How to get the most out of marketing agencies and contractors
| October 7, 2019
Most companies have an in-house marketing team, but still employ agencies and contractors to fill in any gaps. For example, a startup might have a small team of marketing generalists and outsource very specialized functions to an agency due to limited resources. Larger companies also find it useful to hire agencies and contractors for gaps or one-time projects, such as a rebranding or website overhaul.
Even if your marketing team is well-rounded, it’s always valuable to get an external perspective. Although in-house marketers will be the most specialized and knowledgeable about their own company, an agency can bring valuable skills and experience from their work with a breadth of companies across various industries.
Here are some guidelines to help set your team up for success when working agencies and contractors.
Have a specific goal
It can be easy to get swept away by the beautiful content or inspiring case studies in an agency or contractor’s portfolio, but make sure you are hiring to achieve a specific goal and evaluating candidates based on how they will help you reach the goal. Communicate this goal to the agency or contractors you hire so they are aware of what success on their end looks like.
Communicate, communicate, communicate!
A big challenge when working with external contributors and agencies is staying in sync. Your in-house team won’t see the agency or remote contractors every day, so it’s important to communicate expectations clearly.
Having weekly or biweekly check-ins and tracking deadlines and progress on a project management platform will help your team work better with agencies.
Streamline workflows
Working with agencies shouldn’t make your life harder, but often, it can add more baggage to team workflows.
How do you make sure that agencies and contractors have access to the assets they need to do their work, without bogging down your team with asset requests?
Canto customers solve this problem with portals, which allow team members to share parts of the main media library through a link. Agencies or contractors can access the portal through the link and download any assets they need to do their work, such as logos and approved imagery. This allows teams to share what’s necessary without giving third parties access to their entire digital library.
“Our PR and social media agencies really love Canto! We were using Dropbox with them before, and Canto is more user-friendly,” Alessandra Roqueta, marketing manager at Boral North America, says. “It’s easy for them to resize or change image formats in case they need something for a certain media outlet: they can just identify the size and format they need and download it directly from Canto.”
Learn more about Canto portals here.