We talk about practising what we preach a lot with our clients, so we decided to make it one of our values at Chime Agency. It holds us accountable and we take decisions based on whether it is what we would advise a client to do.
We, therefore, thought it was important to score Chime Agency on our proprietary marketing matrix and wanted to share with you what we learnt from the process and how we are ensuring it informs and elevates our marketing.
You can download the full research report with findings from scoring over 100 agencies marketing on our matrix, here.
There were some areas we, perhaps unexpectedly, scored well. We have a well defined niche that is clearly communicated on our website and having only recently gone through a branding process, our visual identity and consistency across our channels scored well. We were even pleasantly surprised to see that our domain was attributed to relevant topics by search engines, making us one of the only small agencies to score well here. Our overall score was nine points above benchmark at 36 out of 43 – the overall average agency score is 27 out of 43.
However, the process also revealed areas for improvement that we are already working on. Some we knew instinctively and others were a little more hidden.
1. Identifying our values and mission on our website
While we are clear on these as a team, they are not clear on our website. I’d argue they come through in our content, but we now plan to add them to our ‘About Us’ page so that anyone who visits our site gets a strong sense of who we are and what drives our business.
2. Producing more regular and varied content
We made it a strategic imperative for Q1 to get our marketing machine up and running so we can consistently produce marketing content. In response to the scoring, we have now allocated time across our team to dedicate to producing website and social content. Our research report is of course a huge driver of this. We are experimenting with different content forms much more now too and are building out a reporting mechanism to better understand what works best for our audience.
3. Incorporating clear case studies
We have a suite of case studies that we share with clients at creds or proposal stage, but these are not currently on our website. We know we need to create a system to capture the stories from our client work and get them out into the world more effectively. We are also including our clients more within our content to bring the work we do for them to life in different ways (you will see some of them feature in our research report for example!) We have set a target of creating a new case study every quarter so we can continue to grow this resource bank.
4. Diversifying our content to talk about culture, industry and our work
At the point when we scored ourselves, Chime Agency was relying heavily on the personal brand of our founder. Now we have the findings of our research and a growing team we feel better able to diversify the sort of content we are talking about on our Chime Agency LinkedIn page. We have assigned one of our team members to curating regular content from across the industry too.
5. Generate earned media
Since scoring ourselves we have made a concerted effort to generate more earned PR coverage. We have worked with the wonderful Orange PR who are masters of media relations to amplify our award wins and generate media interest in our research. We know this is an investment in our brand long term.
We found the process of scoring ourselves and benchmarking against other agencies really useful to focus on where we can learn, evolve and hone our own marketing machine.
Each month we will be scoring a small number of agencies on our matrix and providing a tailored report with learnings and recommendations. If you’d like to get your hands on one of these limited audits, drop us a line!
Download our Practice What You Preach report
Agency marketing is hard. Our research with over 100 UK agencies proves it. Download the report to learn how to become your own best case study.
