Branding Agency vs Advertising Agency: Pros & Cons,
So, someone sent me an email asking me to share my thought on what Branding Agency and Advertising agency is and which is best to adopt in their startup.
Well, after explaining what the both serves and what to do, it landed me a one month consulting deal which she paid $3000 for, that is 1,080,000 Naira.
I’m pretty glad I was able to help her clothing startup scale from where it was in 5 months to doing 5 figures in $ every month.
Read: What is influencer marketing?
So, in this article, I will be sharing few tips which details;
- What is Branding Agency
- What is Advertising agency
- Pros and Cons of Branding Agency and Advertising agency
- My thought on branding and advertising as a marketer and sales person.
- My predictions on both and
- My experience doing marketing at Satowallet.
So are you ready?
Let go there!
What is Branding Agency?
According to Wikipedia, A branding agency is a firm that specializes in creating and launching brands and rebranding. The role of a branding agency is to create, plan and manage branding strategies for clients, including support in advertising and other forms of promotion.
How customers, people or users see a company or platform is the work Branding agency. Creating a good brand reputation can take some time to build which is no so with advertising agencies.
What is an Advertising agency
Just as said in Branding agency, Wikipedia also defines an advertising agency as a creative agency, is a business dedicated to creating, planning, and handling advertising and sometimes other forms of promotion and marketing for its clients. An ad agency is generally independent from the client; it may be an internal department or agency that provides an outside point of view to the effort of selling the client’s products or services, or an outside firm.
Pros And Cons Of A Branding Agency Vs An Advertising Agency
Pros
| Brand Agency | Advertising Agency |
| Sells to customers while helping them | Sells to customers without the stress of support or help |
| Cost-effective | Gets almost instant result if not immediately |
| Great way to build good reputation for companies and get results | Great way to get exposure and attention fast |
| Good for growth hackers | Good for growth hackers if well applied |
Cons
| Brand Agency | Advertising Agency |
| Takes Tim To Produce Result | Annoying to customers/users |
| Customer lifetime value not guaranteed | Costly to maintain |
| No guarantee that there will be a result | |
| Can affect company reputation |
My Thoughts:
In the early days, advertising Agencies were the hot thing and mostly depended on by corporations and businesses to drive revenue.
Most of the marketing approach used by these Advertising agencies are done via campaigns pushed out across TV, radio, billboards, websites/platforms and so on which in recent time is losing trust by customers which is due to the social economy we live in right now.
While on the other hand, a brand Agency will carry out a business audit, industry trends industry, processes, systems, stakeholders and more and then determine the best ways forward for that will help the company drive revenue with the current social economy.
Basically, what same marketing approach is applied for all businesses by Advertising agencies but custom marketing approach is applied by branding Agencies.
My Predictions
With the current market trends, branding agencies will eventually play a larger role in the marketing space.
Also, businesses (especially product sellers) that adopt building their brand based on customer location is likely to make more sales that business that advertises to wide reach an audience.
- According to data from THINK WITH GOOGLE, 67% of smartphone users are more likely to purchase from companies whose mobile sites or apps customize information to their location. This brings locally SEO into play.
- My biggest prediction in the marketing hassle is that companies will eventually forget the name called Advertising agency and will soon regard it as dead but Brand agencies will remain evergreen as they can as well perform the duties of advertising agencies while making a custom marketing approach for various businesses. This is where AB testing comes into play.
My Experiences
Branding will always make a company stand out than Advertising. Customers are hating obvious adverts. Below is my experience at Satowallet.
Before I joined the Satowallet team as the marketing lead and product analyst in November 2017, the company had already spent thousands of Dollars into Google Adword, Facebook and Coinmarketcap without any result and had less than 4000 users using the wallet. They hired some Ad agency to do their advertising for them and it never produced any good results after wasting money.
In December 2017, I did competitive research and discovered the approach and weaknesses of the competition, so we decided to implement some features on the App that will make it stand out as a brand, we;
- Updated the App and came up with better UI and features
- Built a system that lets Satowallet users make money without losing money
- Integrated a referral system
- Become the cryptocurrency wallet with the best support right now
- Engage our community with what we are doing.
In less than 1 year of doing all these, Satowallet became the largest cryptocurrency wallet and exchange in Africa with over 45000 users right now (that over 10X growth) and generating more revenue and spends less in Ads because the brands has used few months to build trust in the industry.
Read: How to start an Advertising company
We designed a marketing system that will work for the startup using the Brand Agency approach with lesser money poured into paid advertising.
Most times, doing this requires pretty study and research, well, you don’t have to worry, why not hire me to do it myself or book a consultation with me and have me discuss with you and your team on the best approach to go about scaling your business from its current state.
You can reach out to me at gudtalent@entorm.com
