Your internal marketing team is overwhelmed, your deadline is fast approaching, and you decide it’s time to outsource an integrated campaign. Before you hand off project details and move on to something else, take the time to clarify key information about your brand and ensure everyone is on the same page.
Here are some tips:
Define Your Brand Goals
Why are you creating this marketing campaign? How will the success of this product, service or awareness campaign impact your overall brand? How will you ensure the campaign is integrated and will be supportive of your outside sales teams?
Answering these types of questions for your outsourced agency will put marketing goals into perspective so they can build an integrated marketing campaign that is relevant to your customers, empowering to your sales team and worthy of your brand reputation.
Share Your Brand Guidelines
Even if you regularly outsource work to a support agency, it’s important to share your brand guidelines with them on a regular basis. In addition to the fact that there might be new members on your external marketing agency’s team, a refresher in brand standards is a good reminder for everyone.
Make it a habit to share Brand Guidelines every time you launch a new project, and highlight key positioning and phrases that should be used across all channels. Is your brand all about innovation? Highlight the sections in your Brand Guidelines that express this with special attention to words and images that should NEVER be used. This will save time during the editing process and make everyone more successful.
Share Your Brand History
If your internal marketing team has created similar marketing pieces or integrated campaigns that were successful, sharing those stories can help your support agency as they concept. The goal is not to copy past successes, but to glean information about what worked well for your brand.
Similarly, if your team has used phrases, visuals or angles that fell flat in the past, sharing that information can prevent an outside team from going down the same road.
With time, your marketing support teams will know your brand as well as you do, but they have to start somewhere. Give them the right tools to be successful up front so you can all focus on the bigger picture—creating an integrated campaign that feels on brand at every touchpoint.
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