How to Choose the Right Advertising Agency Part Two
You’ve written your core values, identified your customers, and have a clear vision of the challenges facing your company that you need an ad agency to help you address. So, you Google advertising and marketing agencies and find inbound agencies, digital agencies, full-service agencies, agencies that specialize in radio, TV, print, and billboards. Which one do you choose?
Beware those who see only a single path.
Advertising must be bespoke to be effective. Delivering a cookie-cutter approach to your company’s specific marketing needs will fail.
I attended a content marketing discussion where the first speaker said, “Advertising is defined as…” and then described a basic content marketing strategy. Another person asked how traditional advertising fit inside this definition, and the speaker said, “I don’t recognize traditional advertising as marketing.”
I strongly disagree with that statement.
Inbound marketing works. Digital advertising with SEO, SEM, and a great website work. TV and radio work. A mixture of these approaches works. It depends on the business and the circumstances, and within these strategies, the agency needs to be flexible to address your company’s specific needs.
Different Strokes for Different Folks
Mass media is a good “big scoop” approach. If you’re thinking about funnel marketing, mass media will raise awareness and dump a lot of consumers at the top of your funnel. Traditional advertising works well with consumers who don’t know the problem they have. So, you didn’t know you needed a Coors Light or Taco Bell, or there’s a big sale at Kohl’s. If your business depends on impulse buying or there is low awareness of your brand, traditional marketing is an excellent way to go.
Inbound marketing works if the consumer has a searchable problem you can address. Like how do I fix my kitchen sink, how do I organize these sales leads, where can I get my 1959 Studebaker fixed. With inbound marketing, your prospective customer “opts-in” to the messaging. Combined with a robust SEO strategy or a social media campaign, this can be highly effective because you provide a solution to their problem.
In many cases, though, you need several media platforms and several different approaches. No matter the strategy, the challenge is to get consumers bombarded by 6,000 advertisements per day to look at your company (without being annoying). And that’s a real trick. I have several email addresses, one I put down if I suspect I’m going to get spammed. Every morning there are 1500 emails from companies where I wanted to view the free content, and there’s another 1500 in my spam folder. I delete most of them. Every evening while watching the local news, I mute dozens of commercials on TV. But occasionally, when I’m tired and cranky and don’t feel like cooking dinner, a spot on the radio for a local pizza joint, or that software product that popped up in my email, or the sale saw on TV that reinforces the email I got, those things speak to me. And I buy.
A case study that’s not mine
I did some creative consulting work for an ad agency that won the state fair account in their state. Based on a twenty-year-old study, most fair attendees came from the agricultural area of the state. Past strategies focused on mass media in this attendee-rich area, with the big urban areas ignored. A TV and radio campaign in the urban areas large enough to be effective would consume most of the budget. Factor in how you get people to attend with the pandemic still lurking and other venues such as movie theaters and amusement parks reporting low numbers, and you’ve got a complex marketing challenge.
The 2021 agency did a light, statewide mass media campaign designed to drive people to the website and coupled that with strong social media advertising, a viral “tell us your memories” campaign, wraps on transit vehicles, billboards, and an old-fashioned public relations campaign.
The agency emphasized an inclusive strategy that reached consumers where they were, not where they wanted them to be. They nailed it. The result was the state’s second-largest turn-out in fair history.
Importantly, this is not a strategy they deploy for all their clients, but it was the strategy that worked for this one.
Find the Agency That Fits Your Company
An inbound marketing campaign might be best for your company, or TV and radio campaign might. Social media marketing may hit the mark, or it could take a combination of any of these. The agency that pitches a strategy that addresses YOUR customers where they are and not where they want them to be – and that can effectively reach them – is the strategy and the company you want to handle your advertising.