Creating designs, relevant content marketing, developing an ad campaign, and understanding buyer personas are important for building a business’s brand. However, creative work is artistic and highly skilled. As an entrepreneur or small business owner, you likely only have the bandwidth to do so much—and often artistic work is not part of that equation. In this article, we describe what creative agencies are, their different types of services, the pros and cons of creative freelancers vs. hiring an agency, costs, and expert tips for hiring a quality creative agency.
What is a Creative Agency?
A creative agency is a marketing agency that provides innovative strategies and initiatives to help businesses achieve their brand goals. They specialize in advertising services, technology, and design.
It is worth noting that creative agencies can specialize in virtually any industry. As a very artistic subset of marketing, they will usually find a niche market to broaden their skills and services. For example, a creative agency may specialize in hospitality or nonprofit businesses, defining who they are as an agency.
Creative agencies may also be completely full-service, meaning they have all necessary expertise and equipment on staff (e.g. video producers and cameras) or they may outsource part of their work (e.g. filming a commercial).
What are the Different Types of Creative Services?
The tasks that are associated with creative services are varied, but below are the main services that an agency would be able to accomplish.
Creative Strategy
Agencies, in general, can provide a full set of services, but at a creative agency, they specialize in brand awareness, content marketing, and social media strategy. With any design specialty, you want to be sure that the end product aligns with the rest of your business. A creative agency can provide an opportunity to reevaluate your brand and all that encompasses so that it is clear to your customer and fits within the customer persona.
Design Services
For many, when they think of a creative marketing agency, they think of designers. But this is only one service an agency provides. Design services include graphic design, web design, video production, copywriting, art direction, and user experience designers.
Advertisement Services
Creative agencies can also provide an advertisement plan, including the strategy, design, ad-buying plans, and roll out the marketing campaign. Advertisement services include extensive research of the industry and competitors, to distinguish the client from competitors. Advertisement services can be quite extensive and expensive, so the process is usually one of the most collaborative at an agency and their client.
Analytics Monitoring
It is one thing to create a beautiful creative strategy full of gorgeous new logos, social media graphics, and story content creation, but if these creative pieces perform poorly, then it won’t lead to new revenue generation. As this article explains, one of the most important things that a creative marketing agency can do is monitor the performance of its enacted strategy. By doing this, they can then tweak their strategy or completely scratch everything and create something new. A good agency won’t be afraid to do what is right for you as their client.
Why Do I Need to Invest in Creative Services for My Business?
Creating designs that align with your brand and are effective is a highly specialized skill. Yes, as a small business, you could play with some free tools or Microsoft Suite to create a logo or social media campaign, but will the collateral look professional? Will the end product be aligned with your business’s mission, vision, customer persona, and goals? Hiring a creative agency to do this work for you will go a long way to reach your target audience, entice them to use your services, and ultimately generate revenue.
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Should I Hire a Creative Agency or a Freelancer?
Now that you understand the value of creative services in marketing, it is time to decide how to hire this support. It is unlikely that small business owners have a creative, so the decision is between an agency or a freelancer. Here we describe the positives and negatives of both.
Positives and Negatives of an Agency
As with hiring any agency partner, the biggest benefit of hiring one is the breadth of resources they can provide. Especially as a small business, outsourcing your creative needs will ensure that you have the designs and content marketing you require without all the added costs associated with having in-house staff. One of the perks of using an agency vs. a freelancer is that agencies generally can provide more services with expert contributors. They often have creative directors, who have lots of experience in marketing strategy. If you are looking to really change up your brand look and strategy and want skilled and creative designers to work on several components of your creative marketing, an agency will have that. The only downside of an agency is that they can be more costly, especially if they do not outsource some of their services (e.g. video production).
Positives and Negatives of Freelancers
If you are not looking to overhaul your strategy to your brand awareness, and only need help with tweaking your logo or need someone to update your content on your website, a freelancer may be more suitable. If you find the right freelancer, they can feel like they are part of your company, in culture and style of communication, and ultimately will be cheaper than an agency. However, no person is an expert in all creative tactics, nor is there a freelancer that understands every industry, so the search to find the perfect freelancer will take more time.
Why You Should Hire a Creative Agency
As a small business owner, your focus is likely on overall strategy, increasing revenue, and daily operations to keep the ship afloat. However, you’ve probably recognized that to grow the business, brand recognition is paramount, and thus, creative thinking is necessary. By hiring a creative agency, you can leave the creative work to the experts.
Hiring a Creative Agency
If you are in the early stages of seeking out a creative agency, you’ll want to do the legwork upfront to find out where to start and gain an understanding of the potential range of costs.
How Much Does It Cost to Hire a Creative agency?
For creative agencies, there are two general approaches to billing: hourly rates and project rates.
Project rates are more commonly used for short-term projects. This would be if you have a project in mind (e.g. re-branding marketing campaign). A lump sum would be paid. There would be additional charges if the scope keeps changing or the cost could decrease if the agency fails to deliver on time.
Hourly rates are more common for longer-term engagements, though they can also be used for single projects. Here are ways this could be broken down:
Rate card
You assign an hourly rate based on the function and level of the individual doing the work beforehand. An example of this would be if the agency has a more junior staff member working on one component of a project, they will charge less for that part, while a senior staffer would charge more. The “rate card” corresponding rates to function/level is agreed upon before work begins.
Blended rate
A single hourly rate is negotiated and agreed on between the client and the agency. Regardless of function or level, all hours are billed at the same rate.
Cost plus
This is a combination of rate card and blended rate. Hours are billed on a blended rate, but that blended rate will go up or down depending on the function and seniority of the staffer and the amount of work they are doing.
Per hour/day/week
This model is most common in consulting work. This is done when a project has been completed, but there is ongoing work that is needed after. This is usually a model when there is a continued relationship, but not much work after the project is complete.
If you choose to work with an agency partner for full-stack options, then the prices range quite a bit depending on location, services, experience, and more. However, in this scenario, they will provide a contract that outlines set-up fees, project-based fees vs retainer fees, and a timeline of when the contract expires (and thus when retainer does as well).
How to Find a Reputable Creative Agency
Luckily, UpCity has a list of top creative agencies, so that is a great first step. However, every search should include several sources. Doing a Google search, referencing LinkedIn, and seeking out reviews and recommendations are great places to start.
When going through your search, make sure you have clear goals you’re hoping the agency can help you achieve. As mentioned earlier, creative agencies can specialize in different industries, different services, or be full-service vs. ad hoc. It is also important to have a budget in mind so when you conduct your search, you can quickly eliminate agencies that are out of your price range.
Once you have a list of possible agencies, look at their portfolio, case studies, and testimonials. If you are intrigued by their creative portfolio, then it may be an agency for you. If, however, they have horrible customer reviews, you would want to take a closer look to find out why and if the negative feedback would be relevant to your needs.
Questions to Ask a Creative Agency
Once you have created a shortlist of agencies that you are interested in, schedule a chat, and come prepared with the questions. Here are examples of questions you could ask:
- What is the range of services you provide?
- What are the buyer personas and/or industries that you are most familiar with?
- How does our pricing break down?
- What types of creatives are on your marketing team?
“Make sure to know the details of the contract before signing to avoid miscommunication. Ask what is the timeline/how will you know when they will send updates or deliverables. How many revisions do you have in a design project? Asking these will make sure you are not blindsided later in the process.”
—Mariya Bentz, President, MBM Agency
Expert Tips for Choosing the Right Creative Agency
While we could share more tips and tricks to find a suitable creative marketing agency, we thought we would reach out to the experts themselves. UpCity surveyed leaders in the industry, and this is what they had to say:
In your opinion, what are your top tips for finding and hiring a great creative agency?
“When looking to hire a great creative agency you’ll want to do your homework. Make sure you are shopping around and not just going with the first company that sounds good. Ask for samples of their work and the experience they have. Make sure you also know their process and how long something like this will take so you keep on track with your business plan. And last but not least, make you know their fee and see if it fits within your budget.”
—Alexandra Van Doren, Co-founder & Senior Dynamic Social & Content Integrator, Agency onethree LLC
“Do you like their work? If you like their brand and their work is in line with what you want for your branding, they will be able to deliver. Be clear about what you want, show examples, and communicate your brand’s tone, voice, image, and persona. And PLEASE have your branding book or criteria ready to go. Nothing worse than doing the work and having someone say, ‘Oh I forgot we want [insert font]’”
—Shannon Peel, Creative Entrepreneurial Owner, MarketAPeel
What traits should you look for in a creative agency?
“You should look for a creative agency that’s, well… creative! They should really care about being awesome at what they do. They should be easy to talk to and communicative. They should have good design taste, of course, reflected in their website and other materials. And, of course, they believe in what they do and try to get you results so they won’t push you into something you don’t need.”
—Nick LaRovere, Owner, Occulus Films
“The most important part of any relationship is communication. Make sure they are responsive to phone calls and emails, not only during the sales process but afterward too. You can gauge communication by reading details within online reviews.”
—David Wurst, Founder, WebCitz LLC
What are the common mistakes you should avoid when hiring a creative agency?
“Don’t just hire for a name brand. Many agencies lean on a brand name, but it might be that they can’t deliver what you need as well as a hungry up and comer. Ask them what deliverables will be achieved and force them to give you a budget and stick to the budget. If you don’t like paying a lot for project managers and coordinators, do not hire a large agency in some big city. They have a lot of overhead to cover, which means costs to you. And beware of the layers of people acting as agency mediators on your account. This lends itself to mistakes, miscommunications, and more costs back to you.”
—Michael Donovan, CEO, Donovan & Co. Strategic Communications
“Yeah, once you’re absolutely ready to hire a creative agency, you have to be ready to let go of the driver wheel a little. You have hired this team because you trust them. Let them work their magic and do their thing. If they request 3 months to get started, give them those 3 months. Don’t give up after month 1 of them working endlessly and creating genius ideas for the months to come. COLLABORATE & COMMUNICATE. You guys both have the same intention and that is to grow your brand and business.”
—Vanessa Castillo, Founder & CEO, VCV Agency
Post-Hiring Expectations
Once you have found the right agency and your contract is ready, you can expect a few things once the work gets started:
- Reconfirm understanding of project requirements
- Conversations with your sales team or marketing staff (if applicable) and the agency to discuss KPIs, metrics (e.g., conversion rates) target audience objectives, and deliverables
- Initial work gathering information and data on existing creative designs
- Follow the project management model established in the initial proposal
- Regular follow-up reports on successes and opportunities including graphic design proofs and reporting on KPIs.
Do you have any questions about hiring the best creative agency for your business? Check out our picks for the top creative companies for further information.