What Is A Creative Agency?
Creative agencies are organizations that provide a number of different creative services to all kinds of clients. These services basically come down to four different fields of creative work:
- Advertising
- Design
- Technology
- Strategy
Of course, these four often overlap and a lot of creative companies offer more than one service. They employ experts and innovative minds that have the knowledge and vision to make your brand really stand out.
Your business can either decide to rely on an in-house team or hire an external agency. However, even those who go with the in-house option often rely on creative agencies to some extent.
77% of in-house teams choose to partner with different creative firms and outsource some of the tasks to them.
All of the mentioned services are very important for your business. Thus it’s critical that you know how to choose the right creative agency.
How To Select The Right Creative Agency For Your Brand
1. Decide Which Services Your Business Needs
As it was said, creative agencies offer a number of different services. Some of them choose to focus only on one area, while others offer full-service assistance to your company. More precisely, creative agencies can provide businesses with one or more of these:
- Web design
- Digital strategy
- Overall marketing strategy
- Digital advertising
- Branding
- Engineering services
- Consulting
- Print Design
- PR
- Software development
Of course, the list doesn’t end here. For basically any creative job that needs to be done in order to boost your business and your brand, there are creative agencies that are able to help you.
Thus it’s crucial to know exactly what your organization needs. You need to be familiar with its weaknesses and recognize which areas are in need of serious improvement. Whether you have problems with design, digital advertising or developing a marketing strategy, there’s always a top creative agency you can hire to fix this.
2. Best Creative Agencies Will Have Flawless Portfolios
When searching for creative companies to hire or partner with, you have to pay attention to their previous experience.
Obviously, it’s perfect if they have already worked with someone from your branch. In this case, you should closely examine this work in order to check whether they have a proper understanding of your industry.
Furthermore, contacting some of their previous clients is not a bad idea. You might actually like the work a certain creative company has done, but you still know nothing about their process and their culture. Some first-hand experience might come in handy.
While experience in your field is definitely an advantage, it’s not a must. If you really like the work of a creative agency and they seem versatile and imaginative enough, they might be the right pick regardless of their lack of industry experience. Sometimes it’s best to listen to your gut on this one.
3. A Creative Agency Must Be Able To Fulfill The Particular Goals You Established
The fact that you decided which services you need from an agency still means nothing without setting specific goals you want to achieve.
Setting the right goals is crucial. For instance, when it comes to marketing, marketers that set goals are 429% more likely to report success than those who don’t.
Hence when picking the right creative marketing agency you need to know your goals, communicate with the agency and see if they’re the right people for the job.
Your choice and success will depend on your business’ needs. Some agencies may be good at boosting brand awareness, while others excel at increasing traffic on your website or your short-term revenue. Thus you have to make sure not to miss this step.
4. Top Creative Companies Have Strict Deadlines That They Adhere To
Every creative agency has its specific process. Some take their time while others prefer a quick and efficient approach.
You may have found an agency that fits your brand perfectly, but if they’re not able to deliver an ad or a design solution on time, you’ll have to keep looking. Surely, building a business and branding it is a long process, but sometimes there are important short-term goals that your company has to fulfill.
For example, if you want a social media campaign that focuses on your Christmas discounts, it’s not of much help if a creative design agency delivers visuals in February.
Hence when negotiating, talk openly about important deadlines. If the agency can’t meet them, your search is not over yet.
5. Determine Your Budget Before Hiring A Creative Agency
With all the expenses your business has, sometimes it seems that spending a bit of extra cash on creative agencies is a waste of money.
It’s no surprise 28% of marketers think that securing enough budget is their biggest marketing challenge.
While being economical is a trait of any serious entrepreneur, being overly stingy isn’t. It’s vital to determine just how important this campaign or rebrand is for you and which exact benefits you’re going to have in the long run. Then discuss this topic with other decision-makers and decide just how much that’s worth in dollars.
After you’ve done all this, go back to previous steps and see which creative agency offers the best value for your money.
It’s always more appropriate to allocate a few extra dollars for this purpose than to go for a completely inadequate option. Then this whole effort will really be a waste of money.
Top Creative Agencies
5 Traits Of The Best Creative Agencies
1. Best Creative Firms Have A Great Company Culture
Company culture is hugely important for any company, not just creative ones. Businesses with strong cultures are far superior in terms of success and income. These companies’ revenue is 4 times higher than that of companies that don’t nurture company culture well enough.
More importantly, strong company culture means higher employee engagement, which further means a more dedicated approach to their tasks and clients. Just hanging around the company, seeing how they work and experiencing the overall atmosphere can be very valuable for picking the right creative agency.
Aim for the creative companies that seem collaborative and encourage passion, innovation and initiative. Avoid those that seem indifferent, reactive and unimaginative.
2. Top Creative Agencies Are Both Creative And Strategic
All services that creative companies offer, be it design, advertising or technology are equal parts art and science.
These creative teams don’t come up with ideas out of thin air. On the contrary, their creative process is always reinforced by hard facts and solid, well-established strategies. Best innovative ideas are rooted in data and prior experience.
Top creative firms are neither too rigid nor too loose when it comes to their creative process. Having the right measure here is absolutely crucial for success.
3. Best Creative Agencies Will Work Collaboratively
Sometimes, everyday life in creative agencies can get chaotic and disorganized. They’re usually working on multiple different projects with a number of people involved in each and every one of them.
That’s why it’s very important that a creative company exhibits smooth collaboration within their own departments and teams, as well as with the client. For this, they need to have a reliable project and delivery managers, but that’s not all.
All the members of the team need to work closely with each other, communicate and be up to date with the latest developments on the project. This is a virtue of a truly reliable creative agency.
4. Top Creative Firms Will Track Record Of Success And Provide A Strong Return On Investment
When it comes to best creative companies, being strategic entails tracking the results of their creative efforts. This approach ensures valuable insights that help the agency to adapt quickly and learn from mistakes.
The exact metrics that they choose to track will depend on the goals you’ve set. At the end of the day, most clients are simply interested if they’re getting value for their money.
Calculating return on investment is not that easy for marketers, designers or consultants.
As a matter of fact, 42% of marketers claim that determining ROI is their biggest marketing challenge.
The best agencies, of course, are able to both calculate revenue from their efforts and generate it.
5. Best Creative Companies Will Provide Full-service Offerings And Put Emphasis On Professional Relationships With Clients
While there are certain top-class creative agencies that decided to limit themselves to just one or two lines of creative work, most of the top agencies offer a wide array of services.
Even if they’re not able to do the whole job themselves, they’re so well-organized and connected that they always have another reliable agency to which they can outsource that part of the job.
Moreover, a trustworthy agency will pay a lot of attention on nurturing good relationships with their clients. This is very important in an era when there’s very little loyalty between clients and agencies.
In advertising, the average client-agency relationship lasts for less than 3 years.
This is a huge decline compared to 1984, when it lasted for 7.2 years on average. Thus creative advertising agencies that care about their clients and that manage steady relationships with them for years are very valuable and hard to find.
How Do Creative Agencies Charge Clients?
When it comes to determining your budget and getting value for your money, you’ll have to pay attention to the way an agency bills their services. There are several different types of financial arrangements in this respect.
1. Creative Companies Charge By Time And Effort
One of the most common ways creative firms calculate the price is by time and effort invested in the project. Usually, they’ll charge you by the hour, plus they’ll expect you to pay for any potential materials spent as well as other additional expenses.
This method may be tricky as the creative company could prolong their work using suspicious excuses in order to charge more. This way you’re not just paying more, but you’ll also be losing a lot of your precious time.
However, it’s quite safe if the agency offers an estimation of how many hours of work they need for the project and stick to it. Just make sure to agree on this in advance.
2. Creative Agencies Can Conduct Results-Oriented Billing
Sometimes, when an agency promises you remarkable results, it’s not merely a strategy to convince you to hire them. Some of the agencies will agree to be paid according to the results delivered.
This can be a great way to protect yourself and avoid wasting money. If there are no results, then you pay the minimum price so there’s not much damage. If the results are really good, you’ll be paying more but you’ll know you invested smartly. Simple as that.
3. Creative Firms Can Charge By The Project
Agreeing on a fixed price for a certain project can be convenient whenever it’s difficult to estimate the exact number of hours an agency needs to finish it.
Of course, agencies usually set up their prices based on some sort of evaluation of the amount of work they’ll need. And they’ll often keep this assessment for themselves.
Here you have to rely on estimating the value this project has for your company. Since you don’t know how much time they’ll need to complete it, you have to make sure it pays off at the end of the day.
4. Do Creative Agencies Charge An Hourly Or Flat Fee?
Which method of billing you’ll choose will depend on the scope of the project(s) and your own needs. If it’s a rather small project that can be quite well-estimated in terms of workload, going for the hourly fee is just fine.
Of course, you can choose the hourly fee with bigger projects as well, especially with reliable and reputable creative agencies.
Nevertheless, sometimes when the scope of the job is too large it’s better to go for the flat fee, based on how much you think you can gain from it.
Also, if there’s a large ongoing amount of work that the agency does for you every month, agreeing on a monthly flat fee can save you a lot of time. You don’t have to calculate the number of hours the agency has put in and whether they’ve been stretching their work unnecessarily. Sometimes this approach can lead to a long and healthy client-agency relationship.
Creative Agencies Have An Organized Process And Roadmap To Success
1. Top Creative Agencies Have Their Strategy Clearly Outlined
It may seem that in this day and age all companies would have detailed marketing strategies, both for digital and traditional channels. But this is not true.
It turns out that as much as 49 percent of organizations don’t have a clearly defined marketing strategy at all.
That’s why it’s extremely important that the creative agency you choose to hire has a strategic approach to their work and that they can effectively adapt this strategy to your goals.
Normally, before starting to work on any particular creative tasks, they have to have a clear and concrete plan based on the client’s needs and background. Every creative agency has to know their clients’ target audience, (desired) brand image, mission, core values and messages that the company wishes to send.
2. Best Creative Firms Conduct A Thorough Market Research
The second step, after getting familiar with the client’s company is getting familiar with the client’s market and competitors. Proper market research is extremely important, so it’s no wonder that the market research industry has generated over $45 billion of revenue in 2017.
Getting to know your industry and your most successful competitors can bring about a lot of different benefits for your company.
Obviously, this doesn’t mean copying your competitors’ strategies, messages or creative solutions. But simply knowing what works best in your field can serve as an inspiration for creative agencies when preparing your campaigns and projects. It also helps define and describe the demographics your business should be targeting.
3. Best Creative Companies Will Identify New Deliverables
Once the research is done, it’s important to establish which deliverables your company needs, based on the goals that were set. For instance, a creative web design agency could identify the need for new navigation or page layout, and a digital marketing agency may decide that you need to boost your SEO or social media presence.
Furthermore, there needs to be a tactic laid out on how to make these deliverables successful and effective. Every decision about deliverables should have clear reasoning and a concise plan behind it – the agency needs to explain why, when and how they should be implemented.
4. Top Creative Agencies Brainstorm Ideas And Make Sure They Correspond With Data And Strategy
What people usually see as creative work starts only now, after conducting a meticulous research and laying out a general strategy. Now it’s the time to put in some actual creative work.
Creative teams can now start brainstorming. But they have to have in mind that the ideas must be aligned with the data obtained and the strategy laid out.
And creative agencies are well-aware of this fact.
57% of marketing executives believe that data-driven marketing is crucial for success in today’s market.
Hence brainstorming in creative companies is more than a purely creative process that relies on the team members’ ingenuity. On the contrary, it has to be backed by concrete data and correspond to the previously designed strategy.
5. Creating Campaigns/Initiatives and Executing Them
With brainstorming, the creative process in the narrow sense has only started. Creating an entire campaign or finishing a serious project takes time, patience, skill, and expertise.
Hours of writing, drawing or coding may not seem too exciting, but it’s the crucial part of the job. Innovative ideas that were gained from brainstorming don’t mean anything if they can’t be transformed into a solid, well-rounded final product.
And once the campaign is conceived and designed in detail, the work’s not done. To execute it properly an agency has to be diligent and detail-oriented. Some campaigns demand commitment on a daily basis.
6. Best Creative Agencies Will Gather Results, Analyze Them And Adapt Accordingly
Every product of any sort of creative work is a kind of a living organism. Even with all the data, experience and a meticulous strategic approach nobody can guarantee that it will work to your advantage.
Thus it’s vital that the creative agency is checking the feedback and the most important metrics at all times. That way, if the campaign doesn’t seem to be working, they can analyze what happened, adapt and fix the mistakes.
In the age where all sorts of analytical tools are accessible and easy to use, you may think that doing proper measurements of the campaigns’ performance is a given for any creative agency. But this is not the case.
Take social media marketers for instance.
As much as 53% of social media marketers don’t measure the success of their campaigns.
So be very careful when hiring an agency and make sure that performing measurements and analyzing feedback is a part of the deal.
5 Questions To Ask Before Hiring A Creative Agency
1. What Are Our Goals And How Will A Creative Agency Determine Our Objectives?
As it was said, determining goals should be the first step of any marketing, design or business endeavor. Establishing objectives and devising a business plan doubles your chances of growing your business.
It’s crucial to let the creative agency know what your business is about and what your long-term plans are in general. Then you can define these goals more precisely with them, establish some short-term goals that will help you reach your ultimate objectives and get to work.
2. How Will Your Creative Agency Create A Strategy To Achieve Those Goals? Why Will This Strategy Work For Our Specific Brand?
It’s clear that you shouldn’t interfere with the creative process too much and leave it to professionals. But it doesn’t mean people from the creative agency don’t owe you an explanation as to why their ideas will work well for you.
Every campaign is different and should be tailor-made, so accounts of previous success may mean nothing. The agency should be able to prove that they know what your business is about and provide justification as to why this specific strategy will work for this specific brand or product.
3. What Results Can We Expect And When Can We Expect To See Them?
Top creative companies will always be as concrete as possible when it comes to estimates and future projections. They won’t be trying to be vague or ambiguous when asked about exact numbers or benefits you can expect.
Of course, there are many unpredictable factors in this business so you shouldn’t be too harsh on the agency if there are no instant results. But in the long run, it’s essential that specific targets are defined and fulfilled.
4. What Tools/Resources Will You Use To Concept, Create And Execute The Campaign And Gather Results?
Getting acquainted with the tools the agency has at its disposal can tell you a lot about their approach. Using the right tools and resources to create and automate the campaign as well as measure its success can make the whole difference.
As much as 80 percent of marketers that use automation software claim that it helped them generate more leads.
Analytical and automation tools can often give a much-needed boost to your campaign and your business.
5. How Will You Communicate With/Collaborate With Our Company?
The question of communication is more important than it might seem and if the agency has a reputation for poor communication, that can be a deal-breaker.
You have to make sure that the creative agency you hired is normally available for all sorts of consultations. Finally, it’s vital to agree on how often you’ll get the updates about the progress they’ve been making and which channels of communication will be used.
Who Are The Team Members At A Leading Creative Agency?
1. Project Manager/Point Of Contact
Project managers are of huge importance for any project of a considerable size. Their job is very diverse and includes a number of duties.
They should ensure smooth communication between different teams and departments, as well as between the agency and clients. A project manager also gives out particular tasks to team members and makes sure they’re completed on time.
2. Creative Director
In most creative agencies, the person of utmost trust when it comes to the quality of creative work is the creative director. Apart from making sure that the content is valuable and appropriate, he or she also makes decisions about assigning tasks to different teams.
In addition, creative directors sometimes create content themselves, since they come from creative backgrounds themselves. They are experts in the job and true leaders of their teams.
3. Art Director
Art director basically sits between the creative team and the creative director and is involved actively in the creative process.
Art directors guide and oversee particular tasks and campaigns, using their expertise and creative impulse. While creative directors have more of a supervisory role, art directors work more closely with the team.
4. Copywriters
Copywriters’ job is to write all kinds of content for marketing purposes. This includes blogs, articles, social media posts, banner ads, scripts for commercials and basically any sort of advertising content you can imagine.
The tasks they get are assigned to them by directors, editors and project managers, who also control the quality of the produced content. Copywriting demands creative thinking as well as a good understanding of the client’s market, different types of audience and advertising industry in general.
5. Marketers
Marketers are advertising experts that have a number of marketing-related duties which help round off a successful campaign.
These duties include helping create strategies, managing external partners, being involved in conceiving a brand voice or tracking results of campaigns. They are multi-faceted and should be very well familiar with both creative and business aspect of the advertising job.
6. Digital Strategists
Developing a sound strategy that will boost a client’s digital marketing efforts demands a versatile approach and expertise in a number of fields. Digital strategists create overall strategies that should improve a certain brand’s online presence and then supervise their execution.
The job of digital strategist covers many areas and overlaps with many other positions, such as social media manager, business analyst or web analytics expert, to mention just a few.
7. Brand Strategists
The brand strategist’s job is even more comprehensive. A digital strategy is just one aspect of the overall brand strategy developed at the creative branding agency.
When creating a brand strategy, they need to conceive the entire brand image and voice from scratch, or recognize flaws in the current one and fix them. A brand strategist should have more than just a perfect understanding of the market – they also need a rare creative impulse that can turn this knowledge into a successful marketing strategy.
8. Graphic Designers
The job of a graphic designer is creating compelling visual solutions that are an integral part of any campaign. They combine images, motion graphics and typography in order to communicate a message that a brand wants to send.
As humans are predominantly visual beings, their job is of huge importance. Images are vital for the success of any campaign.
For instance, tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than those without images, while Facebook posts that contain a photo see 2.3 times more engagement than plain text ones.
9. Web Developers
Inside creative agencies, web developers also play a key role. A quality website is one of the most important aspects of any brand’s digital presence.
The job of a web developer is to create and maintain a functional website with flawless performance and user-friendly interface. They also deal with the on-site SEO elements as well as more technical aspects of the campaigns in general.
10. Storyboard Artists
Storyboard artists’ job is sketching different scenes for commercials and other video content. Their drawings are based on the ideas of copywriters and creative directors, with whom they work closely.
Back in the days, these were drawn on an actual board, but today most storyboard artists have gone digital. This ensures easier modifications and smoother collaboration with their colleagues and clients.
Why Do I Need A Creative Agency?
It’s simple. Best creative agencies are packed with top experts from any of the creative fields that can help boost your business, whether it’s advertising, design, consulting or technology.
You have everything you need in one place. The same company is responsible for developing your brand image, devising your strategy and executing it to the smallest detail.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you can just let them do all the work and sit back and relax. You need to be involved in the process, communicate your objectives and supervise their work to a certain extent. Only this way they can really understand what you want and get the most out of their knowledge and talent.
Not all agencies are the same. Be careful when choosing – the right creative agency for you is the one that’s attentive towards clients, understands your brand and provides top-notch content followed with measurable results.
So, take your time and explore the best creative agencies around the world at the top of the page to find the right partner for your business goals.
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