How to Get the Best Out of Your Agency: A Rough Guide for Advertisers

We’re all familiar with the old adage, the customer is always right, but what does it mean if we truly believe our clients are always right? Working under such an assumption could potentially remove opportunities for curiosity, for questions, for innovation. 

At SMI, we’ve made a slight revision to that classic salesman’s axiom that we believe produces the results: The customer should always be heard. 

 From the very first point of contact, we begin listening—really listening—to how you describe your brand, your product, your customers, your goals, and more. Throughout our process, from onboarding calls to creative reviews, to strategic planning, we are listening with the kind of curiosity that leads to good questions that ultimately lead to performance. That is the shared goal that we are all after. 

 Creating time and space for our clients to educate us on their brand and expertise is imperative in crafting a tactical gameplan, one without the blindspots created by false assumptions. 

 We don’t assume. We listen first and then we act.   

In order to succeed in our shared goal, we also need to discover (and then manage) the expectations of our clients. Most expectations are reasonable, thoughtful, and essential to a prosperous relationship between client and agency. We work hard to clearly define key milestones within a campaign, meet deadlines, and overdeliver. We want our clients to expect greatness from us because that is what our seasoned and dedicated team is capable of. 

Of course, we’ve all been on the other side of the table from a not-so-reasonable expectation. These should not be ignored or acquiesced to. Not-so-reasonable expectations can be illuminating afterall. They just need to be managed. (Psst: listening plays a helpful role in these conversations as well!) 

 Managing expectations is a skill we employ over all parts of our business, but here’s an example relative to the ever skyrocketing potential of podcasts: 

 Marketers often want to get their products on the most popular, well-known shows—and rightly so. Big shows have a really big reach. But the reality is that, even though we’d love to get all of our clients on high performing shows like The Joe Rogan Experience, the #1 podcast in the world, sometimes the budget, availability, or target audience just isn’t viable at the moment. However, with our team’s strategic creativity and careful listening this becomes a solvable problem. 

 As Podcast Operations and Buyer, Steve Mondor said, “understanding the client’s budget and listening to their needs is crucial. SMI knows from experience that you can test into a sizable amount of smaller shows in order to gain valuable learning that will allow long term growth.” 

In general, we know that making choices based on personal biases or anecdotal evidence rarely hits the bullseye. It’s our job to listen carefully and ask why you want to make a certain decision. It’s also our job to carefully guide you toward the effective solution. In making sure our clients are heard, we open up the door for more creative and effective solutions, ones that will more resourcefully meet their goals.

Here at SMI, we take pride in our collective knowledge. We are pioneering new technology to change the ad business. We are experts in what we do. 

But that is just one part of the equation. 

Our business relationships require reciprocity. Meaning, we expect you to rely on our expertise just as much as we rely on yours. You are the expert of your brand, your product, your story. We may not utilize buyer personas, SWOT analysis, or pitch decks in our ads directly, but those insights that you provide us with are invaluable. We leverage your expertise. 

This reciprocity allows us to move swiftly, remain nimble, and hit our target. 

But how does it actually work in real life? You point out the problems, and we fill in the solutions.
You lean on us for our expertise as we lean on yours. It’s that simple.

Amidst the hustle and bustle of marketing dollars, charts, graphs, and channel acronyms—it can be easy to lose sight of a very fundamental truth: we are human beings working together. The working relationships (and frankly, the social offshoot as well) we have with our clients are paramount.

In order to raise important questions and concerns, it is vital that we understand and value one another’s perspective and expertise. It’s what makes it a relationship more than a transaction. Being human is what makes us resilient, adaptable, and truly creative in our problem solving. It’s what makes the team at SMI a worthy partner in your business.