There are a million ways to reach your customers — but engaging them effectively and creating genuine connections has gotten increasingly difficult. Brands now have multiple channels at their disposal to help them get their slice of the pie. That’s why it’s important to implement a robust communications strategy to build brand awareness, drive sales and set yourself apart from the competition.
However, it’s tough for brands to juggle all these channels without some expert help, so it’s only normal to outsource some of the work and leave it to the specialists. However, this poses another problem — who do you hire and for what function? PR, content marketing, digital marketing, social media…it can be tough to draw a line between one job and another. After recruiting all your agency partners, how do you make sure they work together to launch one cohesive campaign?
Here are some handy tips that might help when engaging multiple agencies to effectively drive all you business goals:
Have a concrete plan
Before signing on any new partners, review your campaign plans and ask yourself these questions
- Who is my audience and how do they consume information?
- Where do they hang out (online)?
- What online format would work best, and how much money can we spend on this?
- What are we trying to achieve?
- How do we measure success?
While these are questions your future agency partners can help you answer, it’s good to give them some thought and prepare a great brief before you head out and look for the people you want to work with. The clearer the brief, the more accurately the agencies will be able to develop proposals and costs, and the quicker you can get your project off the ground.
Know what you need
Once you’ve locked in your potential agency, be clear about what you want and need – whether it’s driving product sales, brand awareness or credibility. The more accurate your brief is, the easier it is to be accurate about costs.
To avoid hiring agencies that offer the same or similar services, be careful and clear when selecting your partners.
Encourage collaboration and teamwork
Once you’ve selected your partners, you then need them to work with you and together. This is sometimes the tricky part — because a lot of communications agencies offer a similar selection of services, it is not uncommon to sign ‘competing’ agencies. However this is normal, and everyone involved should act as professionals.
But in the event that there is animosity or a tension in the air, especially in the early stages of working together, the fastest way to overcome this and get everyone working together is to make the campaign’s end goals very clear to everyone involved. To foster collaboration, facilitate multi-agency brainstorms where everyone has a say, is involved, and can bounce ideas off of each other.
Enjoy the ride
Managing multiple agencies for a single project might be daunting, but if all parties can seamlessly work together, your work becomes easier. While it can be a messy ride sometimes, it’s important to celebrate success together and have fun!
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