Managing a successful ad campaign can be challenging and can require thinking outside of the box at times. Collaborating between entities, including your ad agency, media partner, and your business is critical to creating personalized marketing and advertising campaigns that deliver your desired results.
With this modern collaborative approach, each part of the team has an important role to play in creating and placing ads that target the right audience. By getting everyone involved in your integrated strategy from the start, you are setting yourself up to better understand all of your options and to steer the campaign in the right direction for your brand.
Collaboratively Creating Ad Campaigns
As you prepare to undertake a new marketing or ad campaign, here are four ways to work in collaboration with both your advertising agency and media company for a more dynamic, effective process:
1. Communicating During the Planning Process
Your media partner and ad agency are two separate parties, but when it comes to planning ad campaigns and marketing deliverables, it’s important to bring them together. Rather than having them work against each other or having one lead the project, it’s better for your ad agency and media partner to work together to brainstorm collectively to create advertisements for your marketing campaign.
While still in the planning process, you can schedule conference calls between you, your ad agency, and your media partner to identify the overall goal and theme of the campaign, the appropriate narrative for the content, and a suitable call-to-action (CTA). This allows everyone to provide their thoughts on creating the best campaign materials for the targeted outcome before the creative process actually starts. From there, you can have regular check-ins to ensure all parties are moving in the same direction.
2. Collaborating During the Media Buying Process
Creative agencies are often brought in after the media has been segmented and planned, causing them to feel like data and targeting are dictating their creative strategy rather than inspiring it. When an ad agency and media company work together throughout the implementation of an ad campaign, they can use their combined expertise and knowledge to get your business the best media package for what you’re looking to achieve. But keep in mind that the most inexpensive option on the market might not be the most favorable.
Media companies have comprehensive knowledge of what packages are available and which is the best option for your business, based on their experience working with numerous brands. They can ensure your campaign goals and media package are aligned for optimal results.
3. Working Together Toward the Same Goal
Content and context must work together to create impact. You can—and should—help unite your media company and ad agency, and set collective expectations that lead to the same end goal: Bringing awareness to your business and growing a trusted customer base.
Ad agencies and media companies working together help to streamline the process and ensure that content and context are working in tandem to achieve maximum reach across all platforms.
4. Assessing the Data and Results
It’s not enough to launch an ad campaign and hope for the best. After the campaign has launched, you should get together with your media company and ad agency to discuss the results. Ask both parties to bring whatever data they collected to help you assess whether you got the results you wanted.
Ask for feedback on what could be done in the future to make the process even more effective for all parties.
An Integrated Approach to Advertising and Marketing
While you share your needs with each of them, they can share their creative ideas, combined experience, and knowledge with you to come up with the most effective advertising and marketing strategy for your business.