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What To Give Your Agency So They Understand Your Brand
It can be extremely difficult to hand over the reins of your business to a digital marketing agency. There's no need to worry! You still have complete control over what we post and how we present your brand. However, you'll have to get us that information so we can create work around it! Here are a few things that you can get your digital marketing agency to help them nail down your branding!
A Brand Guide
A brand guide is an essential tool to keep your marketing consistent both internally and with digital marketing agencies. A brand guide should be filled with everything pertinent to marketing efforts around your brand. This includes all-important visual cues like fonts, specific color hex codes, logos and variations, and imagery preferences. In addition, your brand guide should include a brief background of the company, unique selling points, and specific rules about photo or logo usage, tone of voice/personality, and any taboo topics. While creating a brand guide does take quite a bit of work, it saves everyone time and hassle down the line. Rather than guessing, your digital marketing agency will have exactly what they need to create content that matches with your brand perfectly! Nothing is more frustrating for both our team and yours than repeatedly missing the mark when it comes to branding. There are so many tiny elements to your brand, and we'd much rather learn about them all prior to starting rather than as we go. Getting use a brand guide will make for a more streamlined managed social media process and far less revisions.
Specific and Detailed Feedback
The second piece that we need to really understand your brand is specific and detailed feedback. We often have clients that hold their tongue when they aren't 100% happy with things, and that prevents us from avoiding the same issues in the future. Even vague feedback isn't very effective. If you tell your doctor that you don't feel well, that could mean a lot of things! How on earth would they be able to diagnose you! On the other hand, if you say "I've been having a really painful ache in my lower right abdomen for three days," the doctor can arrow down the list of possible issues down considerably! When a digital agency asks for your feedback, we want your honest feedback. If you aren't happy with the work, let's sit down and talk about it! Detailed criticisms don't hurt our feelings if you approach them calmly and non-defensively. We want to do the best work we can for you, and we are always more that happy to make adjustments as needed. If you don't feel comfortable speaking to your Client Success Manager directly, your digital marketing agency of choice may offer a feedback form. Be sure to be as detailed as possible! From experience however, real-time meetings (in-person, on the phone, video chat, etc) are the best way to give and get feedback. It allows for a dialogue that is responded to immediately. If we need more clarification, we can ask right then and there and potentially even ask you to share your screen if the technology allows. Yes, early revisions can be tedious, but we do them to get a better grasp on what you're looking for early on in your account so we don't need to bug you later!
Examples
For our managed social media and website clients, we find examples to be one of the best ways to help us clearly see your vision. Examples can come from past work from your own company, or from other brands that you think market themselves well. We've had numerous cases of examples helping both us and the client learn more about their brand and how they want it to be perceived. We know that not all business owners went to school for marketing or design. Because of that, they may not fully understand design principles that are proven to make content more pleasing. When these business owners bring in examples, our team is able to point out design principles it follows to find trends in your preferences that you may not even realize you have! For example, you may bring us examples that you love that show a lot of bright colors and poppy designs. This likely means you appreciate a strong contrast in designs! If you bring us examples of content that you find boring or un-engaging, we can take a look at it to find any patterns between them. With concrete examples to look back to, your digital marketing agency's job gets a lot easier! It can be tricky even for marketers to clearly express what they want to see. You know what they say; a picture's worth a thousand words! Examples are great for just about any managed social media service you're getting - ads, organic posts, Instagram layouts, etc. We've also found them extremely helpful for website development so keep that in mind as well!
Do's and Don'ts
We will ask you about do's and don'ts in any onboarding or revisions meetings we have with you, but it can save everyone time if you give us a list ASAP as well. For example, are there topics you want us to avoid at all costs such as political statements, celebrating specific holidays, or using certain terminology? You can also reiterate things in the brand guide in terms of visuals. Maybe you're a branch of a larger company and they have strict rules about what color the logo should be based on the post. Let us know and we'll stick to it! Remember to keep these instructions as detailed as possible, and don't hold anything back if you consider it important. As we've said previously, we'd rather know what's expected from the very beginning so that the learning curve is lower. The faster we can understand your brand, the faster you'll see content you like that gets results. Of course, there are some things that are understood as a "do not touch" topic such as social issues, anything extremely controversial, vulgarity, etc. That said, if you are looking for any exceptions to these rules, you must tell us or we will assume you fall under the category of most of our clients. It's generally wise to avoid taboo topics online, so just keep that in mind. If you're in a very niche industry, or something that the average person often struggles to understand, don't hesitate to state what you may consider the obvious. A long list is not as overwhelming as you think, so don't be afraid about hurting our feelings or stressing us out with it.
Summaries of Services or Products
Finally, whenever possible, your digital marketing agency will benefit immensely from summaries of your business, products, and services. As you would imagine, your managed social media team is working with clients in several industries. Considering most teams are built with business or marketing majors, we are not always in the know about other industries. If you want your content to sound knowledgeable, help us out and give us a quick overview of what we're dealing with. Do you sell makeup products? Wonderful! Just send us a quick list of what makes it great and anything that will help it sell (vegan, cruelty-free, etc). Are you an author? Congratulations on your book! We'll try our best to read it, but to help us get started, a synopsis or your favorite passages to highlight would be awesome. We do research for all of our clients, but learning the ins and outs of an industry, a company, services, and products, will take us months without your help. These summaries don't have to be anything formal or fancy, just a blurb with information about what it is, what it does, and why it's unique. We may ask for some more clarification, but it's a wonderful starting point for us to work from.
If you are currently working with, or planning to start with, a digital marketing agency, be sure to get them as many of these things as you can. It will save both parties a lot of time and will prevent revisions, frustration, and delayed results. Managed social media is a great thing, but it does take a bit of upfront work from you. We want to get your Facebook ads launched, your Instagram posts live, and your blog posted as soon as we can, and any/all of these things will help greatly. If you're just starting out and don't have many of these things done yet, BusySeed can help! We can work with you to create a brand guide from the ground up, walk you through revisions to find out what you do and don't like, and set up calls to go over your company in detail. We have helped over 300 businesses build their brand online, and we can do the same for you! Let us handle the heavy lifting! Call (888) 353-1484 to get started today!
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