In the funeral profession, perhaps more than in other industries, the companies who work with outside advertising agencies and independent marketing professionals are relatively few. As a result, most businesses who go “outside” for the first time don’t yet know what they don’t know, and that can limit their best chances for success. Even those who have worked with agencies or independent professionals before can easily fall into certain traps that may lead to potential upsets with respect to sales or personalities. We’ve seen and experienced both.
So in the spirit of wanting you to get the very most from your marketing efforts, I am beginning a short series of articles having to do with selecting, working with and nurturing the relationship you have with your outside marketing team. I’ll refer to these outside professionals as your “agency,” but it could just as easily be a design firm, free-lance copy & art team, or a web developer.
Let’s start with selecting your agency.
So, WHY go outside in the first place? After all, who knows more about your business than you do, right? The answer is two-fold. First, you probably didn’t go to school to learn graphic design, public relations, copywriting, marketing strategy and media buying. So whatever marketing you have learned, you’ve acquired on your own, which can lead to an incomplete or even erroneous perspective. A marketing agency is filled with people who have studied their craft, honed their talents, experienced the effects of their efforts across a wide range of client industries, and live solely to see their marketing expertise pay off for their clients. For the same reason you wouldn’t be expected to know the law as well as your lawyer, or tax codes as well as your accountant, you aren’t expected to be as experienced in the art and science of marketing nearly as much as those who do this as a career day-in and day-out. Second, it’s nearly impossible to turn your own eyeballs inward. An agency brings the necessary objectivity to your marketing in the same way your audience does. The agency’s job is to communicate your story through the eyes and ears of your customers, who aren’t nearly as biased toward your business as you are. That’s why they may not drink your Kool-Aid as quickly as you do and may approach the marketing challenges from a perspective that could feel quite foreign (or even wrong) from your point of view. So talent, experience and objectivity are the real reasons you should consider going outside. Marketing dollars are hard enough to come by without wasting any of it through do-it-yourself efforts.
Once you’ve decided to seek “professional help,” how then do you go about selecting the best team to bring fresh solutions to your enterprise?
The great adman, David Ogilvy, wrote that the best way to choose and agency is to look at advertising you envy and reach out to the agencies that created it. If there is no conflict of interest, if they’re not currently working for your direct competitors, you should talk to them. It doesn’t really matter if they’re not heavily experienced in funeral marketing. Every agency has clients whose industries they had to learn about the first time, and even then, every company within an industry has its unique audiences and marketing challenges. There will always be a learning curve for the agency no matter who you choose. Until our first cemetery client, we had never done anything in the death-care space, and yet we increased their pre-need business better than 22% the first year. So reach out beyond your own “comfort zone,” simply look at great ads and marketing ideas you wish you’d have thought of, and then talk to the folks who actually did think of them.
Next, interview the key players in the agency. Find out what drives them, what makes their work successful, and how they’d get up to speed with your business. Ask them about their failures as well. Every agency has failures and you’ll learn a lot about them from whether or not they fess up, or cast the blame on others, and how they responded when the failures occurred. Ask about their resources. They don’t need to have a huge staff, but they should be able to provide you whatever capabilities you need in a timely and cost-effective fashion. And, of course, personalities do play into it. Is the chemistry good? Are they a good fit with the people they’ll be working with on your end?
As you do this, think about how much or how little you’ll need from the agency, and for how long. Many relationships work well in a retainer arrangement wherein the agency is acting as your ongoing marketing department, doing everything a good in-house marketing team would do, only under someone else’s roof. The cost of hiring an agency on retainer may actually be cheaper than hiring an experienced marketing director in-house, while having the entire agency’s wealth of resources at your disposal. On the other hand, if you’re not in need of strategic guidance and are only looking to create an ad campaign, produce a new website or re-design your logo – in other words, specific projects – it may be more advantageous to work on a project-by-project basis. The fundamental difference is how pro-active you want your agency to be on your behalf. Some marketers need strategic help, others only tactics.
Notice that I’ve not yet discussed money. That should be the last thing you talk about before you hire the team. If all else is good, trust me, you’ll work the money part of it out. But basing your selection of an agency on money too early in the review limits you from hopefully finding the goose that lays the golden egg.
Oh, about the title of this post, that’s also a famous line from David Ogilvy. It means that if you do bring an agency on to help with your marketing, make sure that once the goals, benchmarks and budgets are set, you allow them as much room as possible to operate with the most minimal direction or supervision. You shouldn’t have to do their work for them, while at the same time, you should trust that they know marketing as well as you know your own business.
But much more on that in my next installment in which I’ll talk about the care and feeding of your agency so they can be the best they can and do the best they can all for your benefit. Stay tuned…
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Dan Katz is president, creative director of LA ads. To discuss your thoughts with Dan on this blog or any marketing matters, email via this link, or visit www.LAadsMarketing.com. You can also connect with Dan on LinkedIn.See agency work via this link.
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