December the 12th 2023

Gifts for the company that uses 5 agencies

It’s not uncommon for businesses to take on multiple agencies to get the very best talents working on their business. This can be across IT, marketing, paid advertising and almost any aspect of your business.

While this gets talent into your business, it’s easy to end up with a calendar full of meetings and an inbox full of invoices. There are ways to take back control – without losing the talents you’re working with. If this resonates with you, here are our suggestions for what you and your business can take a look at.

Social media scheduling tools

Pretty much all businesses use social media in some capacity these days – if you’re not you’re missing out. Learning to be successful on these platforms isn’t too hard but you may be outsourcing this to a marketing agency simply because of the time it takes.

There are a host of tools you might not have used to make this process easier. While you can pay for an advanced system like Hootsuite which pulls all your analytics into one place – there’s little need.

Within your Meta Business account, you can also directly schedule posts to your Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Combined into Adobe’s Creative Cloud there’s Adobe Express which hosts a calendar for scheduling your posts. This is useful for non-Meta based social media e.g LinkedIn and X (formerly known as Twitter), however within these platforms, you can schedule posts individually.

Harnessing scheduling means that a week or even an entire month of your business’ content is ready to go in just a few clicks. This means your regular meetings with a social media marketing agency may not be so necessary.

Related: Shoothill assist customers in marketing start-up app

Use your brand guidelines

Brand guidelines are effectively your plug-and-play pack for your company identity. If your external graphic designers haven’t given you these – ask for them. These will help you in producing your own content, while remaining consistent with previous work. Including work produced by yourself or with a new agency. Brand guidelines also take into consideration your tone of voice, use of font as well how you would lay out your logos, infographics and anything else you can think of.

With these brand guidelines, you can set yourself up with templates for your social media posts, website content, even bespoke cloud-based systems for your employees or customers to use.

Assign a dedicated point of contact in your team.

While this may mean an increased workload for one individual in your team, managing an agency or agencies – having an expert in this relationship and what work is being done is a true gift your business’ path to success. Just like how agencies assign you with an account manager – you need to manage that relationship on your side as well to unlock the greatest return on investment from your agency.

Related: Which mobile app is right for you?

Speak with your agency about their other services

Most agencies are multi-faceted and offer a range of services beyond what they’re primarily known for. Considering these can offer a number of benefits, not limited to time-saving but also cost-savings. For example, we at Shoothill are known for our prowess in the application of custom software. However, these same expertise that enable our enterprise to flourish allow us to offer our clients things like IT Managed Services and marketing support. It’ll be the same with other agencies and can be an important discussion to have.

A meeting with a full-service agency

Another solution for regaining control of your calendar is to look at working with full-service agencies. These businesses combine experienced design departments with specialised marketeers to produce work for you quicker and with less time spent in meetings – introducing other agencies to one another.

At Shoothill we specialise in this. Across our consultants, designers, developers, marketeers and operations teams. We have numerous full-service clients that have taken on all aspects of our business – our latest being BettyBetBet a social betting app to help clubs fundraise. But we’ve been providing this service for decades now, leading marketing campaigns that leveraged the creative application of technology to produce stellar results for our clients ranging from blue-chip companies like Arla and Warner Brothers to local firms.

Related: Shoothill are to develop BettyBetBet a community focused betting app