Recognizing When It’s Time to Expand Your Marketing Retainer

When a brand’s marketing efforts are succeeding month over month, and they feel ready to expand into new mediums or campaigns, one of the biggest barriers they must overcome is having the manpower to handle the extra work. Companies who hire a creative agency on retainer don’t have this problem. 

Creative agencies provide companies much more flexibility and scalability than may be possible with an internal creative team—largely due to cost and time. By renegotiating your retainer contract, your brand can quickly expand your content strategy with new deliverables and services from the agency. In short, hiring an agency on retainer gives brands the freedom to expand their marketing efforts with less risk and typically lower costs than if they manage marketing in house.

Not having the barrier of scalability is only part of the problem, though. Brands must also identify the most appropriate time to expand their marketing efforts. Scaling up with your creative agency partner will still come at a cost and some risk, so it’s very important to look for key indicators that expansion is necessary and executable.

• Your existing marketing efforts offer returns: One of the most important things for brands to know before expanding their creative retainer is whether the campaigns they’ve run recently were successful and had good returns on investment. Throwing money at an underperforming campaign is unlikely to yield positive results. Rather, expanding a marketing campaign or creating a similar effort to one that yielded high returns can be a positive for the company. This also shows you have a strategy that’s proven to work.

• Your internal team is doing creative, too: Are you or your colleagues doing creative work to accompany the content being produced by your agency on retainer? Would your energy and time be better used elsewhere? If so, you may want to consider offloading those content pieces to the creative agency you have on retainer. While it will likely increase your fee, it will allow your team to focus on other areas of business growth for better returns. 

• You have a clear plan for expansion: Brands should never expand their marketing efforts without first taking the time to consider what that plan looks like. What additional content or services do you need, and what purpose will they serve? Never jump into a marketing expansion without have a clear plan of action.

A marketing retainer’s clear, up-front pricing helps businesses budget for outsourced marketing efforts. Unfortunately, this number might make marketers hesitate to expand and pay more. However, for brands with a successful marketing strategy, clear plans and a bold vision for their campaigns’ futures, expanding the retainer with a creative agency you trust can provide immense value. 

Is your brand ready to work with a scalable creative agency on monthly content? Say hello!