How to Maximize Your Investment When Hiring an Ad Agency
Hiring an advertising company is a notable investment in your organization's brand and its products and services. If you're ready to hire an ad agency, you'll also likely want to maximize the value of that investment. You can make the most of working with an ad company by doing these five things.
Focus on Long-Term Goals
Advertising is a long game. Especially if you're selling something that has zero public recognition, you need to develop awareness. Even if the advertising agency hits a home run with your first campaign, you have to build awareness, inform the public, and keep grinding away.
Develop a Data-Centric Attitude
In a modern ad agency, everything has a set of key performance indicators. If your business isn't already using a data-centric approach, then you need to be prepared to absorb a lot.
Never depend on the advertising agency to ingest and report the data so you can gain insights. Collect the data they offer and integrate it into what you have. Your firm knows KPIs like sales, customer growth, consumer sentiment, and store demand. Tie that data together with what you're getting from the ad company to develop a complete picture of a campaign's success.
Know Your Target
Every ad has a core audience. A jewelry business pushing an ad campaign for wedding rings, for example, has an idea demographically of who the expected customer is. Develop personas for these target customers so you can build brand stories around them. If you need to target multiple groups, ask the ad agency to build additional campaigns tailored to those groups' personas.
Have Branding Materials Ready
Your business should have service marks, logos, colors, and trademarks ready to go in usable digital file formats. Gather everything so you can drop it all on the creatives at the advertising agency on the day you sign the contract.
Also, make sure someone is around to field questions about the brand materials. If the campaign manager isn't sure about some of your previous attempts, for example, they should know who to contact at your business to fill in those questions. This person should be ready to answer the ad agency's questions within a day or two whenever something comes up.
Be Willing to Adapt
Advertising is a process of refinement. You will send campaigns into the world, develop feedback, and have to adjust. Even if you've been pushing a successful campaign for years, the world will change and you may have to adapt. Focus on constantly refining and improving the message, even if the campaign is nailing it.
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