Creative agencies are a curious blend of marketing professionals, data scientists, creative prodigies, and business gurus. No one is more qualified to come up with a brilliant campaign or to straighten out your business messaging than an agency united by talent and vision. Still, we know how hard it is to identify the best creative agencies for your brand.
As always, we’ve got a few ideas. Building top brands for over 30 years brings a certain confidence about what makes the magic happen for businesses. And for us, it’s a blend of these traits: proactivity, curiosity, data know-how, project management finesse, and above all, motivation. So let’s get into it!
The Best Creative Agencies…Advocate for Their Clients
Brand experts have the training and skills to do the job. But proactivity isn’t just about churning out a completed project. It’s seeing beyond what’s required. Whether that’s for a paid ad campaign opportunity, an obstacle you’ve encountered in marketing a product, or a website design decision, it comes down to an intuition born of experience.
A good creative agency is proactive with your brand’s challenges. They see past business obstacles and have a strong footing in your market’s terrain. Aside from the client themselves, they are the biggest advocate and cheerleaders for the brand.
Their approach to problems sounds like “Tell me more about that” or “That’s interesting, have you tried ______?”
…Are Curious and Insightful
In this same spirit of proactive problem-solving, the best creative agencies are curious about how your business works. Instead of pretending to know it all, they never fear asking for clarification or getting more information when they need it to nail their deliverables.
Interviewing the client is a very insightful step in partnering with a creative agency. Without it, getting off track with collaborative projects or communications is easy. So look for an agency that requests and initiates meetings early to keep the project on track.
…Are Masters of Data
A creative agency might be winsome with words and language, but they should also have a strong grasp of numbers. Making sense of the new G4 platform, running paid ad campaigns, and performing competitor and industry research requires a certain comfort level with data.
Benchmarking goals, tracking progress, and achieving visibility for your brand happen by following the numbers. This means tracking metrics like cost-per-click for paid aids, click-through rate, and users and sessions for website traffic. These metrics give a snapshot of your audience while providing insights on areas where you might focus to get even more results from your marketing efforts. It’s all about that data.
…Are Motivated to Chase Your Goals
A great idea is great, but you won’t see results without the work ethic behind it. This is why creative agencies exist: to bridge the gap between idea and action. A creative marketing agency that’s been around for a while will have a solid process for getting results. And while the process might lend itself to creativity through trial and error, getting results should be a predictable process for an agency, especially when there’s a deadline involved. You’ll always be happy investing in a team of producers.
…Have Project Management Finesse
There’s a lot to keep track of with a new branding idea or website. From the design choices like typography and color palette to industry requirements and nuances, you’ll want an agency prepared to organize all of the information. Details are the difference between good results and great ones.
And organizational skills are the key to unlocking the best results for the time and expense of hiring an agency. You can expect streamlined results, clear communication, expectations about timelines and deliverables, and everything short of perfection (after all, we’re still humans).
But responsiveness and an open line of communication are a great baseline to establish with a good creative agency before you move things forward. Ask about where the project is going and how the team plans to get there to understand how the agency works toward a goal. Establishing a clear point of contact with the agency, typically the project manager is especially helpful to avoid the classic “too many cooks in the kitchen” scenario.
For the Best Creative Agencies, Choose a Brand Like Savy
No creative agency is everyone’s cup of tea, but yours should work hard to make you proud and have a strong portfolio of past clients to show for it. At the end of the day, sometimes beyond all metrics, finding the best creative agencies is about personality fit and timing. So we leave it up to the expert (you!) to decide. But if it’s time to seek out some creative professionals to help get your brand idea off the ground, look no further. We’re here to make the brand magic happen!