four variations between artistic and advertising businesses
Do you need a creative agency or a marketing agency?
Take a look at today's most successful companies and you will see the magic of both types of agencies in the game.
Take Apple, for example.
Apple marketing believes thatDesign and use are just two of the reasons for Apple's success and are sure to give it a competitive edge. "
However, if you look at the success of Apple and its individual products in the markets they compete in, you will see that design alone doesn't do the magic.
Marketing is just as important.
Apple is driving growth with a marketing mix that generates enthusiastic fans even before product launches. The total sales of its products are a direct result of the company's marketing strategies.
In other words, to help drive and sustain its growth, Apple employs creative agencies. However, before the product launch, they use the know-how of marketing agencies.
This is the difference between a creative agency and a marketing agency.
What is a creative agency?
According to column 5 media:
“A creative agency is a term for an agency that offers a variety of services that fall under the umbrella of marketing and advertising. Basically, if you need a creative strategy, work, or promotion these can help you achieve it. "
Column Five Media is a creative agency that has worked with Intuit, eBay, Google, Facebook, and dozens of other global brands.
Take a second to look at Column Five Media's definition of a creative agency and what does it tell you?
It clearly shows that even a highly experienced creative agency admits that their services, or the services of a creative agency, fall under the umbrella of marketing and advertising.
This definition should tell you something:
A creative agency helps illuminate the implementation of a company's advertising and marketing strategy through appealing designs and other forms of creative work.
What is a Marketing Agency?
Like Column Five Media, my agency, Neil Patel Digital, has worked with global brands like Google, eBay, Intuit, Facebook, and dozens of others:
This is how I define a marketing agency:
“A marketing agency is a company that researches, strategizes, tags and advertises a company's products or services. Ultimately, marketing agencies work with a company to develop, manage, and execute its marketing strategy to achieve defined business goals. "
As you saw in the Apple example, design and use (mostly brought to life by creative agencies) play an essential role in making products more attractive to users.
Identifying these users, understanding what design choices appeal to them, the messages that resonate with them, how, where, and when they can be reached most come first.
That is why I say that marketing (mostly achieved with a marketing agency) promotes and supports the growth of a company.
While creative agencies help illuminate, strategize, create, and deliver the right content to the right people, marketing ideas:
What are the various other differences between a creative agency and a marketing agency?
4 differences between a creative agency and a marketing agency
As I said at the beginning of this article, the difference between these types of agencies boils down to very fine details.
However, the need to know about them is paramount because you can avoid judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree.
To guide you, I'll differentiate the two by pairing the associated services that these types of agencies can help you with if you want to grow your business.
Difference # 1: market research vs. User research
Market research is a core business function.
Through market research, you can validate a business opportunity, examine the economic forces by examining key industry trends and competition, and get an idea of your potential market size.
However, the main goal of market research is not to provide you with a solid foundation for the above.
The most important thing to do is to relate the results of the research to your business case to make sure you have a clear picture How and Where to position your company for growth.
By using market research to determine the positioning of your business, an agency determines measures to differentiate your brand from competitors. Plus, they can identify where that positioning should take place – something that comes from knowing the demographics of your potential customers.
Marketing agencies are characterized by this type of market research at a high level.
Not only are they the ones who typically work in-house with market analysts, but they're also the ones who develop tools that make this type of market research possible.
For example, the need to do SEO research and help people better understand their market and their competition led me to create Ubersuggest:
Although some marketing agencies have in-house user research, creative agencies excel most in user research.
Market research helps determine how and where your brand is.
But to know why people would care, you need to address their interests and address their vulnerabilities as soon as they discover your brand security, mostly without saying a single word.
To accomplish this feat, it is necessary to create user-centric graphics and design assets that speak to people's interests or address their weak points, also known as psychography.
User-centric design is the core of creative agencies.
To do this, they always do user research to determine the psychographics of potential customers, even after market research has identified their demographics.
This explains why you can find UX researchers and UI / UX designers who run the lines for creative agencies.
Difference # 2: Long-term branding versus specific targeting
Did you notice about most of the global brands?
They hardly change their core branding.
Yes, they are evolving into trendy graphics like most others, but the branding fundamentals rarely change completely.
Take Google for example.
The company's visual identity and logo evolved tremendously from 1997 to 2015, but the basic brand colors of red, blue, yellow and green remain:
This is because branding, which is usually done by creative agencies, takes a long-term approach. It's about creating design assets and visuals to represent what your company represents and to articulate your corporate identity for years to come.
However, as you can see on Google, over time and as new market opportunities emerge (mostly identified through market research and marketing agencies) there may be a need to evolve that identity once you realize that specific audiences need to be targeted.
And that was the case with Google.
According to a report by The Verge, redesigning the logo to look good on small screens had a profound impact on why Google advanced its visual identity design in 2015.
In other words, through ongoing market research, Google has recognized the need to target the growing number of people who use smartphones to access the internet.
The example from Google shows an important difference between creative and marketing agencies.
Use creative agencies when you need to design and evolve your brand and corporate identity to reflect what your brand represents over the long term and in changing times.
However, creative agencies are more focused on designs and are not concerned with studying changing market trends on specific channels.
And this is where marketing agencies differ.
The job of marketing agencies revolves around finding new ways to market what your company has to offer, reach specific audiences, and drive growth. This is logically a necessary first step before starting the design or involving a creative agency.
Difference # 3: Developing go-to-market strategy versus creative direction
Marketing agencies and creative agencies also differ in the area of go-to-market strategy development and directing the creative direction of strategy implementation on different channels.
In this way, marketing agencies can help you identify the channels for marketing your product or service. They can also help you plan and decide which types of content will have the most impact.
But most of them lack design expertise, even with in-house designers.
So creative agencies are a better option when you know what channels and content types need to be created, especially when expert design of the final result of such content is required.
For example, a marketing agency may find that your brand is driving more engagement and growth on social media. However, they may lack the creativity to create engaging content for the social media channels that your company uses to target your audiences on these platforms.
Creative agencies differ in this area.
They are the ones to turn to when you need expert design execution specific to a go-to-market strategy that is usually developed by a marketing agency.
Difference No. 4: Analytics vs. creativity
There was one myth (although debunked in 2013) that postulated that we have two heads: the methodical or analytical side on the left and the creative side on the right.
Let's imagine for a moment that there is some truth in this myth.
Why?
Because I think it's a good way to differentiate a marketing agency from a creative agency.
In this case, you can think of marketing agencies as the analytical side of the left brain as they put lots of numbers together in search of logic to justify things like marketing spend, marketing ROI, and many others.
Creative agencies, on the other hand, deal with the irrational aspects of a business by using creative thinking and emotionally driven design development to address intangible human emotions that aren't necessarily measured in numbers.
Although in business, everything is measured in the long run, including a marketing or creative agency's efforts to justify its investments.
Let's say you want insights into how your advertising campaigns are performing or, in the future, about your business goals.
Or you might need data intelligence like traffic sources, channels that are having the greatest impact on your business, your sales funnel metrics details, and marketing agencies to contact as these tasks require analytical data processing.
If data processing by marketing agencies shows the need to improve your design or to create it from scratch to make it more appealing to specific audiences or channels, creative agencies are better suited to that.
Creative Agency vs Marketing Agency: Which One Should You Choose?
It depends on.
The truth is that both types of agencies have excellent levels of creativity in everything they do.
So, if you stick with the myth about the left analytical brain and the right creative brain, you cannot scrap one side and expect the brain to perform at its best.
You need both to move your business forward.
Instead of asking which to choose (because you will eventually need one of the two), the question should be when should I choose a marketing or creative agency?
If you want to develop or improve your branding or brand identity, reach out to a creative agency. If you want to create or improve design assets to aid your marketing campaigns or make your content more attractive, creative agencies can help in these areas.
Before seeking creative design help, however, it is imperative to do market research, develop a go-to-market strategy to drive everything you design, and establish an airtight analysis ecosystem to measure everything every step of the way.
If this is what you need now, my Neil Patel Digital advertising agency shines in this area.