creative briefing

My agency will be undergoing a number of changes over the next few months that are part of the natural evolution of the business. With faces, structures, models, and handful of other elements due to be changed, I see the process as an opportunity to hit the reboot button and rebuild certain aspects from the ground up. This got me thinking - what would I change?

It’s not very often that a business gets a chance to tear down everything and start again. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears go into developing the brand, reputation, networks, clients, PR (for the SEOers), and basically every other grain of what you call your business - so much that “starting over” is a concept that is usually quite foreign to most. But let’s entertain ourselves for a bit, shall we?

What if you had the opportunity to do it all again? Over the years, months, weeks, and days that you’ve been a business owner (yes, this applies to you freelancers as well), you’ve picked up an immense amount of new knowledge. Knowledge that sometimes helps you realize that some of the things you’ve done were not the right things to do. Knowledge that sometimes makes you think, if I could do it again, this is how I’d do it.

So what would you change? What would your business look like if you were to start it again today? What were your biggest mistakes and what have you learned?

To get the ball rolling, here’s a few of my biggest business mistakes:

• Not setting aside budgets for internal work: Budgets for client work are a no-brainer and are easy to justify. Why shouldn’t internal work have the same rationale? Your brand, website, and products are all important assets that, when properly invested in, will offer a [bigger] return.
• The ‘we can do that’ mentality: Every small agency’s tagline should be “we can do that” - not because it’s a good strategy, but because you end up saying it so much that you it might as well be a tagline. Trying to take on too many things outside your realm of expertise will thin out your business and leave you delivering less than mediocre results.
• Not having a hiring strategy: When you first start out, your business doesn’t need 30 sets of hands. It probably doesn’t even need 10. What’s more important to focus on is getting the right set of hands to work with you to build the business and more importantly, to run and execute the business and bring in the revenue. Partnering with a developer to match your design skills = great idea. Hiring a team of designers before you even have an established flow of work coming through = bad idea.
• Not having a growth strategy: Hiring is part of this, but a bigger part is having a plan for how your business will grow in 1, 5, or 10 years. If you’re a lemonade stand, you should have a plan on how you will grow your business into some kind of industry leader in lemonade production or distribution (for example). Without a growth strategy, you’ll always just be that same lemonade stand at the front of your house (or in my case, that lemonade stand with a really thirsty neighbor - thanks Satish).

These, and many more, are considerations that I’ll keep in mind as I begin to build the next instance of the agency.

What about you? Leave your biggest mistakes in the comments and share what you’d do differently if you could start over again (if anything).

PS - As further support that this is an important topic to consider, Naomi from the IttyBiz factory has also recently asked the same question to her readers. Check out her blog if you haven’t already - it’s one of the most entertaining and insightful small business blogs around.

In case you can’t get enough of me here, I thought I’d direct your attention over to Simply Put, the second blog that I’ve been actively contributing to. Simply Put is my agency’s blog and outlet for creative conversations, so if you’re killing time waiting for your pizza pops to finish in the microwave, swing by and read up on what we’re saying.

If you pay attention to my sidebar, you’ll also notice the RSS widget that pulls the latest headlines from Simply Put. I just wrote a quick tutorial over there on how to vertically center content with CSS (anybody want to lend a stumble or digg?). And if you’re not a web designer, maybe you’ll get a kick out of the color-coded text. Or maybe not.

Ding. My pizza pops are ready.

Two posts in one day? I think I’m spoiling you guys. Maybe I’m just in the giving mood be it the holidays and all…

I told you I’d be back soon with word of a new project launch. It wasn’t too long ago (or at least it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long) since I became inspired by the powerful potential of WordPress as a CMS. Three great things have spawned since then:

1. A new skillset that opened a whole new door to potential future business.
2. cantwaitforchristmas.com (read this to learn more).
3. The complete relaunch of my agency’s website in all its WordPressy glory.

Hoping to take a lesson out of my own book, the team and I began discussion of a refresh for our agency website as far back as in August. We had grown a lot as an agency and everything about the old site just didn’t do justice to who we were now, so we knew we had to start fresh. Projects came and projects went, and so did the time and bandwidth we had available to focus on building a new site.

September, October, and November passed by far too quickly, and before we knew it, December was here and we still had no new site. Enter: meeting-with-designer-that-inspired-my-WordPress-fascination. Like a shot of creative steroids, I got to work immediately and quickly turned the new layout template that our team had been kicking around for a few weeks into a fully WordPress-integrated site. That was the first night after being inspired.

Fast forward 3 weeks, a lot of WordPress hacking, plugin-customizing, CSSing, Photoshoping, and copy writing, and we arrive at 6 am Friday morning when the new site finally went live at www.vdotmedia.com. I’m pooped, but am so stoked at how everything turned out. In our moment of glory, I felt like the new WordPress rockstar (with Adii announcing his “retirement”, this possibility becomes a little more real).

Vdot Media (www.vdotmedia.com), before

Vdot Media (www.vdotmedia.com), after

The entire site, from the rotating Flash banner to our new portfolio to our RFP form, is fully WordPress-powered. And just like the promise to post my WordPress tricks for cantwaitforchristmas.com (which I haven’t delivered on just yet), I will promise to do a full write-up of the ins and outs of creating a complete agency site on this platform. I’m sure you’ll get more of a kick out of that post as our agency site is at least ten times more complicated than the single-paged Christmas countdown site.

We’ve also got our new agency blog, Simply Put, running on the site which is great because the team and I finally have a common place to expel our thoughts, ideas, and banter. I encourage all of you to check out our most recent post on the Email Standards Project and if you’re interested, do that whole RSS-subscribing thing that some of you are pretty good at.

So there you have it, a long-winded excuse for why I haven’t been too active over here in the past few weeks. I hope you’ll accept my apology.

Last Friday I attended the second annual LIVE Conference Awards Gala which marked the end of a grueling two-day national student business competition. My agency has had the pleasure of being the creative partner of this one-of-a-kind conference since its inception almost 2 years ago, and from our involvement with the experience, I’ve learned 2 very important things:

1. Student organizations like the Management & Economics Students’ Association (MESA) who pilot innovations like LIVE Conference are breeders of tomorrow’s most promising business leaders.
    
2. Sponsoring a great organization or initiative could be one of the smartest moves you make for your growing business.

Two years ago, some colleagues of mine had asked for my help to launch an ambitious vision they had for a new breed of undergraduate business conferences. They needed some online firing power and I, reluctantly at the time, had accepted the honour, offering the services of my agency in exchange for potential exposure. Little did I know that that decision would ignite a long string of relationships and successes that would help us get to the point where we are at today - with the good fortune of being able to imagine ourselves doing what we love full time.

From our involvement with LIVE Conference 2006, we met one of our best clients who has not only personally provided an ongoing stream of projects for us, but has also referred us to a handful of other great clients. Additionally, our success with working with one of the co-chairs encouraged even more positive word-of-mouth, consequently spreading the good word to all her subsequent new business contacts. From these two buds alone have grown several long and fruitful branches of success that have helped us reach many new milestones throughout this past year (how’s that for an overly-developed metaphor?). We recently closed off our fiscal year with a nearly 200% growth rate from the previous year. Though other factors played a role in our growth as well, many of our successes trace back to our sponsorship of LIVE.

Yes, there’s a point.

Requests for sponsorship are not uncommon in any industry, especially not for creative agencies. Often times, growing agencies hardly have the man power to support sponsorships because it means sacrificing man power from client work which inevitably pay the bills (and the men and women that provide the power). However, I encourage you all to sidestep this [reasonable] excuse and consider for a moment the often-unseen benefits that can arise if you play the cards right.

If bad PR is still good PR because there’s no such thing as bad PR, then good PR must be awesome PR (just follow the logic…). Exposure from sponsoring a successful initiative will put you in the good light with the other corporate sponsors (read: potential clients), which, as our story has shown, can bring many promising things.

Here are some other benefits of sponsoring:

1. Gain access to new audiences.
2. Have full creative control over the work being delivered.
3. Get a testing ground for new technologies and/or strategies.
4. Have the opportunity to contribute to a cause you believe in.
5. Meet great people.

It’s not all good…

While I’m encouraging that growing agencies give sponsorship a try, I should also warn that sponsorships can go sour if you’re not careful. The sponsored party can gain a bad reputation which then passes onto you. The sponsored work could take an excessive amount of time and labour that is far beyond what was forecasted and planned. Or, worst yet, after all the hard work, the project you’re sponsoring could fail and never see its launch date.

These are all risks you take when sponsoring, and some risks will be more prevalent than others depending on the party you’re working with. Do your homework and carefully consider all angles of the deal. Free work is tough, but free work for nothing will hurt you considerably.

Survive your sponsorship

Doing pro-bono work isn’t easy. Trust me, I know. So to help you make the most out of your sponsorship experience, I’d like to offer 3 nuggets of advice that I’ve gained from my experience:

1. Pick a relevant cause. The more relevant the sponsored cause, the more potential benefits there are. Pick something that reflects the values you and your company believe in and also something that connects with your line of work. This ensures a more natural transition from your sponsored work to future paid work.
    
2. Do it yourself. Cost is always going to be a big issue. If you can’t afford to pay your team to do work that brings in no revenue, then do it yourself (if you’re capable of doing it). Putting in the hours to support a sponsorship deal is no different from putting in the hours to network with clients to acquire accounts - it’s all part of the business development role that accompanies your entrepreneurial responsibilities.
    
3. Give a little, get a little. Your sponsorship should be as much about giving as it is about getting. As part of your consideration of whether or not to sponsor something, measure the value of the return - whether it be exposure, relationships, or anything in between. It’s also not uncommon to look to sponsor projects that offer you opportunities to learn and do new things that you normally can’t do with paying clients.

With a new outlook on sponsorship, my agency now looks specifically for great new organizations and causes to sponsor every year. In fact, through the connections made at LIVE, we also extended our arms to the American Marketing Association, who we happily work with as part of the interactive team.

So the moral of the blog post is this: as contradicting as it may sound, sponsorship can be a profitable move. Play your cards right and you’ll gain not only in revenues, but in relationships, opportunities, and good will too. For us, we got all of that plus the pride of being the creative partner for the leading national undergraduate business conference in Canada.

Not too shabby for a growing agency!

My team and I have been hard at work building our agency’s new site (which explains my lack of posts lately). Just like the evolution of our business cards, the next evolution of our website is a reflection of the growth and maturity of our agency. It’s funny how much can change in a single year, but I think it’s absolutely critical to keep your company’s website up to date and always in line with what you’re trying to achieve. The ironic reality is that most agencies get so caught up in the work they’re doing, that they often neglect their #1 marketing vehicle. I’m guilty of this as well.

If you run an agency (or any company for that matter), you’ll know how commonly your potential clients or customers ask “where can I see some of your past work or learn more about your services?”. That question alone should be reason enough to keep the content on your site up to date. But the content isn’t the only thing to consider when it comes to your agency website. From design to tone to architecture, there’s quite a bit of thought that goes into building something that effectively represents your agency on the internet. Now engulfed by the magic and wonders of this process, I thought I would share with all of you my perspective on the anatomy of an agency website.

Design & Style

The face of your agency lies within the design and style of your website. More importantly, if you’re an interactive agency, this website represents your skill set and everything you’re trying to sell to your visitors. Hell, if you’re in the design industry at all, you can bet that your visitors will have greater expectations from the aesthetics that greet them. Not that visitors will be forgiving of an ugly website - and that’s the thing: sometimes the design and style of your website will say more than your content ever could. You may have the most intriguing and insightful copy in the world, but if it looks like crap, your visitors won’t buy it. Literally.

Consider this:

• Is the style of your website consistent with the style of work you produce?
• Is it easy for your visitors to find out information about your agency? Usability, usability, usability!
• Is your website branded consistently with the rest of your materials? Colors, fonts, look, feel, etc. (More importantly, do you have a brand?)

Voice & Tone

Your website is a communication tool. And when it comes to communicating, it’s not always what you say, but how you say it. Imagine your website as if it were the front desk receptionist in your office. What does she sound like? How does she greet your visitors? This same concept applies to the voice and tone you choose to use to communicate your message to your audience.

Consider this:

• Are you a “we” company? Decide whether you will communicate from first person or third person. The perspective you choose dictates how personal you want to get with your visitors.
• Is your tone corporate, business casual, casual, or flat-out web 2.0? The fashion in which your content is written speaks again to the relationship you’re offering. A very corporate tone will allude to a more transactional relationship. A casual tone says screw the corporate BS, let’s be pals. You may find your agency’s tone somewhere in between.

Content & Architecture

Okay, now we’re talking about what you’re saying. For the most part, new visitors to an agency site follow a simple pattern when attempting to learn about your agency. Here’s a ranking of the must-haves on your website that also reflects the typical order in which a new visitor browses your agency’s content.

1. Portfolio
   It’s no surprise that visitors looking to see what you can offer will first check out what you have already offered to others. Plus, for the visual learners, a portfolio will say more about your capabilities than the copy of your services section will. Which brings me to…
    
2. Services
   A portfolio is a great way to wet the lips of your visitors. Typically, after seeing what you’ve done for others, they’ll be on the look out for what you actually offer to do. As such, your services page should be prepared to clearly outline everything you can do.
    
3. About your company
   You may have convinced your visitors that you’ve done great work and that you offer the services they’re looking for, but if you’re a crazy group of axe murderers (as some agencies may be…), then chances are the sales cycle stops there. Tell them a bit about your agency and reassure them that you’re not that crazy group of axe murderers. Or if you are, then try not to mention the murderers part. Or the crazy part.
    
4. Contact
   If your visitor has made it this far, you’re in good shape. It means they’ve been convinced enough of your agency’s abilities that they’re even considering speaking with you. Make sure the contact options are clearly laid out and as easy as possible for your visitors. The harder it is to contact you, the more reluctant they’ll be to actually do it.
    
5. News/Blog
   Here are the rules for this section, as I see it: if you have a lot of great news, share it in a news section. If you don’t have news worth mentioning, use a blog instead. If you don’t plan on updating the blog that often, don’t include this section! The use and importance of this section varies across different agencies of different sizes.

These are the basic sections to cover when it comes to the content on your agency website. Many agencies opt to offer extra features as well in hopes of adding value to the user’s visit. Remember folks, value is the keyword.

Consider this:

• Does the content you’re offering provide the answer to the questions your visitors would be asking?
• What do you want your visitors to do after interacting with the content on your site (i.e. what’s the call-to-action)?
• Does your content offer reason for your visitors to come back?

* * *

Remember, I’ve only discussed the main areas of an agency website here. There’s clearly much more to consider when it comes to building out your site. But, if you don’t know where to start, this should give you a nice blueprint for your first few steps. If you’ve already started, I think it’s still important to review some of these points as a checklist just to make sure you haven’t missed anything.

As I write this, my team is still working hard at building the next instance of our online face. Looking back at the current site, I can’t help but see how many things need changing. It suited us a year ago, but so much has changed since then.

Is your agency site up to date?