Why agencies always struggle with their own communications
originally posted to www.carnsight.com
It’s safe to say, creative agencies will always have a little piece of my heart. As I said in my how marketing helped me in PR blog, when I was younger I used to fast forward the programmes (on my VCR) just to get to the adverts. I loved those 30- or even 60-second sumptuous, visual treats. We were blessed with some iconic commercials in the 1990s – from Levis to Guinness to Tango. So, being able to begin my career in a London advertising agency was a dream come true for me.
The reality of working in an advertising agency was somewhat different to the expectation, however. But we worked hard, played harder and made some cracking campaigns along the way. I also made some lifelong friends and met my brother-in-law, sister-in-law and husband, so it was a fruitful period!
While a lot of time was spent preparing and delivering pitches to clients in advertising, and winning new work, there didn’t seem to be a lot of time spent on the way agencies presented themselves to the outside world beyond that. When it came to reputations, and how strong their client work was, word of mouth ruled supreme.
However, this was also the era of poor website design and dumb phones and that bastion of careers chat, LinkedIn, was just a twinkle in a developer’s eye. So, to some extent, agencies weren’t under pressure to manage their reputations in the same way.
Today, digital dominates, and you’re only a click away from a comment, staff review or glowing agency write up. That means current staff and future team can easily find out about their agency, but also clients, prospective and lapsed clients and the industry as a whole can. They can see what it’s like to work there, work with the agency and what kinds of campaigns are being produced.
Agency reputations are now created and evolve whether the company chooses to play an active role in them or not. People understand that agencies are brands, and they understand the power of those brands. Alongside that, there’s also more science to support marketing efforts than ever before. There’s very little that isn’t measurable in some form.
In short, the landscape is completely different from the one in which I started, and it needs to be managed differently.
The good news is that you can play an active role in the way your agency’s perceived, be it through a PR strategy, social media or other agency content.
In thinking about how an agency is currently viewed, and how you’d like it to be perceived, there are various things to consider. A good place to start is interrogating the agency’s point of difference – your unique selling point (or USP). Often, agencies start off with a clear USP – it’s often the reason they’re founded in the first place – but sometimes that changes over time. That could be down to the market place changing, personnel changing or new tech advances.
When we run our Three Lens Messaging Sessions with clients, their point of difference is one of the first things we discuss. And you might be surprised at how many different versions of that USP we get from a group of senior people around the table. Sometimes we find out that they’ve been talking about the agency in a number of different ways, but not communicated those ways to each other.
All content – be it social media; white papers; PR activity; even internal communications – should spring from what the agency stands for, so it’s important to agree on this.
However, even when an agency is clear about what sets it apart from the market, and has a strategy to communicate it, there often remains a hurdle to overcome. Communicating consistently.
We see a lot of peaks and troughs in agency communication, and it’s not hard to see why. Profiling an agency is rarely one person’s job – it often sits between marketing teams, new business and the senior team. And actually, it’s actually something everyone in that agency can play a part in, to a greater or lesser extent.
Agencies often plan events or launch prominent campaigns and put a lot of effort into communicating them, and that can lead to spikes in activity at certain times. Then, another activity becomes more pressing, and social media accounts, content and PR activities are left to languish for a period of time.
While a burst of activity can certainly provoke short term interest and attention, it’s communicating consistently that helps build a strong, lasting reputation. It can also help to ensure the right messages about your agency are appearing, and the narrative isn’t being led by others.
To create consistency in agency communications, you need to create a culture of PR. Building the agency’s profile needs to part of a consistent strategy, and it should have an overall owner – even when there are different stakeholders involved.
Agencies can be excellent at telling their clients how and why they need to communicate regularly, but find it hard to turn that advice on themselves. The cobbler’s shoes are always the worst heeled.
That’s where an external eye can come in. Be it agency PR, social media, blogs, newsletters or website content – having someone else who’s dedicated to keeping on point, responding to current events and hitting targets each month can be invaluable.
If you want to see a bit more about how consistently agency PR and communication can work – have a look at our work for Fiora, Aer Studios and Armadillo.
At Carnsight Communications we create strategies and campaigns to showcase our clients’ brilliant work through PR, content and social media. We help them get noticed by the right audience, at the right time. We specialise in creative agency PR.
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