All great creative work has been forged with constraints.
Monet painted how light looks on the haystacks of Giverny because he wanted to avoid painting the same snobby subject matter as the Victorians.
Early American folk and blues music sounded raw and rough because the quality of the available instruments was raw and rough.
Creative agencies work the same way. Give us a tight set of guidelines, and we can make magic.
Good Creative Agencies Are Collaborative
To effectively create an ad campaign that brings you more business, a creative agency knows they need to learn first. Here’s how that works at an agency with a strong operational strategy to help clients like you:
- Discovery: You meet with a sales executive who listens to your needs, provides business intelligence on your market and audience, and creates a vision for how you can succeed.
- Sign-off: You move forward with an informed strategy that the team will implement.
- Meeting your agency team: You meet with a client success manager who explains how your campaign will work, what is needed from you, and what the creative agency team will do.
- Working with the creatives: You connect with the creative team, who learns more about your business, understands how you do business, and collaborates with you on an approach to make the strategy and your goal come to life.
- Creative work begins: The creative team gathers information and assets that they need to create the elements of your campaign, including photos or videos from your business, marketing materials you provide, testimonials from your customers, or any other resource that may be useful.
- A first look: You get to see the first draft of the advertising materials for your campaign with time to critique them. You provide feedback. The team discusses how they will honor your changes or engage with you on how to find the right balance between your vision and their intent.
- Revisions are made: The creative agency reviews your feedback and makes changes for your approval. When you are satisfied, the project is complete.
- Time to launch and monitor: The project launches and the creative team monitors its progress, providing monthly data on performance. The creative team may have even chosen to A/B test different versions of ads in your campaign to make pivots toward the material that has proven most engaging among audiences.
You can see that effort and collaboration are required to make a successful campaign work. You are in the driver’s seat as much as the agency is. Your point of view is critical. Business intelligence is critical. The resources you provide, your feedback, and the initial need that you have all inform what kind of marketing is best for you.
What To Look for in a Kansas City Creative Agency
Excellent creative agencies understand that you, as the client, play the most important role in bringing high-performing advertising to life. True, agencies are proud of all their talent who contribute to a business’s growth.
However, it’s always important to remember that creatives work for the client, whether they’re performing brand development services or assisting as a web design agency. If we don’t understand your goals, your audience, and your experience, we’re creating in the dark.
A creative agency that puts the client first looks like this:
- They listen.
- They make your expertise feel valued.
- They rely on analytics and research.
- They want to get to know you well.
- They want to understand what will best benefit your business.
- They work together (and with you) to achieve your goals.
- They are eager to hear your feedback and engage collaboratively.
You’ve heard this one before, but it is nowhere more true than at any creative or brand development ad agency: your goals are their goals. An agency succeeds when their clients succeed.
Find an Agency That Views Creativity as a Client-First Service
Too often, creatives can fall into the habit of standing behind “their vision,” and not the client’s. Anyone who has been in a creative field for a long time knows that this is simply a sign of artistic immaturity.
As creatives grow, their understanding of the artistic process becomes far more open and generous. They know that the myth of the reclusive artist obsessing over a work of singular genius is just that, a myth — or at least a rarity. Artists build off of each other. They thrive on collaboration. Constraints, challenges, and adversity bring about things that feel new and original because they’ve been tested and tried.
Your content marketing agency should take the same approach. They should feel engaged, interested, responsive, and eager to collaborate. They should go into the ad creation process knowing your core objectives, audience, and goals. When you see what they’ve created, you should feel a shock of recognition that they’ve truly seen and understood your brand.
We Turn Your Business Needs Into Something Amazing, Unexpected, and Yet Completely YOU
When you decide to explore iFOCUS’ capabilities as a Kansas City creative agency, you’ll find that we view our creativity as a service, not as a talent we need to prove. This is surprisingly refreshing in the advertising community and among most brand, content marketing, and web design agencies. Most creatives fit the cliché: they want you to recognize them, when they should be recognizing their clients’ needs.
Our view of creativity is about what we can do together. Our Creative Director often remarks how critical it is to the creative process that all ideas, voices, and perspectives are on the table — specifically, yours.
If you don’t feel that’s the vibe you’re getting from your current marketing approach, consider iFOCUS.
That’s it. That’s the blog.
Peter Mishler is a senior copywriter. He enjoys learning everything he can about your business to help build your authority and web presence. Peter is the author of three internationally published books, for which he has received critical acclaim and national writing awards. He loves spending time with his wife and two children.
