What comes to mind when you think of a “full-service advertising agency”? Ad campaigns, definitely, with all the print ads, commercials, social media and other elements you might need. Strategic planning to make sure that campaign is effective. They’ll be able to design and build your website, if they’re full-service, and write web copy and content for you, and buy media.
It’s an impressive list, and all of those (yes, even print ads) are important for reaching your audience in an evermore digital environment. But there are other services out there that advertising agencies provide. Maybe you’ve never thought about needing them. Maybe your agency doesn’t offer them. Maybe your agency has been using them all along, and you just didn’t know. But you might be surprised about how those services could benefit your brand.
Data Science
“Data science” sounds technical and fancy, doesn’t it? That’s because it is. Data scientists takes data about your brand, your audiences, your market in general, the national and global economy and everything else they can get their hands on and refine it into actionable insights to inform your marketing efforts. This isn’t just social media analytics or sales figures — data science knows how the COVID-19 pandemic could influence your media choices for your next campaign.
What do your customers need that they aren’t telling you about? What can you do to meet those unspoken needs? What are common opinions among your audience, how are they changing and what can you do in response to that? And specifically, what tactics and strategies should you use to make your efforts effective? It’s understandable if you don’t know the answers to those questions — that’s why your agency has data scientists.
Experiential Marketing
Experiential marketing focuses, as the name implies, on experiences — opportunities to connect with your audience at a very personal level. Experiential marketing creates real-world encounters that immerse consumers in the essence of your brand. Tours, trade shows, tastings, special events — all are the work of experiential marketers. In a market where every voice can be broadcast and every consumer is a kind of influencer, those experiences help turn your potential customers into vocal advocates.
An in-house experiential marketing team is important because it allows your agency to integrate those offerings into your campaign strategy from the very beginning. If you have a customer base that doesn’t respond to traditional advertising, or a product that needs to be seen in person to be believed, the experiential marketing team can make sure those needs are addressed within the campaign.
Digital Experience
The digital experience team is the online complement to the experiential marketing team. If experiential marketing helps your brand meet your audience in the real world, digital experience helps you meet them in the digital world. This includes not just the look of your website, but also the functionality and the user experience — how visitors will interact with the various elements of your site. The team also handles search engine optimization (SEO) to move you up the search results page and catch the eye of your audience.
As with experiential marketing, it’s a crucial element to involve in the strategizing process. The digital experience team collaborates with social media and content strategy, PR, analytics, creative and so many other elements of the agency to make your campaign work.
Market Research
Effective strategy is dependent on the constant availability of fresh data, and that’s what the market research team provides. It’s not just market landscape and segmentation. The market research team provides feedback along the way on everything from positioning to creative to pricing to packaging, so you can be sure you really are reaching your audience. It accomplishes that by using everything from surveys and focus groups to social listening. And that role keeps them involved from the beginning of the project to the end, and from designing research methodology to reporting results.
Shopper and Retail Marketing
When you’re looking at rows and rows of foods that, as far as you know, are basically identical, how do you choose one? What makes it stand out?
What makes it stand out is months of behind-the-scenes efforts by a shopper and retail marketing team. You noticed that specific bag of tortilla chips among all those other bags of tortilla chips because a marketing professional had already mapped your shopper journey, researched retail statistics, adjusted the price, designed the bag and found a way to display it to make your chosen vehicle for guacamole.
Your brand is at least as important as that bag of chips. If your brand has a retail element, your agency needs a shopper and retail marketing team to make your product move.
Master of All Trades
See? “Full service” might be fuller than you thought. If you think any of these services might be beneficial to your brand, talk to your agency and see what they offer. Or contact 9Rooftops to talk about integrating a full slate of services into your marketing efforts.
