If you’ve been reading up on how to make your business a success, you’re probably nearing the next step in the process, hiring an agency. Of the many things to consider, this question always comes up: Which one is best for me? A marketing agency or a creative agency?
Both types of agencies are dedicated to making your business go from success to success. Both are a great addition to any business. However, you may only need one of them.
In today’s post, you’re getting a clear overview of the differences between a marketing agency and a creative agency. After this short read, you should have a clear idea which to hire.
Let’s dive in!
What’s a Creative Agency?
Before we go into the nitty-gritty of defining a creative agency, I want you to get your head around the idea that creative work falls under the umbrella of marketing and advertising.
Simply put, a creative agency is responsible for doing creative work, strategy, and promotion. It connects the gap between a marketing/advertising strategy and its execution by taking charge of the designs and media needed.
So, in a nutshell, a creative agency does:
- Corporate identity work
- Websites design
- Graphic design
What’s a Marketing Agency?
Since we’re a full-service advertising and marketing agency, we do marketing at scale, and we’ve helped a lot of brands and companies in the Middle East region to achieve their marketing goals.
Here’s our definition for a marketing agency:
A marketing agency is responsible for creating, building, and executing a marketing strategy to help a brand or a company achieve a wider audience or make a lot of sales.
A marketing agency derives its intelligence and aims from its understanding of your target audience. The creative agency works on the designs or creatives to use, the messaging that’ll resonate, and where to display those things for maximum reach.
Typically, a marketing agency works on:
- User Research
- Developing a marketing strategy
- Tweaking positioning
- Executing the marketing strategy
Now; let’s find the 3 key differences between the two.
3 Differences Between a Marketing Agency and Creative Agency
You can’t easily judge any agency based on what they appear to offer on the front end, as there are many factors at play. But, you should definitely know the difference to make your hire. To help you shop intelligently, here are three key differences between the two agency types.
Build The Marketing Strategy vs The Creative Strategy
One way to spot the differences between a marketing and a creative agency is to compare their varying marketing strategies.
A marketing agency will help you decide on the best channels to target, what content to create, when to post the content, and the appropriate budget to reach your audience.
A creative agency will be more focused on the actual creatives and designs needed for these channels in terms of their sizes, what colors to use to show off your branding, and the best channels to use to attract your ideal customers.
All in all, a marketing agency is the one who can create the marketing strategy and the creative agency helps in delivering the creative media needed for the marketing campaigns.
The Life Cycle Of A Brand vs Embracing New Trends
Most brands evolve and change over time, and there’s always a time that they need to change their logo and identity to match a new trend or arena. Google is a case in point:
Exhausting the branding possibilities of the logo design is part of a creative agency’s remit. They have extensive experience creating designs that work and make it stick.
However, the reasoning behind this change is always determined by a marketing agency, since the majority of what marketing agencies do is reading numbers to justify ROI and emerging trends. They help inform when to do a rebranding.
So, rebranding is done by a creative agency, while the decision behind that is done by a marketing agency.
Market Research Vs User Research
Marketing agencies have dedicated teams of data nerds who excel at doing marketing research. At the end of the day, you have to justify your performance.
Creative agencies do user research to know how to attract a user without ever having to say a word. That’s their area of expertise. Most of them have UX/UI researchers and UX/UI designers.
Market research is the core of marketing agencies because the first step of a marketing strategy is to develop a buyer persona, and to do that you have to know your market.
And user-focused design is the backbone of creative agencies, since they focus more on understanding how and why users interact with a certain design.
Final Thoughts: Which One To Choose?
Both types of agencies are a great addition to any business. It certainly helps, thorough, to know what they are about and how they differ.
Whether you’re in the early stages or are about to do an update to your overall corporate identity, hiring a creative agency is the best choice. However, if you want to build a new acquisition channel or improve your overall revenue, a marketing agency is best.
As a full-service advertising and marketing agency, we do both. And we do them extremely well. Rather than hire two different agencies, why not explore a package with us that could save you money. Let’s talk.
