Make a fresh start
Choosing a new marketing agency is a great opportunity to ramp up the impact of your brand and marketing communications.
Thinking of changing agency? Or maybe you’re hiring some marketing help for the first time. Whether it’s a PR, marketing, digital, DM or any other kind of agency, we thought we’d share our 8 tips for picking a winner:
- Decide what you need. Before you can evaluate whether an agency can help you, you need to be clear what skills and activities you want them to provide. Think about how you would like to work with them, how you want to communicate, what activities you’re hoping to set up and how much input you need from your agency in planning and coming up with ideas and suggestions for campaigns
- Come up with a shortlist. There are so many consultancies out there, and plenty who claim to do it all. How do you sort out the most promising for you? A good place to start is with recommendations from people you trust and reviews or contributions in reliable industry media
- Keep hold of inbound contacts. You’re probably emailed and sent information by agencies all the time. When you’re thinking of working with someone new, you might just find the perfect candidate in your junk mail. If they’re good, they should have targeted you because they think their skills might be relevant to you
- Take a look at their shop window. Check out their client work (most agencies have case studies on their websites) and make sure it’s recent. See if you can find evidence that they practise what they preach: for instance, if they’re mobile marketing specialists, do they have their own mobile-optimised site?
- Make the most of what they offer. For a smaller business, an agency with a breadth of experience and skill across several marketing disciplines could be a good bet. Even if you’re only looking for help in one specific area at the moment – such as SEO – you’ll almost certainly undertake other marketing work in the future. If you’ve already developed a good relationship and shared understanding, you won’t have to waste time briefing strangers. Plus a multi-disciplined agency can sometimes act as a marketing department or manager for you, if you don’t have the in-house resources to devote to a campaign
- Look for a balance of innovative thinking, strong implementation skills and commercial-mindedness. To differentiate your business, your agency needs to come up with effective and distinctive ideas for your business that will deliver measurable results, and put them in place efficiently and quickly
- Trust your instincts. If you feel comfortable and you have the sense that the key people think in a similar way to you and understand what you’re trying to achieve, you’ll inspire each other and enjoy every aspect of developing successful marketing campaigns
- Give them a try. Start with a small brief and see how it goes. Don’t commit to a major project or large retainer until you’ve seen for yourself that your agency is capable of doing what they promised, and working in a way that fits with your business approach. The best time to hire a new agency is a little while before you want to kick off your big project – that way you’ve had chance to work with them on something lower risk and check that you’ve made a good choice.
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