To improve the collaboration on multiple projects, Viva’s managers started looking for easy-to-use project management software that would help to manage the workload. Members of the distributed team at Viva Creative needed a convenient way to stay up-to-date with project schedules and a handy tool to track their own assignments. For the managers, it was hard to monitor the team’s progress and get a global overview of all the activities. With Wrike, team members at Viva Creative have found an easy and efficient solution to keep the dynamic workflow well-organized. “Wrike has become an irreplaceable tool that we rely on as we grow our business,” says Lorne Greene, CEO at Viva Creative. Read the whole interview with Lorne to discover why Wrike has become such a valuable tool for Viva Creative and how the team members benefit from using this innovative project management software.
Within a marketing agency, the project manager is responsible for planning deliverables (including creating a project calendar), communicating with clients, and keeping marketing projects on track. Find out more project manager responsibilities and skills in this post.
When you have more clients than you can possibly handle within a 40-hour workweek, it may be time to delegate work to freelancers like yourself, and turn what was once a humble solopreneur business into a full-fledged freelance agency, managed by you. But only if it makes sense.
Creative agencies use so many tools today to make life easier, but does your team have too many? It’s called software sprawl and costing you more than you think. Read more to see how software sprawl is cutting into your business’ profits and how to solve it.
Thanks to Canadian entrepreneur and marketing consultant Jules Marcoux, CEOs and marketing directors can have exactly that. In what many consider to be one of the best marketing books around, Marcoux maps out exactly how to take brands to the next level and drive better results. In our continuous effort to give marketing teams an edge over the competition, we revisited this marketing agency blueprint for our own book review.
As an entrepreneur, you pour your heart and soul into your business and do everything you can to help it grow. Building your product, team, service models and customer base takes all your focus, and it can be difficult to know what to prioritize. But whether you’re a brand new startup or an established business, continuing to build your brand is always of vital importance. At amoCRM, we rely on marketing efforts to cut through the fierce competition within the Bay Area. Finding the right marketing agency, however, turned out to be a challenge. We needed an agency that tended to each and every lead, like we do with our own customers. We’re sharing the lessons we learned on our quest to find the perfect marketing agency, to save you from conducting your own wild goose chase. Starting Our Search Living in the Google era, we started our search for marketing agencies online, selecting 20 agencies with the best Google Ads. We knew we’d ultimately have to narrow our search to 5 agencies, but selecting 20 to start with gave us a nice pool of options. We began with Google Ads for a very pragmatic reason: agencies that allocate funds to quality Google Ads are more invested in pursuing every lead. We reached out to each and every one of these 20 agencies, either by direct mail or via their web forms. We provided them with a short introduction to our company and shared our brand strategy and development plan. We had a very rough notion of our marketing timeframe, goals, and budget, but we were far from a concrete marketing strategy. 30% of the agencies we reached out to never replied, either because they didn’t consider us a valuable lead, or they simply hadn’t invested in CRM software to help them track potential leads, we’ll never know. But that helped us narrow down our search and come one step closer to our perfect partnership. We also disqualified one agency due to the fact that their web form was disabled, and their contact details were difficult to find. Evaluating Marketing Agencies The remaining 70% of agencies that did answer our inquiry actually responded pretty quickly. Within a week, client directors and CEOs were reaching out to us, which really fluffed our feathers, so to speak. They all wanted to set up phone calls or face-to-face meetings. No generic proposals attached to a price list were thrown our way—we were genuinely impressed by their desire to get personal and find out all the details of our business goals before coming up with a plan. They all demonstrated the detailed attention to leads that we were searching for. In our own business, the follow up is as important as the first contact. Unfortunately, we never heard back from four of our “impressive” agencies. We can’t be sure if they forgot about us, lost track of their leads, or simply deemed us unworthy of future efforts, but as the saying goes, every kick in the butt is a step forward. The next step involved a lot of phone calls, talking to each and every agency that was still in the race and even meeting with some of their representatives. We wanted our vision to be perfectly reflected in the brand strategy and development, and after all our questions were asked and answered, we were able to move forward with 6 agencies. This number represents 30% of our initial “Google Ads” list. Each of these agencies presented us with an exceptionally creative and well-executed marketing proposal, Three out of these 6 actually pursued our decision within a week. This is the level of dedication and attention that we were looking for. Two agencies followed up more than twice to learn our decision, and soon after, we found our perfect match with one of these agencies. 4 Tips for Finding the Right Marketing Agency for Your Business 1. What’s their track record? Past results say a lot about a business, so the more you can find out about what the marketing agency accomplished for others, the more you can envision what they can do for you. A marketing agency that’s proud of its work and results should make case studies, analytics, or other metrics available to potential clients. 2. Communicate your budget from the start Marketing is a creative industry, and developing a marketing plan without a clear budget in sight can be the downfall of any partnership. Don’t be ashamed of your budget, not matter how small it is. You never know where lighting might strike! You could always be referred to another agency that turns out to be your diamond in the rough. 3. Get ready to talk …and talk and talk and talk! Keeping the lines of communication open is critical to enabling a marketing agency to design a proposal customized to your needs and goals. Look for an agency that’s just as curious about you as you are about them. 4. What’s their commitment? A marketing partnership is not a short-term relationship. Therefore, you don’t just want to partner with an agency that you like and does great work, but also an agency you can rely on to take your calls, answer your questions, and address your concerns about your marketing strategy plan. You can evaluate their level of commitment by paying close attention to the effort the agency puts in during the sales process. Are they quick to respond to inquiries? Do they follow up with you? Finding the right marketing agency can be a lengthy process, but remember: settling for less is not an option. Your brand is the key to your business’ success and what distinguishes you from competitors, which is why you need a marketing agency that understands where you’re coming from. Finding the right agency might just be the most important business decision you make. Author Bio Jen Anders is a marketing manager at amoCRM, a web-based CRM tool for small businesses.
When Secondred Newmedia adopted Wrike project management software, they successfully overcame all collaboration issues with Wrike’s help and discovered an optimal solution for their needs - bottom-up planning. With Wrike, all team members can contribute to general planning, making the firm more agile and saving Daniel Schneider from lots of routine work. “Wrike took the load of micromanagement off me, so that I could switch from manager-centric to team-centric planning,” says Daniel Schneider. If you want to know more about Secondred Newmedia’s successful experience and find useful tips on bottom-up planning, read the whole story of the Internet agency.
Whether you’re creating an unparalleled customer experience, providing a behind-the-scenes look into your creative process, or sending weekly performance reports, finding creative and effective ways to demonstrate your creative agency’s value is essential in today’s highly competitive landscape.