creative – Orizan

Break your Advertising V-Card: Getting the most out of your agency.

As a business owner, with every decision, no doubt at some point you’re asking the questions. How long will it take? What’s the cost? And what resources do we need?

This may elicit a very complex spreadsheet, project timeline or list of new requirements for resources for the task to be achieved. In some cases, partnering with an agency can feel like a natural extension of your team in order to fulfil the endeavours of your business at a much more effective cost.

From the minute we leave our homes, we’re instantly being flooded with information, content and some good, but also some very bad advertising.

Which makes competing in any market for such a small percentage of share in your customer’s mind can be very difficult, time-consuming, overwhelming and for some, very expensive.

But it doesn’t have to be, you just need to find the right partner with the right advice to help you find somewhere to start.

Unfortunately, in a lot of industries, there are individuals or organisations that paint an ill-picture for the majority of service providers with poor execution, blow-out of initial budgets or an un-promisable understanding of what you want to achieve in your business.

With any organisation, your clients choose you based on your story, why you exist and what’s in it for them. Which begs the question, are you telling the right story?

We’ve put together some tips for a few things to remember when hiring an advertising agency, so you don’t get caught up in something you can’t break free from. Hopefully, these tips will help you have a more meaningful and prosperous relationship with your agency partner.

Be clear on your budget and actual spend.

Your budget will always be the cornerstone of a decision, particularly with advertising so try to be as transparent as you can on what you can budget for your creative and media spend. It’s up to the agency to let you know what they can and can’t do within that budget — if their response doesn’t sit well with you, find another agency that aligns more with where you’re currently at in your business.

What if you don’t know what to spend?

List what you want to achieve out of your advertising and prioritise it. From there you’ll be able to establish a list of goals and reasonable outcomes. However, as a rule of thumb and depending on the health of your business, around 7–10% of your gross revenue would be quite a nice and healthy budget to get you moving towards some real results.

“I don’t know what I’m asking for, but know what skills I don’t have”

Ask if the agency will provide you with a workshop. This is a great way of establishing a relationship, but more importantly provides you with the opportunity to gain insight as to how an agency can help with your business, especially if you’re unsure on where to start. Remember, the insights and materials you gain from a well-run workshop won’t go to waste as you can use the information internally to better your own processes. A great workshop will draw out what you want to achieve and what your new business goals. For example, it could be that you need a better digital and social marketing strategy put in place to boost user engagement for your products, or you might need to run an integrated campaign for an event you’re trying to launch, or maybe you need to go right back to basics and find the true essence of your brand to better understand the value that you offer your clients.

Ensure to have a totally transparent and honest conversation

Firstly, if you’re the business owner, lose the ego and be ready to be vulnerable. A good advertising agency isn’t trying to trick you up on what you’re not doing — but there to help you plan and implement what your business might be able to achieve at every stage in the buyer’s journey to create a better and more memorable experience for your customers.

Ask questions about any technical terms, write them down and use as a reference for future use. Request reports and data on a consistent and accountable time frame. For example, each Monday of the week or the last business day of the month.

Consistent reporting of the data captured will help you to make better decisions and provide you with the insights you need to scale and grow your business.

This will ensure you have a trusting an open relationship with your agency if they’re representing your brand — you want them to be telling an honest story and that comes from your willingness to trust their creative process.

Clear briefing is essential.

As the client, you may have an account manager who will work collaboratively with the strategists and the creative team on an internal brief based on your discussion. The creative brief is a critical document in the creative process that links the client’s expectations with the agencies creative.

Talk about some bad outcomes that could happen from a bad brief and that spending the time to get a creative brief right is time well spent because it controls the creative process. A lot of (most times) times though, a client won’t ever see a creative brief. It really depends on how clear the problem is stated in the beginning.

Using an advertising agency is an excellent way to supercharge your brand story. You open a door to an expert team with skills and capabilities that helps you stay ahead of the curveball (and your market) without the expense of finding, hiring and managing an internal team of your own.

Want to know more?
Get in touch, the coffee’s always on us…

How to Define a Budget for Advertising

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We always see a fair bit of confusion when it comes to advertising budgets.

This poses the question: What’s the difference between Advertising, Marketing and Sales? They’re all the same thing, right? Well, no.

Marketing is essentially an umbrella that covers the overall selling of the product or service which includes market research, product planning, sales, distribution and pricing.

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Put simply, while advertising can still fall under your paid, earned or owned media banners, it is still a message where you’re in control.

Marketing and Sales are very different, marketing is about the consumer needs of the product/service and selling is about the transactional cycle of the product/service.

It’s easier to break down if you think of your budget as three separate components within your organisation.

what are we trying to say? And how/where are we going to say it?

the question: What are our consumer’s needs in order to see these messages? Promos, Offers, Referral fees, Discounts etc.

What are the steps being taken during lead generation in order for it be a paid transaction? A phone call, Email, Follow-ups — i.e. Communication methods of nurturing, engaging and creating a commitment with the client.

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So how are you now going to allocate and define your advertising budget?

Here’s 4 methods used by successful independent businesses and our take on them:

Begin with the total gross sales of last year or the average sales for the past few years. Allocate a percentage of that figure for your marketing budget (a lot of small to medium-sized businesses try to set aside about 7–10% of annual revenues for marketing).

For your advertising component of the marketing budget, this needs to align with your business goals and possibly the lifecycle of your business.

For example, a business goal might be that you want your product to expand your audience reach or it might be that you want to focus on social networks like Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn. The weight of each advertising goal is going to impact the percentage you set aside.

Let’s make up some numbers.

Your sales are $4million annually and you’ve decided to allocate 10% on your marketing, creating a $400,000 budget where you might choose to have 40% ($160,000) go towards your annual advertising initiatives.

The benefit of this method is that it’s easy to understand and relatively safe as its based on previous sales.

Have a look at trade associations or any industry publications as they can normally provide an average amount or the percentage companies are spending on advertising, and you could adapt this to your company.

With this method, you need to be wary that you’re comparing your company to a similarly sized business in terms of both resources and revenue.

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Workshop the specific objectives you want to achieve and map out the tasks required to meet those objectives.

Then determine your budget by estimating the costs of carrying out those tasks. If you can’t afford to do them all, prioritise and focus on the top few. Advertising can be a long term investment, your campaigns can be forward thinking so that your objectives can be achieved over a number of years, with the previous tasks all being a building foundation.

With a method like this, you would want to allow for some contingency in case your estimations aren’t accurate. The other thing to note is that this method takes a lot of trust and belief in the risk because if an Ad flops, it can be pricey.

Set aside just enough money to sustain the business or enough for the family, then spend the rest on marketing.

Lots of fast-growing businesses go for the age-old “you have to spend money to make money” but it can be risky.

If you don’t set aside the appropriate operating costs to sustain your business and then rather than creating a proactive energy for your business’s growth, it becomes a reactive environment (safe to say, we don’t love this method).

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Personally, we’re in this industry to see businesses flourish with the help of our Advertising Creative Agency #hatchetagency. We love being part of an organisations’ story and seeing a business grow from strength to strength, which ultimately takes time — there’s no quick fix. The best method we’ve found is to be more proactive about where you want your business to go and how you’re going to achieve that.

Obviously, everything in business costs money, so getting your budget to align with where you want to see your business grow in 2, 5, 10 years is crucial in setting a budget that works for you and your business. We take a consultative approach to this important stage of any business — whether you’ve been in business for 10 years or 2 years, a business workshop can be a great way of being proactive towards your goals. So come time for budget-setting, you are equipped with the knowledge of where your headed and can prioritise and allocate your funds accordingly.

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Want to know more?
Get in touch, the coffee’s always on us

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