How To Find the Perfect Creative Agency for Your Brand

Once you’ve made the perfect creative brief for your project, its now time to partner with the right agency. Before jumping into the search, its really important to consider the type of relationship you’re looking to having with your agency partner.

1. Figure out your agency love language
   1. Long Term: Do you have significant marketing knowledge, but need the chops of a savvy brand architect to help develop your product campaign? Long term partnerships with agencies often prove to be the most fruitful for a variet of reasons: frequent collaborators tend to understand the ebb and flow of needs across your orgs brand lifecycle and can staff projects accordingly. Agencies can act as extensions of your brand and marketing teams in these engagements and trust built over the long term across many projects.
   2. Short Term: Sometimes brands have campaigns that last only a few months or specifically at 1 time of the yea; think special in person events, or large animated trailers for product launches. These shorter term engagements often require the support of specialist agencies that have deep knowledge of your vertical or asset space.
   3. Work For Hire: Do you just have one project and need it executed quickly and precisely? In this situation, consider a Work For Hire type of relationship. Typically these are short term engagements that are purely transactional. You provide the very specific instructions and the agency fills in the creative production gaps your team may have. On deadline day you get your vision, executed precisely the way you want within your own campaign.

Once you’ve determined the type of partnership you’re looking for, its time to identify how you would like to work with the team:

1. Integration Styles
   1. Embedded: Agencies that are embedded in your org have access to your internal communications tools, and sometimes even an email address with your brand’s extension. These agencies often need access to tools and data internally to iterate more rapidly on projects to deliver on schedule and on budget.
   2. Locally Available: These agencies are within the same city or time zone as your working level team, and can join meetings (virtual and in person) with little scheduling constraints.
   3. Fully Outsourced: These agencies require very little interaction after the original scope of work is provided and can operate anywhere, often communicating through a single point of contact on both sides of the relationship.

Select agencies that match your partnership needs and integration styles to optimize project delivery.

1. Be realistic about your agency choice
   1. Identify which agency pitch can deliver on the ideas they pitch to your team. Don’t succumb to wishful thinking based on exciting conversations, rather, analyze which partner can help you achieve your goals for your brand.
   2. Every organization is different- you are the expert on your stakeholder relationships, consider how timelines presented could be affected by your internal processes.
   3. Make sure to choose and agency that responds to your creative brief or the needs of your brand. Do not fall victim to scope creep or pre made rinse/repeat ideas.
   4. Take all agency pitches seriously. There’s a lot of high quality content being created at every level, try to drop pre conceived notions and give agencies a chance to pitch you on their skillset and ideas.
2. Be diligent at every step.
   1. Escargo.io starts by creating your Bespoke Brief and works with you through the process of finding your Agency Tailored Match based on the parameters outlined in this post. We help you find your ideal creative partner.