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Creating a Recipe for Success: Where Agencies Add Value

21/04/2023
Branding and Marketing Agency
London, UK
33
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big group content marketing manager, Laelih Babai, on why agency value is in our insight, our experience, and our ability to weigh up theory and strategy

In agency land (hell, every land) we’ve heard conversations about scaling back and seen budgets paired down. Clients often come to us for solutions that are easy to implement, quick and result in the biggest ROI. Instead of ‘Come up with the next big idea’, it’s ‘Come up with the next big idea, that’s cheap, easily implementable and which gives us immediate results’ - conversations have moved from idealistic to realistic. For some, it‘s disheartening to hear that you’ve got to do more with less. For others, it‘s an opportunity ripe with joy and nuance - if you get the right approach. 

How ‘bout them apples?

Low-hanging fruit is often the most attractive option when looking to impress quickly, you look for the most easily attainable goals to get the quickest, most bountiful result - the quick win. But tinkering around with the low-hanging fruit is really just optimisation. And optimisation shouldn’t be a job for an agency. Optimisation is stage one before you bring in an agency, an in-house task that identifies the fruit that’s ripe, ready, and not too hard to reach. As a core function of your brand, it needs to be as good as it can be from the start. 

How an agency sweetens the deal

Agency value is in our insight, our experience, and our ability to weigh up theory and strategy. If agencies only look to optimise and satisfy the here and now, we prioritise the short-term and the long-term suffers. Give us the challenge of making one small change that can make a big difference and we’ll leave the optimising to you. 

When younger me did work experience at a stock brokerage firm, Matt, one of the traders, told me an anecdote of when he received his first big promotion and his maximum trade size increased. He now had a lot of money at his fingertips, and what used to be relatively easy became suddenly impossible. He started making bad trades, chasing losses, and losing millions. Very quickly, his boss pulled him in for review and asked, ‘What’s going wrong?’ Matt said the size of the trades was throwing him off, and the two of them came up with a clever solution. What was it? A post-it in the bottom left corner of the screen that covered the last, ‘000’. So, a million-pound trade looked like £1,000 and the problem was solved.

There are thousands of examples of one small change making a huge difference: Amazon’s ‘One-Click’ ordering process, Starbucks adding a branded cardboard sleeve to a hot cup, Google’s ‘Did you mean?’ feature. My colleague, Paul North, even wrote an article about how one small and simple change to Chat GPT’s code led to a boom in users. Read it here! Small changes are everywhere and it’s where agencies prove their worth, especially those that pride themselves on bigger thinking!

When all the right ingredients come together, it’s a recipe for success.

The proof of the pudding...

Campaign success is measured in days, weeks and years. It iterates, it changes. Like all good recipes, the classic elements stay the same but new twists are added over time. A dash of spice here, some sweetness there, but always going back to the main ingredients of optimisation first, then adding our insight and experience. So, when we look back over what we’ve done in five years’ time and ask ourselves if we’d do anything differently, we’d be confident that with the right approach, we’d make the same decisions. Because that’s how classics are born.

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