Monday, May 9, 2016

Working With A Marketing Agency: The Inside Scoop



Clients often only understand the final product, and how it impacts their sales and awareness. They do not always know the robust strategy and all the moving parts your marketing partners put in motion to execute your marketing tactics. We’re giving you the inside scoop on what exactly marketing professionals do to get the job done… and how much of a value you receive by working with a marketing agency!

Below, we’ve highlighted three projects to show you the inner workings of life at a marketing agency: 
  1. Commercial Production:
    This project requires a lot of pre-production planning! Before grabbing the video camera, your marketing agency brainstorms creative visual and audio ideas to get your message across. They start by creating a story board, which lays out frame-by-frame how your marketing partner envisions your commercial to look like. The agency will then pitch the concept to the client, sharing their vision with them.
    Once the concept is approved by the client, your marketing partner will then move on to shooting the video. This involves going both on-site and off-site to capture footage of your company and your products/services. It may also involve hiring talent to star in your commercial. Commercial video shoots can take up to a full day to capture the shots needed for a 30 second clip.
    The editing process is the most technical and time consuming part of the whole process. Trimming the snippets of video down to fit perfectly together can be daunting, and a strong knowledge of the editing software is needed for cutting-edge special effects. At this point in the process, marketing professionals will hire a voiceover to record the audio, or they will do the voiceover themselves.
    Once the commercial is completed, the last step is to buy media on the tv stations they would like it to air. Strategy includes understanding the client’s target market and buying tv spots during the times and programs that demographic tunes into.
  2. Google Adwords:
    Top performing Adwords campaigns are supported by a strong strategy and small tweaks to the campaigns on a weekly basis. The planning phase begins with researching what keywords people are searching for to find your product and service, and putting together a campaign that will help you better measure success based on specific segments of your target market. Adwords planning also involves understanding the average cost-per-click of the keywords you’ve chosen in your market, and putting together a budget that will allow your ad to be seen without over-spending.
    Once the keywords are established, your marketing partner establishes geographical boundaries for your campaign. He or she will then create short ad copy that appeals to your target market and drives them to your website. With Adwords, your marketing partner will receive real-time data as how your ad is performing. When more data is available, he or she will find small ways to optimize your campaign, from swapping keywords to re-allocating budget.
  3. Web Design:
    There is a lot of work that goes into website design and development, especially when created from scratch. Because nothing is more devastating than having your website or email functions crash, your marketing partner will work to select a reliable hosting provider that will be responsible for making sure everything is secure and working on the back end of your website.
    Next, your marketing partner will pick the right template that meets your needs, and install plugins that give your website functionality. With the rough outline of the site established, your marketing partner will then collect or create the information needed to fill your site with content. This content is then placed on pages formatted in a responsive structure, to make your site mobile-friendly. Other types of media, such as videos, photos and documents are uploaded or linked onto the site. Collecting and organizing information in such a way that your clients or customers can easily access them is essential, and this process takes a lot of planning and will have a lot of tweaks and changes.
    Before launching the site, SEO best practices are put in place and analytics are installed on the back end to track activity on the site. Your marketing partner will communicate with your site’s domain host provider when it comes time to launch, to switch your new site over and assure there are no big kinks in the process.

And if you think that’s a lot of work, we usually have multiple of these projects (and more) going on at the same time! No wonder there’s always coffee in the pot! We broke these projects down for you to show you the value you receive when working with a marketing agency. For the price that agencies charge for their services, clients have multiple staff members working on their projects sharing their time, talent and expertise to provide cutting-edge service and also deliver a well-thought-out strategy. If you are interested in the projects listed above, or anything else marketing-related, call TRIO!