How to Collaborate Effectively with a Marketing Agency or Graphic Designer

Life has simple rules, but they’re not always easy to follow. But they can be applied in any aspect of your life. Similarly I mentioned consistency in ‘The Power of Visual Branding’ post. In this post the key word is communication. 

Communication is important in your private life and professional life. If you want to succeed in either, work on your communication.

Before the project starts

1. Define your goals

Ask yourself a few questions. Do you have clients, but no e-commerce to allow them to easily return? Have you found that your competition recently updated their brand, and have left you outdated? Have you found that your business is only missing a few small bits of information that your customers keep asking about? Or has the new year inspired you to create a new business and need everything building up from the ground? Have you got any ideas or know the direction you want to go in? Or do you have no ideas, and are just looking for advice? What is your budget, will the budget cover your goals? 

There are endless questions you can ask yourself. We would recommend sitting down for 30 minutes with a pen and paper or laptop and just writing down everything. Anything useful and anything you wouldn’t think is useful. Believe us, it’s all useful.

Once you believe you have written down as much as you can, take a clear picture of it, so that when you send it to your marketing agency or graphic designer, they will be able to have a bit of your brain to help them understand what you’re looking for. But don’t worry, if you’re working with us, Damian will also ask questions to ensure we have everything we need to start working.

2. Establish your brand identity

This links back to a previous post ‘The Power of Visual Branding’. Do you have a logo? Colours? Fonts? If this is something you already have, look at it from the point of view of your customers. Take your goals into account, does your current brand need a new life, to fit your goals? Have you found that maybe your goals have changed from when you first started and now your brand needs a little altering to fit your new goals. Or maybe everything aligns perfectly, and you need someone to stay consistent with what you have to create more products for you? 

If you’re unsure, don’t hesitate to ask your marketing agency (or us) for advice. We can create an analysis of your current brand, and point things out you may not have noticed. Sometimes it takes someone with a fresh perspective to find things that aren’t perfect.

3. During the project

Schedule time for regular check-ins.

Be prepared to have to sit down and go through the work your marketing agency or graphic designer has created for you. Dedicate time to this, it’s important. If you don’t dedicate time, you might find your project deadline getting pushed back. Without your feedback or responses, it’s hard for us or anyone else to be able to finish our work, not knowing which direction we need to head. Having to double back and change direction takes time and in turn in most cases will cost you money, to pay for extra time and extra feedback. It can all be avoided with regular check-ins and dedicated time to sit down and go through the work. 

Stay open to suggestions.

Your marketing agency or graphic designer, will most likely work with a lot of different businesses, and can recognise patterns, they will be able to understand what will work and what will not. You don’t have to agree to everything, but allow us to advise you when we think it might be necessary. We want you to succeed just as much as you want to. We love seeing our past projects doing well and helping our clients. Our advice is only there to help you. 

Provide quality resources.

If you’re sending us your own images, ensure that they are high quality, no one wants to look at blurry and pixelated images. Best case scenario is you invest in a photoshoot, a new camera, a person who will be in charge of taking photos for you. You could dedicate some time to take an online course on how to take good photos. Or research how best to send them to us. (We have received a lot of mobile screenshots of facebook posts or even people’s camera rolls.. If it’s in your camera roll, you can send the original photo instead of a screenshot.) 

If you have a logo that you want to use, make sure you have a vector file to send to your marketing agency or graphic designer. This makes our lives an infinite amount easier. And you’ll find that if you send us a small jpeg of it, we’ll be forced to make it small and it might not have the effect you want it to have. 

If you’re providing us with text, ensure that it is correct. The more we have to go back to the project to alter the text for you, the more we cut into the time we have for the project. We have had situations where clients have sent us text that wasn’t grammatically correct, or in the correct language and they have expected us to fix it for free. Unless we have stated this will be included in the price, please send the right text. This will save you from extra feedback costs. This is especially important when it comes to pricelists. You want your pricelists to be correct.

Stay consistent.

Stick to the agreed contract, and goals that were agreed upon. Avoid changes to the brief. You can imagine if your client came to you with one thing and then every time you spoke they changed their mind. It won’t only make our life harder, but it will make yours harder too. Your project deadlines will end up changing so much that it will feel like nothing will ever get finished, and you’ll have to pay extra for the extra time your marketing agency or graphic designer will have to keep putting in to complete and satisfy all your changes. 

Feedback and Revisions

Be specific. Avoid feedback like ‘I don’t like it.’ Explain what you don’t like and why it’s not working for you. Is it the colours? Fonts? Font sizes? Images?

Focus on solutions, suggest alternatives. For example if you don’t like a font we used, show us ones you like, that way we can choose a font that matches more of what you want. If you don’t like a shade of colour, send us images of colours you do like. 

Limit revision rounds. At SLT we personally do this to stay on schedule and budget. The more times we return to a project the more time it takes – the work itself, the communication back and forth. It all can delay the deadline. At SLT we do 3 free revisions. It helps our clients collect as much feedback as they need. For example, instead of the first revision being ‘change the blue colour to yellow’ and then the second revision being ‘delete this paragraph so we can make this font bigger’. They will be able to compress it into one and say ‘Change the blue to yellow, and delete this paragraph to make the font bigger, and then move the logo into this blank space that will be created’. This way we can save time on the back and forth communication. It will also allow you to get more feedback. And you might find you’ll only need one revision because everything was done in one go. 

4. After the project

Give us feedback! Let our team know what we did well and what we can improve on! We love expanding our knowledge, and we would love for you to help us. What we do is very human orientated, and not one person or business is the same. So the more we know from each individual person about our collaboration, the better we will be able to help you with future projects. 
Celebrate success! Show off your shiny new projects! We love seeing the lovely reviews our clients leave too. It makes a difference for the whole team, that we were able to help with someone’s dream.

Ready to work on your dream?

Get in touch with Damian.https://sltmedia.com/contact/