6 Marketing Project Ideas To Kickstart Your Agency
Your marketing team wants to do work that has a powerful impact, but it’s easy to dilute their best efforts by pursuing too many directions at once. Marketing leaders are looking for effective ways to reach customers while prioritizing sustainability, lean operations, and other optimizations that increase value add.
Partnering with a marketing agency can be the pivot that enables your team to stretch and scale up or to go broad with new formats, channels, and ideas.
Agencies help marketing teams like yours amplify their work with amazing results. They often specialize in industry niches or specific marketing services, such as graphic design, content creation, or social media. Their contributions can be as narrow as an animated video for an advertising campaign or as all-encompassing as a top-to-bottom rebrand.
Working with an agency enables your team to tackle more, quickly and affordably—and you can find top agencies right here on Upwork. Check out these marketing project ideas for your next agency collaboration.
1. Expand your influencer marketing program
Influencers are figures who are known and trusted by an audience that’s often concentrated around a specific niche. Their specialization and the loyalty arising from that relationship are factors that help make influencers so persuasive. They may not have a sizable audience, but the trust they’ve built within their community can be powerful.
Influencer marketing creates targeted partnerships with influencers in your industry, leveraging their platforms to raise the visibility of your brand and affect how others perceive it. Think of influencer marketing as word-of-mouth marketing with the volume turned way up. HubSpot’s most recent State of Inbound Marketing Report found that:
An experienced agency partner can help by taking the lead on an influencer marketing project, which may include finding and vetting ideal influencers for your brand. Or an agency can help cut the guesswork by contributing their expertise to your overall strategy and offering hands-on support for a campaign from start to finish.
2. Scale your content creation pipeline
Interesting content fuels many marketing efforts, like social media, sales enablement, and search engine marketing. Particularly with B2B content marketing, sharing high-value content can be an effective way to reach multiple people within the same company.
However, your content needs to be able to grab the attention of your particular customers and prospects. That kind of creativity doesn’t always scale easily.
When you add talent and expertise from agency partners, your team gains flexibility. For example, you can grow content production by pairing an agency’s knowledge of search engine optimization with your team’s deep understanding of your customers. Or engage an agency to experiment with different marketing project ideas, such as audio or video campaigns.
When global financial institution ING and their agency partner, Soap Creative, needed quirky animations for an engagement campaign in Australia, they chose Amblagar Studio. The Argentina-based agency is a collective of designers, illustrators, animators, and programmers who’ve worked with leading brands such as Disney, Lego, P&G, National Geographic, and Fox.
“How do you want to spend your life?” was designed to get ING customers interacting with the bank beyond financial transactions. And it worked: The campaign drew in 122,000 unique visitors with an average visit of 5:55 minutes, and 23% of visitors came back to the site.
3. Stay above the competition with a savvy SEO agency
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a slow burn. With time and dedication, good SEO can push your content to the top of search results and boost visibility, build authority as a reliable resource, and draw traffic into your marketing funnel for conversions over the longer term.
But the SEO landscape is constantly changing and that can be a challenge—especially when resources are tight. With little warning, a change to a search engine algorithm can divert traffic away from your website and make it practically invisible. Shifts in industry trends and new initiatives by competitors can also have a direct impact.
“Local and organic search combined drive 69% of digital traffic.”
An SEO agency can support or amplify your efforts through:
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Melissa Psihudakis, founder of Web Rocket Media, said the most effective SEO follows established best practices while keeping an eye on new tactics that might be coming over the horizon. SEO trends and potential ranking factors her agency is monitoring include multimodal machine learning, original video content, podcasts, privacy-focused search, local search optimization, user intent metrics, mobile usability, and lightweight websites.
“Future SEO developments are likely to include more changes to data collection, changing mobile optimization best practices, and interactive content that may not even exist yet,” she said. “The best thing you can do is keep a close eye on your SEO.”
4. Get on-the-ground insights for localization marketing
The year was 2020. Amway, a consumer goods company that operates in more than 100 countries, wanted to celebrate the resilience of individual Amway Business Owners in Brazil, Russia, India, Thailand, and China with a series of videos.
Producing a global campaign is always complex but Adrienne Young, Amway’s creative director, was able to take it in stride—even with a limited budget in the midst of COVID-19 travel restrictions. “We needed to rethink the way we approached productions, including the way we build teams and engage with agencies,” Young said.
International expansion helps companies to grow revenue, increase market share, diversify risk, and expand their customer base. The evolution isn’t easy; hitting the right tone with unique business and cultural norms can make localization a priority.
Localization marketing takes a global marketing strategy and adapts each element for a local audience. It considers not just the language and visuals used but also the needs, interests, and context of the community.
As Young embarked on the video series, she connected with Ben Tyson at Hoozens, a video agency in Portland, Oregon. Tyson took the lead to find videographers in each region, plan and execute interviews, and ensure consistency throughout.
The result of this marketing project? High-quality videos featuring individuals in five diverse countries, pulled together within three months, with a production process that saved Amway $100,000.
5. Support a full, top-to-bottom rebranding package
With all the communication channels available today, maintaining a unified and thoughtful brand presence—whether for a new product, a seasonal campaign, or a full rebrand—takes coordination and production power.
Americord, a biotech company leading the charge in umbilical cord blood banking, needed expert assistance with their rebrand. They tapped Milk Bar Design, specialists in brand strategy and interactive design, to build a responsive website and improve other marketing assets such as ads, landing pages, and printed materials.
Simplifying the complex topic of stem cell banking is no easy feat, but Milk Bar seamlessly handled every aspect of the multi-faceted project. The agency:
They also restructured the user checkout process, handled the collection kit design, and produced instructional materials. View Milk Bar Design’s portfolio for a more complete look at all the refreshed brand assets.
6. Think bigger with the support of an agency partner
A few years ago, what started as a review of Upwork’s brand strategy evolved into a complete rebrand and launch of the work marketplace. It was an endeavor with an ambitious timeline and a broad scope of work—and it needed all hands on deck.
Upwork has a robust internal marketing team in place. However, the simultaneous launch and rebrand would not have been possible without a deep bench of independent talent and agencies to provide strategic support. Work included: