Get the most out of your agency

Any successful agency should expect to work with a wide variety of clients. This diversity of work can be one of the main attractions of life in an agency, so it can be very exciting when a new opportunity arrises. At these early stages, it’s natural for people working in the agency to quickly evaluate certain aspects of the account. These include:

– What the brand is
– What the product is
– Who the audience(s) is
– Who the client is

When starting out, the first three are the most attractive. If it’s a great brand, they can’t wait to work on it. If it’s a great product, they can’t wait to play with it. If it’s a great audience, they can’t wait to excite them. Quickly, however, you realise that the fourth factor is the most important.

If you are thinking of hiring an agency you will naturally want the best results. That isn’t entirely the agency’s responsibility. It’s shared and depends on both sides doing their bit. Any decent agency will naturally want to deliver their clients great work, but they must be enabled to do so.

Often if you want to get great work you need to be a great client. Not a great brand, product or audience. You need to be able to work well with an agency and enable them to create something wonderful with you. Of course, this isn’t to say you should give them free reign, but you should certainly place enough faith in them in order for great ideas to be possible.

Some points that will help you get the most out of your agency:
– Treat your agency as a partner
– Involve them as early as possible in the process
– Anticipate creating specific assets for the campaign (video, images, story etc.)
– Give them as much information as possible
– Allow them to criticise you, and be prepared to criticise them
– Encourage creativity, but expect good reasoning to back it up
– Set specific goals early on. ‘We want to grow our audience’ is not enough.
– Be open to the idea of a long-term relationship that can learn and grow from results together