Should You Give Up Creative Control to Your Agency?

You’re an expert at running your childcare center. Whether you started it from the ground up or launched a successful franchise location, it’s like your child, and you’ve raised it.

But as your business grows, you have to depend on other professionals’ expertise — whether for legal advice, equipment installation and maintenance, accounting and financial help, or, in our case, marketing and digital ads.

Relinquishing control in these areas can feel intimidating, but if you want to reach new levels of success, it’s necessary. In this blog post, we’ll explain why handing the marketing reins to your agency partner is essential — and what goes wrong when you don’t.

A Different Kind of Business Relationship

Sometimes, owners view partnering with a marketing or digital ad agency the same way they view hiring an employee — bringing someone on who needs training and management. However, that’s not the reality. Approaching a business relationship that way ultimately sours your reputation and wastes time.

To get the best results for your business, you must trust the agency’s expertise. They offer professional services and want to help you achieve your business goals. To do that, you need to let them.

What a Lack of Trust Looks Like

As a marketing agency with digital ads expertise, we often meet childcare business owners hesitant to relinquish control.

For example, we understand an owner’s desire to decide what images and ad copy we use. You want to represent your school in the best light, and you know your school better than anyone.

You probably have beautiful pictures of your school — of your teachers, classrooms, playgrounds, children’s artwork, etc. — that families have responded well to on social media. Maybe you want to feature those images in your paid ads, too. How could they not do well?

The truth is, the algorithms determining your ads’ performance are very different from the families engaging with your social media.

The images that perform best in digital ads are professional photos of happy children. These photos pose challenges for many childcare center owners, including hiring a professional photographer for a photo shoot and getting legal releases from families to use photos of children for advertising purposes. So it can be tempting to turn to other images instead.

However, when owners insist on using their images and their ad copy, they spoil their ad results — and the working relationship.

The Reality of Working With a Digital Ads Agency

Here’s another common scenario.

Usually, childcare center owners have an idea of what they think is wrong with their existing marketing campaign when they contact an agency. But this idea is based on data they don’t know how to interpret.

This conundrum is like opening the hood of your car and telling the mechanic what you think the problem is. You know your car better than anyone else because you drive it every day, but the mechanic is the automotive expert. That’s why you consulted him in the first place.

There’s a lot that a layperson can’t make sense of under the hood of a digital ads campaign. As digital ads experts, we know how to interpret that data. We draw valuable insights from it and leverage our expertise to source images and create ad copy that performs well.

The amount of control we have over ad copy is dwindling. Many digital ads platforms use AI to refine ad copy to maximize performance. But agencies determine the right way to start an ad campaign and when to refresh ad copy. Timing is critical for success.

Control Impacts Results

Both scenarios above have the same outcome. When owners resist an agency’s expertise and argue for control, they wind up with inefficient campaigns that waste money.

Requiring unnecessary testing wastes valuable time for seasonal digital ads. You may waste an entire 30- to 60-day cycle running an underperforming ad campaign.

At Rose Marketing Solutions, our team of experts treats your ad spend like it’s our own. We want every penny you spend to yield the maximum return — and because we know digital ads like the back of our hands, we’ll never waste money on unnecessary endeavors.

Start With a Goal

In any professional relationship, it’s important to begin with a goal in mind.

Let’s revisit our auto mechanic analogy. The goal in that situation is to get your car running reliably. How the mechanic fixes it is up to them to decide. 

You can trust them to do their job as long as you’re aligned on the goal.

Regarding digital ads for your childcare center, your goal is to increase enrollment and revenue. Commit to the goal, not the process.

We’re not advocating that you hand over complete control of everything concerning your school’s marketing. We need to have congruency with your brand and legal boundaries, and your input is essential.

That said, the mechanics of our work involves a highly complex algorithm. To deliver optimal performance, we need you to trust that we have your best interests at heart.