
1. Before you start the process, ensure you have buy-in from all the relevant stakeholders.
There is nothing more frustrating than discovering half way through the review that someone wasn’t aware of it and is calling a halt to proceedings. Unlike some business projects, marketing campaigns are necessarily high-profile and everyone always has an opinion about advertising!
Searching for a new agency to deliver a new campaign will almost certainly attract the attention of everyone in the business. So it’s important to ensure the key players are comfortable with the plans and able to contribute to the brief and the final selection.
2. Be clear what you will be requiring your agency to do.
Define early on what you need your agency to deliver. Is it just advertising, for example, or will they need to manage other projects like direct marketing or digital?
It may seem like obvious advice, but in an increasingly convergent marketplace, the ‘traditional’ route of appointing a roster of agencies to manage each individual marketing discipline may no longer be the right approach. With so many agencies now diversifying away from their core offering, it makes sense to consider the agencies whose (new) skill sets best match your marketing strategy.
Try and plan as far ahead as possible. Unless you’re looking for an agency to deliver a one-off project, you should be planning to work with the agency you appoint for about 3 years.
Aside from avoiding having to go through the whole pitch process again, you’ll find you usually get the best work from an agency that have worked alongside you over time, one that has had enough time to understand your brand, your products and your culture and with whom you’ve built up a good working relationship.
It would also be very frustrating to go through a lengthy appointment process only to realise 6 months later that your new agency isn’t equipped to manage the new product launch you’re planning in 18 months time.
Have a think about relevant experience, too. Is it more important to find an agency that has worked in your sector before, or one that has managed a similar brand or product launch? And check how up-to-date that experience is - if it’s all represented by one director who has just left, it is not going to do you much good.
Size may also be an issue. Do you want to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond? There is nothing more annoying for an agency than to be told that they hadn’t been awarded the account because they were “too small” or “too big”. The agency hasn’t changed size during the pitch, the client just hadn’t sorted out their criteria in advance.
Location might be another factor. Do you want an agency in your locale, or are you willing to go to the nearest major conurbation? Where are your other agencies based? It makes sense if they’re relatively near each other if you plan to get them together on a regular basis.
Spending time on identifying the potential ‘first list’ of agencies is the most important part of the process.
Having identified the agencies you feel can fulfil your brief you should arrange to meet them for a ‘chemistry’ meeting before you invite them to pitch. This meeting, usually held at their offices, is the best opportunity to meet the team in their ‘home’ environment, see how they work together and ensure that they are the sort of people with whom you feel you could develop a good working relationship.
For part II of this article, click here.
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