How to brief your agency
It is all in the briefing!
A good agency will work with you to identify your marketing and communications objectives going through a structured approach in order to learn about your business and work out the best way forward to communicate your messages.
However, it is always a good idea to know what you want in the first place before engaging with a marketing agency. Knowing your business vision, values, challenges, ambitions, competitors, and market sector, is crucial to being able to give your agency a considered brief which will ultimately give you a better opportunity to reach your goals.
Why do I need marketing?
Good marketing is the foundation of a successful business.
Marketing permeates everything in our day to day lives, from what we wear, what we eat, to the websites we use, and the ads we see. Marketing profoundly affects everything we do.
Kotler and Keller state that; ‘Successful marketing is a never-ending pursuit.’ In order for marketing to run effectively, it is something that you have to keep working on. Implementing one element of a communications plan will be very short-lived and not necessarily give you the results that you are looking for. Marketing should be reviewed in line with your business plan to make sure the messaging that is promoted is on-brand and reflects the ambitions of your company.
In order to communicate with your market sector and stand out from your competitors you need to have your brand visible and that is why you need to engage with marketing.
Getting to know you
When we work with our clients we really want to understand their business as this forms the basis of our marketing audit and ultimately our brief going forward to work from.
For any marketing to be effective we need to understand a company’s mission, goals and corporate strategy.
Mission statement:
This should cover the following elements:
Company goals:
These can be short or long term and are most likely to include:
Corporate strategy:
A strategy will determine the means for utilising resources in the areas of production, logistics, finance, research and development, human resources, IT, and marketing to reach the company’s goals.
Any marketing that is undertaken should reflect the aims and ethos of the overall corporate plan which covers the mission statement, goals and strategy.
Situation analysis:
When looking at your marketing and reviewing it or compiling a strategy for the first time it is useful to employ a SWOT analysis of your company.
The SWOT analysis has the benefit of placing an organisation’s strengths and weaknesses in the context of the identified opportunities and threats, so implying the extent to which an organisation is capable of leveraging an opportunity or fending off an apparent threat. It is an effective scene-setting tool.
Strengths – on which to build
Weaknesses – to rectify
Opportunities – to consider
Threats – to address
Having all this information to hand then allows your marketing team or agency to fully understand the company and how it should be communicated to its target market.
This will then fed into a briefing document that gives us a blueprint to work from and share with the team.
Getting results
Working through these elements ahead of writing your own brief or briefing an agency will mean you have all the facts at your fingers tips that will help to mould the outcomes of your brief. Whether promoting a company, product, or service having this information to hand will help to keep your messaging on brand.
The simple premise of marketing is that to be successful, any organisation must understand its customers’ requirements and satisfy them in a manner that gives the organisation an edge over its competitors. Consistent review and tweaking of your communications plan will give you better results and keep your customers engaged.
We work in partnership with our clients in order to fully understand their business and to feel part of it, but most importantly to be able to deliver the right creative applied to the right marketing materials to get the right results.
