A Baby and a Marketing Agency
Written by 5ivecanons Staff
They didn’t cross the road or walk into a bar, but they do have one very important thing in common.
Consider a baby. At bedtime, they function with ease and maybe some irresistible sweet giggles when moving through their bedtime routine. While parents may have struggled for weeks or even months finding that sweet spot, the right order of bath, lotion massage, pjs, books, and bed, OR bath, no lotion, song with massage, pjs, more songs, rock and bed, is the difference between hours or minutes of putting that child to sleep. Once they find the process that works, that puts their baby to bed fast and happy every time, they never waiver. It’s not worth the consequences of a broken routine – unless you enjoy hours of trying not to lose your mind and pretending to be asleep.
Let’s take a look at why process matters for an advertising and marketing agency, just like our baby.
Process builds capacity
The minute we start working with a client, the process begins. Discovery, Strategy, Creative, Distribution, and Optimization – the five canons.
Each step of the process builds off the next. The strategy is developed from everything we’ve learned in discovery, creativity built from the strategy, and so on.
With that said, we can do more and add more value in each step because of our learnings from the one before.
Without each step in the process, the capacity for work is much more efficient.
Watch the video above where we share more about the first and most crucial step in our process – Discovery.
To continue, we have processes within processes that allow us to produce more high
quality work in four days than another agency does in five.
While you may not see it as a client, you have an army of creatives working to make sure your project is a success. The Account Lead cultivates a relationship, the Project Manager communicates weekly with the client and delegates projects and tasks to the Production Manager. The Production Manager kicks off the Creatives who execute. The work goes through quality assurance, is delivered to the client, distributed and optimized.
Everyone has a role, and they stay in their lane. When done right, the process of creating and delivering quality work is seamless.
Deliver value
When you follow a process without jumping steps there is no guessing or wasting time. No trial and error. Data drives decisions and you can produce value, every time.
For example, one of the process canons is optimization. This is especially true for landing pages. When we build a landing page, we place a heat map on it. We want to know what users are doing on the page and where they are clicking. That small step allows us to optimize the page in an effort to increase the client’s desired conversion action. Whether it’s removing buttons users aren’t clicking or adding a link to a headline people are clicking, we optimize based on how users are interacting with the page. And we wouldn’t have been able to deliver that value if we did not follow process.
So the journey is pleasant
Have you met a person that likes screwing up, missing a step, or delivering bad news to a client? I haven’t.
When you follow the process, everyone knows what comes next, who is doing it, and by when. This creates a more pleasant and simple workflow, a more predictable day, and happier people. And happy people are more productive.
Raise your hand if you’re into smiles, laughter and camaraderie, rather than unpleasant pressure, confusion and procrastination.
Can weed folks out faster
When you move through your own five canons, or have a specific role in a process, it is much easier to (a) keep people accountable and (b) pinpoint inefficiencies. As you find breaks in the process, you can find a solution faster. You can also evaluate if you have the right people in the right roles, or the right people in general.
To be honest, this also applies to clients.
It’s not uncommon for a client to ask us to break our process. A good example is a client asking us to expedite work that requires more time. While we are faster because of process, and expedite multiple projects per month, there are cases where we cannot bend on the time it takes to produce value and function. We expect our work to be the highest-quality, every time. If we feel it is not possible to deliver the best quality work, we will discuss other options or routes for the project in hopes to find a solution that favors both the agency and client.
Conclusion
Build your process – even if the first few fail. And when you find that sweet spot where the process provides you all of the above, nail it down. Write it down. Name your company after it. Don’t skip a step, and stay consistent.
To wrap this up, who do you want to work with? The mom crawling slowly out of the room praying to not wake the baby after an hour of rocking and shushing, or the mom that has such a tight routine she puts her kid down (awake), walks out the door, does a touchdown dance, and still has time to binge-watch the latest Netflix hit?
