How big does your company need to be before you use marketing professionals?

For brands who are growing  and becoming profitable there comes a time when you choose to professionalise your marketing.  Many businesses decide at this point that they have two choices: to hire a staffer or to buy in expertise from an agency.

Why you need better marketing

The needs are clear – you want more traction with your marketing, you suspect that there are better ways of doing promotion and marketing to get inbound leads and you can afford a budget just for marketing.  These are good signs.

You have identified clearly that your brand has a need and the possible shortcomings of your current set-up.

Hire versus buy: the dilemma

There are advantages and disadvantages – the internal member of staff will need to have well-rounded skills in a range of marketing disciplines (web, advertising, PR, copywriting, print design) and therefore a senior hire with this range of skills is more expensive than a junior.

Using an agency also requires decisions about their skills and area of expertise compared with the type of marketing and communications activity your brand has done in the past or plans to do in the future.

Costs are usually the determining factor

It may be less costly to hire external advisers compared to the cost of a senior member of staff – compare the full cost of hiring and paying (including office costs) a new senior marketer with the price an agency would charge you.

Have a couple of ‘chemistry’ or getting-to-know-you meetings with local marketing agencies and ask their advice.  Also ask to speak to a couple of their recent clients to see if they also made the same transition.

A third option worth reviewing is using a freelancer.  You don’t have the full hire costs of a full time person but can often get very experienced people at lower fee rates.  Check out the freelance hire websites like eLance.com and Freelance.com, Freelancer.com and guru.com.  I’ve successfully hired people for my agency and for clients using eLance.

Creative Agency Secrets has two current clients who use us for mentoring work.  They hired a junior marketer and we speak weekly to review their work, priorities and give guidance.  Could this work for you?  Give us a call – we always offer a free 20 minute first call.

In the meanwhile here are a few other articles that may help you figure out what to do

• Advertising – do it yourself or hire
• Hire a PR firm or do it yourself?
• Do it yourself internet marketing, or hire
• Hubspot offers inbound marketing tutorials for people using its website / content marketing system.
• Read Creative Agency Secrets’ assessment of Hubspot and how to do it yourself
• SEO do it yourself or hire a professional
• Small Business marketing – DIY or hire a pro?
• Web design – do it yourself or hire someone
• DIY or hire a market research company?

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Here at Creative Agency towers, we are usually coy about sharing information about our clients.  But today one blogged a detailed update about the work we’re doing to help improve their website design, CRM and usability.

The client is Feedblitz.com – an RSS to email service provider.  A very neat tool that enables marketing newsletters and blog RSS feeds to be merged into a single site service.  The advanced functionality is very useful.

Take a read about what they wrote about the project.

Creative Agency Secrets has worked on

• User interface redesign
• New site features
• Logo redesign
• CRM customer analysis (value ranking and customer needs analysis)
• Marketing communications – to come later.

We congratulate Phil Hollows and the Feedblitz team on the work so far and look forward to an awesome relaunch… more anon.

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Help is needed:

Rebecca has been asked to speak at a Cambridge University Careers service recruitment evening about our industry.

I’d like to give them a decent informational talk with a bit of humour thrown in.

Here’s the brief.

You may remember we met back in the Spring and amongst other things I mentioned that I may run a Careers Evening of talks around the Advertising and Marketing sector. Unfortunately, this hasn’t come to fruition. However, the Advertising and Marketing Communications Careers Fair is happening on Thursday 29 October and I am putting on some talks during that event.

We talked about the possibility of your doing 20 minutes on understanding the family tree of the sector, what job titles really mean with some jargon busting. Would you still be willing to come along and do this?

Questions:

1. List all the different types of Advertising and Marketing Communications agency specialisms
2. Create a ‘family tree’ of the sector
3. List all the main job titles found in agencies
4. List all the main job titles found in client-side marketing departments
5. What does each title REALLY mean?

Sounds like an A-level exam….. but can you help me out?

I’ll get going with some of the lists.  More tomorrow.

Please post your suggestions below.

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Tim Reid‘s a great creative mind with whom I’ve collaborated in the past.

He just posted a question on LinkedIn and it deserves answers – can any of you help?

There seems to be a huge range of creative briefing forms about…most of which are aimed at providing the necessary information and background to produce creative work that sells (at least that’s what you’d hope!).

What do you believe to be those 1, 2 maybe 3 critical questions that every creative brief should demand be answered?

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One of the nicest things about the web 2.0 world is the expectation that sharing and collaboration are more important than protectionism and corporate isolationism.  Opensource software development led the way twenty years ago and has blossomed so that global corporations like Sun Microsystems have both opensource (i.e. free) software as well as paid-for software in their product portfolios.

Newer examples of open collaboration have been written about and allied with the new-ish concept of “crowdsourcing” whereby an open group will collaborate to solve a problem or answer a question, and the business world has the possibility of a whole new way of working.

We’ve been hearing about new ways for businesses to collaborate and achieve the bonus of “a problem shared is a problem solved”.  Examples range from the Mechanical Turk micro-payments offered via Amazon.com for research services to IdeaBounty, a newly launched brand advertising idea aggregation tool and Innocentive launched way back in 1998 by three Eli Lilly scientists to encourage innovation.

It’s now an independent organisation and sells itself on three advantages

1. bigger breakthroughs
2. faster time to market
3. lower costs

All nicely compelling business case arguments for using the services – IF you can get over the hoarding principle and practice that is common in big business.

Wholly new ideas are pretty rare occurrences – but adaptations and developments of existing ideas and principles are quite common.  This is the basic principle that Innocentive encourages by leveraging expertise while working within the constraints of manufacturing, cost and decision-making criteria.  It sets out two groups of people “solvers” and “seekers” and has cunning sub-groups of seekers for not-for-profit organisations.

Recent challenges within the business & enterprise ‘pavilion’ include insulin delivery for third world countries and innovative male grooming brand communication ideas and in the engineering & design pavilion a “Self Cleaning Handle in a Wet/Soapy Environment”.  All creative challenges needing solutions.

Most participants in community projects like these worry about intellectual property protection for original ideas.  The best sites have strong protection for participants and so participants who offer solutions can be reassured that their good ideas that deliver results are rewarded financially and protected in law (until sold).  Indeed, the Rockefeller Foundation is now funding some of the not-for-profit solution rewards.

In a nice innovation, there’s now an internal version of the Innocentive site called Innocentive@Work that can be set up behind a firewall and used much like the much-vaunted Japanese kaizen system which was promoted during the 1990s for continuous manufacturing improvement.  This may be helpful for large organisations where knowledge is siloed or rarely flows between offices and different workgroups.  But our view is that going wider to external groups may get better and faster solutions.

Reporting on the successes so far, Innocentive says the best solutions come to the challenges that are posed and phrased well.  No surprises there.  Good communications is important throughout the organisation and specifying research briefs is no exception.  One user, SCA reported that it got better Innocentive answers when posting problems as a general issue like how to make materials more absorptive than when they cited it in specific terms just for their organisation’s needs.

This would tend to imply that open-source solutions are best for open problems.  I wonder if the corollary is true that for internal problems, those who work in the organisation are best-placed to solve problems?  Would this be death to consultants if that was the case?

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Image by macinate via Flickr

No matter whether you are proor anti the arguments for doing speculative work in order to win a client are discussed in many places – particularly for design agencies.

Jacob Cass has written a good summary of the arguments for and against.

when I was researching my own view I was persuaded by a friend who runs an interactive agency who said he'd successfully crowdsourced designs for website front -ends while his team were building the techy backend.  He said the quality was 'surprisingly high' and although he found that he needed to actively manage and engage with the bidding process, he found it worthwhile.

 He did it three or four times.  Only once was he disappointed.  And in all the other instances, his company gave further work (without pitching) to the winning designer.

What do you think?

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Image via Wikipedia

Great Fast Company post about a disgruntled customer redesinging the American Airlines website for free and running into the normal corporate issues with large company sites and multiple approval layers.

Compare this to the Obama site design that due to time pressures could not have multiple decision makers in the design process.

I liked this comment

I will give Curtis some credit though – he has probably started a conversation over at AA, and that’s better than nothing

 So to overcome this issue

• As few people as possible in approvals list for redesign
• Stay true to the original brief
• Make sure the brief is clear about your priorities (sales / customer service / ease of navigation)
• Be clear that internally not everyone can participate in the process

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Image via Wikipedia

Sean O'Halloran over on the Hoop blog has written a great post on how Design industry insiders can get involved in telling the Government (UK only so far, sorry!) how they thinkg Design and creative should be purchased.

UK Government wants your views on how design & innovation can be bought and put to better use in the public realm. If you provide these services to public sector clients you will have a view on how the procurement process could be improved.

I see opportunities for new busines models such as

• Open competitions
• Crowdsourced solutions – multiple designers collaborating
• Opportunities to suggest WHERE design is needed that Govt hasn't spotted (reverse procurement?)
• Templated responses for speedy turn-rounds
• Escrow services for quick payment – benefits small business cashflow
• Feedback on who was selected and why – openness and fairness.

Put your answers onto the comments on Sean's blog (although I'd love to have some here too!)

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I have returned from the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) conference in Austin, USA and, as last year, I attended some great sessions and met interesting people.  This year I was also speaking at the conference.

With the recession beginning to affect agency businesses I sought out those sessions that might be useful learning and training tools for you, the readers of Creative Agency Secrets.  Most of you run or work in creative agencies and will be considering how to plan for your future business development, growth and survival.  I hope that some of these posts will be useful reading over your Easter holiday.

Firstly – the panel I spoke on was called My boss doesn't get it: championing social media to 'the Man'.  With well-known B2B blogger, Peter Kim and the Small World Labs team we had a good discussion including taking questions by Twitter!  The panel is
summarised by several bloggers.

If you have an interest in Advertising and Branding – read about how Alex Bogusky from Crispin Porter+Bogusky is introducing new collaborative partnership business modelsto their repertoire.  Chris Heuer speculated on  The Future of
Advertising ng and 'hot' agency boss Pete Lerma from Click Here/The Richards Group led a great talk on
Models for agency integrationread this if you are a traditional agency adding digital teams to your offering.  

British Filmmaker Jess Search of C4 Britdoc facilitated a discussion on how Brands are driving content for branded entertainment. It seems Advertiser funded programming has come to maturity. 

The PR and Marketing communications world came under attack at the session "Are PR agencies a dying breed? " which was very animated – the common view was that social media is natural territory for PR folk but that we've got to get out and claim it for ourselves.  Building online commmunities in B2C and B2B were covered in two separate gigs:  Nerd network: building a B2B online
community
and Building your audience online .

Design and Digital businesses spoke about pitching and how to win work via the internet.  This focused on some of the 'free' pitching websites in the session called Is spec
work evil?   Probably the hottest argument of the conference occurred here and the debate continued in the comments on my blog post.  Please join in and add your views about whether agencies should do speculative work and free pitching. 

Thank you all for your time and please forward this email if it is useful for your team. 

P.S. I will be going to an event tonight hosted by the Cass Business School to debate solutions to the recession for the creative industries.  We'll be using the we20 method and I hope to publish the outcomes.  Join us  

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The Designing Change in America panel will discuss the Obama "brand", it's birth, it's evolution, and it's rise to power. We will discuss the challenges of being in-house designers in a fast-paced political environment and how though challenges informed our process for designing and developing.

John Slabyk – Obama for America – art director
Scott Thomas – Obama – SimpleScott – design director
Alissa Walker – Gelatobaby – design writer and blogger

The logo – a symbol for the people to hold proudly. They started in September 07 on the campaign.  early graphics were 'normal' and concerned for print rather than strong design

  The banners made early mistakes – website used 12 different typefaces and different shaeds of blue and fold mentality.  Logo mistakes.  When we were briefed there were two worlds print and web and we overlapped them both.  Key issue was timing – everything was immedaite.  No time for user research or site architecture thinking.  We dealt with a large number of departments within the Obama for America campaign. We convinced many people that design was important and the clear messaging focused on 'we' rather than 'he'. 

The events team would create a gig with really awful names like "trying to turn the page in Iraq".  So we ended up copy writing as well to create headers that would fit – words are visuals too…Keeping the message of hope while dismantling the notion of being aloof.  Communicate the message of hope in images as well as words.

They also pulled images from the past (declaration of independence) enabled us to say things without saying them verbally.  Pulling feelings and emotions into the design.  They reproduced speeches in olde-worlde formats that could be printed out a posters to go on classroom walls in the same was as Martin Luther Kings speeches are.  

We knew the achilles heel would be lack of experience in Barak and so we tried to establish a consistency and balance to exemplify stability adn experience.  Use consistent colours and typography – colour palette always a consistent blue.

The symbol of the logo was solid and whole but the typeface didn't match.  So we changed it to an all-caps version which was more subtle – rounded up the terminals.  The O is a perfect circle.

Participation was important and so we encouraged downloading to get people involved – we used the idea from sports teams who enable downloads for t shirt printing / posters.

The election cycle as the Olympics of technology. My.Barakobama.com was a tool developed with Chris Hughes from Facebook.

The above-the-fold mentality was ever-present.  Everyone wanted to be on the home page and was really imporant.  Every event was streamed live and they used a full width banner across the top.

Voter registration process is hard and a lot of work to help people find out if they were registered or not. The process map was really complex.

Part of the reason the new media operation was so successful was we were a hive connected all the time.  We were never away from talking and working.  Even at midnight asking for something for the next day "we're all screwed and we have decided to be here so get on with it".

When we rolled out the Change you can Believe in banner – the typeface designer mentioned it on his blog and so I said "We should probably pay for that now!"

No time for proofing – we didn't know how the blue was going to come out as we had different printeres in every city.  We saw the output when it was on CNN.  This showed us that loads of preparation isn't always needed… you can work organically and it is OK if it's not perfect.  [nice anecdote about getting his browser and IM mixed up and typing "on it" into the wrong one and it went live onto the home page!]

Three words Respect, Empower and Include.  Came from the field office in Iowa.  

In the last minute rush we had lots of jobs and we figured that if a request got through to us we'd try and do it for them and do it quickly.  We had a Michael Slaby as a bulldog who made sure we weren't bothered, he summarised things himself so we got projects that were a good use of our time.  In future we'd set up a 'how to design' things for supporters to do it themselves.

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