Marking their decade in business last year in a variety of ways, full-service agency The Works realised the impact that thinking about your business in the same way you would a client's, can have. Here, they discuss why sometimes, you should take a step back and put the shoe on the other foot.
We’re employed by our clients to help them communicate with their audiences in the right place, at the right time, with the right message- whether that be through a printed direct mail piece, online creative campaign or the build and design of a website. Yet, as an industry, it would be fair to say that we rarely heed our own advice. We’re all so busy doing the job that we’re employed to do and enjoy doing, that we tend not to promote the brilliant things we achieve daily for our clients- we really are our own worst enemy.
As we approached our tenth birthday last year, we sat down as a team and decided that it was time to change this. We really wanted to mark the occasion- we’d come a long way, achieved a lot of things and felt it was time to tell everyone our story. We spent a lot of time thinking about what we wanted to tell people, what we wanted to achieve in the year, how we wanted things to look creatively and we treat the project just like we would a client’s, with a dedicated project team. We kicked off our birthday celebrations with a retro birthday party for the team, which gave us lots of attention grabbing, image-based content to send out in mailers to press, clients and suppliers. This content was also the starting point for the year-long social media campaign we ran to boost our social media presence.
Our campaign included sharing throwback pictures of our team when they were 10, monthly competitions intended to brighten the day of winners, with prizes ranging from Easter eggs, to football tickets and cake and fizz, plus countdown, teasers graphics and animations leading up to our birthday ball, and timely worded graphics that all cleverly included the word ‘ten’ within them- (have a look in the paragraph and see what we did there). All of these things combined gave us the opportunity to showcase the services we offer to clients, whilst getting our own name and everything we have achieved, out there. You might think that taking a step back and working on yourself, might mean your workload will shrink, but for us it was quite the opposite. Stepping back meant that not only were we able to evaluate what we were doing on our own campaign and on our clients’ work which gave us invaluable insight and pointers for moving forward, it also attracted new business partners to us.
Following several planning meetings at Ramside Hall where we held our birthday ball, their team saw the way we worked and the work we produce and quickly became our newest client. We’ve since redesigned their website, designed and produced several pieces of promotional materials and went on to work with sister companies Hardwick Hall Hotel – on their Hardwick Live music event – and Colonel Porter’s Emporium a brand new premium bar in Newcastle- opportunities we might never have stumbled on if it wasn’t for our birthday ball and celebrating our own achievements. We don’t like to shout about what we do, we like our work to do the talking, but we’ve now realised: sometimes you have to. In this industry, it’s common for clients to have different agencies looking after their print, PR, advertising and web design separately, but we really do offer the full works, all under one (well, two) roof. And that’s something we’re very proud to shout about.
To find out more about what we do and how we can help you, visit wearetheworks.com or follow @wearetheworks
