The Big 3 Agencies and What They’re Missing

Reaching customers and creating lasting relationships is crucial, and there is no shortage of creative agencies ready to step in and help you achieve those goals. Most companies recognize the need for the “big 3” agency partners – a PR agency, an advertising agency, and an interactive, or “digital,” agency – and should secure the best ones they can afford.

However, consumer habits have evolved over the last couple years, and there is a crucial ingredient to forging customer relationships that these agencies have failed to deliver. We’ll address the missing piece in a minute; first, a quick look at the big 3 to identify the area of expertise for each.

Your Public Relations Agency

Public Relations agencies get the word out. PR is about leveraging relationships and reaching out to media entities to elevate visibility of a product or service. As a result of their online, print, and on-screen outreach capabilities, a good PR agency has you featured or reviewed on a frequent basis. The great ones will also offer media training and crisis communications.

Many PR agencies have recently expanded their offerings to include services not traditionally considered PR, such as interactive development, search marketing, and social media. With the exception of a small few, the new offerings are weak: they’re “dabblers.” They’re running double-duty, they’re not gurus in these areas, and they’re probably staffing up in a hurry or bringing in outside experts. You should insist that your public relations agency focus on what they do best, and that’s PR.

Your Advertising Agency

Similar to PR, ad agencies broadcast your message via mass media. For those who can afford it, television, radio, environmental, and display advertising can make a huge impact in reaching consumers. However, it is not for everyone, as advertising is expensive, and execution usually requires long lead times and substantial media buys – often through a different media-buying agency. If you can justify the investment, your ad agency will create engaging, exciting broadcast messages that reach out to consumers wherever they may be.

Like PR, ad agencies have begun to dabble as well. They have begun offering interactive and search services; but their expertise is still easily defined – ad agencies are good at advertising.

Both PR and advertising achieve a similar goal: they build brand awareness and initiate a conversation with consumers. But where will your audience turn to next to learn more? Your website? A microsite? Google? Amazon? This is where interactive agencies have established their place in your agency roster.

Your Interactive Agency

Once consumers know you exist, they are going to look for more information on your products and services, and the vast majority will use the Internet to do so. Your interactive agency is building websites and other online assets for these consumers. Their expertise is interactive development and user-experience design.

The Missing Piece

The chain seems complete – PR and ad agencies drive awareness and spark consumer interest. Interactive agencies provide places online where consumers can turn interest into a conversation. So what’s missing?

The missing ingredient is relevant, ever-changing, original content.
When it comes to your website or microsites, who writes the content? Does it get created once by the interactive agency and become stale a month after it is launched – or worse, before it launches? Are you hoping that your PR will generate enough blog posts and online reviews to convince consumers to purchase? To recommend after purchasing? When consumers search for you on Yahoo, Google, Vimeo, YouTube, or Flickr, what will they find?

The Big 4

Today’s consumers expect good content. They filter then ignore or digest and share content faster than ever before. They create it themselves. They know the difference between a sales pitch and a conversation.

That conversation permeates your company website or microsites, your blogs or partner blogs, and content distribution channels like Vimeo and Scribd. So there had better be useful information when they get there. There needs to be engaging content and a reason for them to come back. Content needs to be continually updated, continually reinvented. You need to provide a regular stream of insight and analysis, both in your industry and in related topics that your consumers care about. That’s where the content and content distribution pieces of the puzzle become crucial. That’s where a content marketing agency comes in.

A content marketing agency is nimble. It’s better informed about your products, competitors, audience, and market than any of your other agencies. It maintains daily awareness of what’s going on in the consumer’s mind, it creates content that will resonate today, and it’ll do it again tomorrow. This agency’s expertise lies in the perpetual production of content that will resonate with consumers and turn awareness into relationships and relationships into sales.

Takeaway

If you are only broadcasting your message and providing stale content to your consumers via the big three your success will be limited. Get the big four moving forward together and you’ll take your brand to the next level.

Questions

Do you have the right “big four” agencies in place? Is one or more of you “big four” actually an in-house department and does that really work? Are your agencies introducing dabblers into your team and do you really need them?

Next Time…

Having the right agencies in place is key, but there’s more to it than that. There are relationships to manage, and navigating the waters of often competing parties must be done deftly. If there is an existing in-house department, who gets assigned what tasks? How do you manage multiple agencies, and what are some of the challenges? Might there be a conflict or a turf issue? That’s what we’ll focus on next month, so stay tuned.

About the author

Brett Virmalo -

As a creative director at Tippingpoint Labs, Brett leads a team deploying ecommerce and content marketing solutions for global B2B and consumer clients.

Brett has worked with clients including PG&E, Kodak, American Express, TomTom, Putnam Investments, and most recently, Breville. He has been with Tippingpoint Labs since 2003 serving as a designer, developer, art director, and now creative director.