Your Agency Is Your Not-So-Secret Weapon for Business Growth
When you partner with an advertising agency, you’re not just signing up for clever slogans or flashy ads. You’re gaining a teammate that works tirelessly behind the scenes to fuel your business growth. Your agency makes sure every dollar of your investment is working hard to deliver the results you’re looking for.
Let’s pull back the curtain on seven often-invisible ways your advertising agency supports your success. These behind-the-scenes efforts transform a good campaign into a great one and demonstrate how your agency partner quietly becomes one of your most valuable paths to measurable growth.
Your Advertising Agency Plans Your Strategy
Before you sign your contract, the advertising agency you’re considering should explain their marketing strategy ideas that will help you reach your goals.
First, you’ll tell them how you’d like to grow your business, whether you want more leads, want to be on the first page of Google, want to grow a social media following for brand awareness, or something else. You’ll also need to share your monthly or annual budget.
The agency’s strategy team will assemble a plan that connects you with your target audience and drives your business toward your goals. Expect a detailed plan that outlines investment by month and shows you exactly where your spend is going.
Your B2C or B2B Advertising Agency Finds Your Audience
Part of developing your strategy includes determining where your target audience is spending their time. That might be on:
- Connected TV or streaming services; 86% of Americans pay for at least one.
- Social media platforms; 246 million Americans — that’s about 73% of the total population — have profiles.
- Google; the search giant processes 5.9 million searches every minute. (That’s 8.5 billion searches per day or a whopping 3.1 trillion per year.)
- Streaming audio services; Spotify boasts 675 million monthly active listeners.
- Elsewhere online; the average internet user visits as many as 130 webpages per day.
- Traditional media; older demographics or wide target audiences are sometimes best reached through traditional placements, such as print publications or cable TV.
Your advertising agency partner will conduct market research to determine where your business should be present and where you’re most likely to see the results you’re looking for.
They “Fill the Funnel” for You
If your business is looking for a complete marketing plan, you’ll want to partner with an agency that functions as an extension of your in-house team. When you hand over the marketing and advertising reins to your agency partner, they’ll create a strategy that addresses consumers at every point in their consideration process.
Academically, this is sometimes called “filling the marketing funnel.” The marketing funnel is a visual representation of the customer journey, guiding prospective customers from brand awareness to conversions. The funnel analogy is perfect because it narrows down a large group of potential customers into a smaller, engaged group.
- Top-of-funnel strategies drive brand awareness. You want as many people as possible to know your business exists and understand how you might be able to help them solve a problem.
- Mid-funnel strategies help your prospects evaluate their options. These strategies focus on nurturing potential leads and addressing questions.
- Bottom-of-funnel strategies are targeted to those who are ready to make a purchase or take action. These strategies focus on closing the deal and getting the conversion.
Your Agency Designs Your Ads
After you’ve approved your strategy and investment, your advertising agency will begin executing your plan. If part of your strategy includes ads, your agency’s creative team will design and produce them for you, giving you opportunities for revision requests and approval.
Strong creative catches attention by sympathizing with your audience and providing a solution to the problem they’re looking to solve. Because humans buy with emotion and then justify with logic, creative connects the two and gives the viewer a reason to click on the ad.
Ad production includes:
- A skilled copywriter to craft the words in your ad.
- A professional designer who assembles the visual portion.
- A creative director guides the process and ensures your ad is well constructed and meaningful.
To achieve effective creative, send any images or b-roll video you have to your agency. If you don’t have any, your agency can send a film crew or photographer to capture it. Authentic imagery and video outperform stock. As many as 87% of online shoppers say that video content influences their decision to make a purchase, and 91% say video quality affects how much they trust the business behind the ad.
Your KC Advertising Agency Manages and Optimizes Your Digital Campaigns
There’s more to advertising than strategizing and creating ads. The work never stops, even after the ads launch. Your B2C or B2B advertising agency will monitor your digital ads for multiple reasons — all of them meant to maximize your investment in marketing.
- Pacing. Your agency’s media team will manage ad spend for your campaign’s budget over its duration. Pacing refers to the rate your campaign spends its budget or delivers impressions over a period of time. Experienced media teams use pacing to detect performance problems before reports or dashboards reveal them.
- Refining placements and target audiences. By making real-time adjustments, your agency’s media team works to optimize ad spend and maximize reach. They may adjust bidding strategies or targeting based on live performance data.
- A/B testing. Comparing two versions of an ad to see which performs better is the heart of A/B testing. Media teams use a data-driven approach to identify the ad variation that drives the best outcomes based on your goals.
They Analyze and Report Data
Among the benefits of digital advertising is the data you received during and after your campaigns. A reputable advertising agency offers transparent reporting, so you can monitor your campaign performance. The reporting shows whether you’ve reached your goals.
- If your goal is reach or awareness, you’ll be interested in the total number of impressions, or number of times your audience saw your ad.
- If your goal is engagement, you’ll want to know whether you’ve grown organic audiences, such as social media followers, or if your website’s traffic has increased.
- If your goal is conversions, you’ll want to see how many leads you generated and compare it to how many users took your desired action (“co=nverted”), such as making a purchase.
For traditional media, data is less clearly defined.
- Circulation. In print media, this refers to the number of copies distributed or sold.
- Return on investment. This metric compares the profitability of your business compared to the costs of running traditional ad placements.
- Reach. For cable TV placements, you may receive information on the number of households tuned into programming during which your ad played.
Your Advertising Agency Takes the Journey With You
Your agency should walk alongside you during your marketing or advertising journey, providing support and guidance along the way, while cheering on your successes.
Kansas City advertising agency iFOCUS Marketing & Advertising helps your business achieve sustainable growth through measurable data, creative vision, and innovative strategy. When our clients partner with us, they unlock tactics and media that break from tradition, and get the true partnership they’re looking for. We’re not a vendor; we’re part of your team and want to help you reach your growth goals.
Talk to us about what you want to achieve, and we’ll create a growth strategy to get you there.
