Advertising agencies are companies that organizations make use of to promote what they do. It is through advertising agencies that organizations create their awareness to the public. In cases where organizations rebrand themselves or introduce new products, organizations let their clientele know about the changes made via advertising agencies.
However, organizations that are well established have a marketing team that handles their advertising needs. Advertising agencies are hence used by organizations that do not have a marketing team in the hierarchy of organization. Another reason why organization would use the services of advertising agencies, could be that an organization are not in a position to pay up monthly wages for a marketing team.
In cases where organizations have financial constraints, they could opt to hire advertising agencies to provide them with the services required. Other instances where advertising agencies are called in by organizations are to assist in scheduled work by an already established marketing team. Advertising agencies do provide great insights and complement the existing marketing team of an organization.
4 Functions of Advertising Agencies
There are numerous functions that advertising agencies provide to organizations. This article will highlight four functions of advertising agencies.
Attracting clients
The main of an organization investing their money in advertising agencies is to increase their sales. Advertising is way expensive as the main channel of income to many channels of media. This includes television, radio, newspapers, social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
For organizations to ensure that they gain from the advertisements they channel out via various media channels, they hire advertising agencies to help them do the right thing. Advertising agencies that have been in the business for a while are skilled in attracting clients to organizations.
Account Management
Organizations deal with a lot of clients especially if they have been in business for a couple of years. It becomes tedious for organizations dealing with all clients especially when there is a flow of messages channeled via the various communication channels an organization has.
An organization may hence hire an advertising agency to assist them in responding to all the inquiries and orders streaming in from all the organization’s communication channels. In cases when an organization has a campaign, a sale, or a promotion of certain products or providence of a couple of services, an advertising agency could be hired for the period when the campaign is running.
An advertising agency has to however set goals for their results to be quantifiable. This is important because their pay may be pegged to the results that the advertising agency produces.
Media Planners
Various forms of advertisements as aforementioned are channeled via various media channels. Reputable advertising agencies hence have contacts from the media channels they have worked with previously. Advertising rates could mostly be negotiated with local media platforms especially the traditional forms of media.
In cases where an organization’s target audiences are acquainted with television, radio, or newspapers these advertising agencies will know what time slots or pages of the newspaper would best attract the organization’s target audience. With the advancement of technology, newspapers have majorly shifted to e – papers especially because many people work remotely. Advertising agencies hence have to be knowledgeable of how to slot in an organization’s advertisement.
If it through the social media channels, say, for example, YouTube, that advertising agencies have to find out what kind of video the target audiences of this organization view the most to allocate the advertisements in between those specific videos.
Researchers
Research is another crucial thing that organizations who want to scale up the ladder in their business cannot underestimate. The research could have started being done internally even before they call in an advertising agency. However, one of the functions of an advertising agency is to research on who the organizations customers are.
Let alone an organization’s customers, advertising agencies also have to do some deep research on who the competitors of this organization are. As much as an organization wants to retain its customers, it ought to understand that competition is healthy. Advertising agencies hence assist organizations in identifying how they could beat their competitors and avoid losing their already acquired customers.
The other goal of organizations inviting advertising agencies to work with them is to research how to win potential customers and increase their website and social media engagements. Now that many organizations are remotely operated especially after COVID-19 hit the world, the goal is to keep the relevancy of what an organization does.
Conclusion
Apart from helping organizations with how they advertise themselves, organizations hire advertising agencies to design new products, come up with their prices and help companies maintain their reputation.