what does a marketing agency do?

Subtitle:  how to be an easy client and get what you want first time.

After answering a question about this recently on LinkedIn it was obvious that there is some confusion about what a client side (marketing assistant / manager / director) should do, and what the role of the agency / graphic designer / web-developer should do. As this is fundamental to to the success of the relationship, it’s worth exploring this in more detail.

So - you want a new brochure?

Say you are a marketing manager, looking for a new brochure or website. What does the agency need from you to help make the project work well? First, a clear idea of your objectives. Your job is to define the objective of the campaign and how it fits with your overall marketing plan. Who is the target market, what do you want them to do, and when? Then you need to provide a brief that covers these key points cleanly and succinctly.

The message.

What the agency or designer needs to know is the one thing that you want to tell your prospect. This needs to be a single sentence, but summarises the entire campaign. If you can’t give this, then your campaign will be fuzzy and poorly defined, and the chances of you getting exactly what you are looking for is dramatically reduced. By all means give secondary information to support this, but if you can’t define your primary message, then you are not ready to launch the campaign.

The brief.

A brief for a marketing project doesn’t need to be long. It should cover all of the elements that you think your agency needs to know, but usually can be done in a single page. The brief form that we issue to clients from 1503 covers the following topics:

• Background to Project
• Project Description
• Purpose of Project
• Target Audience
• Single Minded Proposition - the big idea
• Secondary Proposition - Is there anything else you want them to know?
• Call to Action - What do you want the customer to do?
• Tone of Voice - What sort of tone are you looking for? E.G. Professional, Fun, Quirky, Dull
• Specification - Is there a particular specification that you are looking to meet?
• Time scales
• Ongoing development - Is there anything that you will be doing in the future that we should know about before we start?

Next steps

If you cover those off, then your agency should be able to deliver exactly what you are looking for. In the next post in this series we will look at things from the agencies point of view - what should they be doing?