Determining the right ad agency can resemble a mating dance. You conduct your best due diligence to gauge whether an agency will be right for you. But you don’t really know your mate until you’ve lived with them for a little while, right?
How creative is the content they produce for you? How responsive are they to your wants, needs, emails and voice mails? How involved are the senior executives who wowed you at the pitch meeting? In time, these things become very clear, and you’ll know if you have a match or not.
History shows, however, that those questions are not your biggest issue. So what is the biggest mistake that small businesses make in working with ad agencies? Micromanaging. And frankly, your potential reluctance to relinquish the reins is understandable. If you’re like most small business owners, you’ve built your company by wearing many hats, and by doing multiple jobs better than someone else could. Therefore, it can be very difficult to loosen your grip over an important and expensive undertaking like your advertising.
But it’s got to be done. If the professionals didn’t know more about marketing and advertising than you, you wouldn’t have hired them. So, let them do their jobs. If you don’t, they’ll grow frustrated, and the marriage will likely end sooner rather than later.
