A marketing agency’s successful strategy can be compared to winning a game of chess. In order to successfully beat your opponent you must first watch and observe their habits, understand their way of thinking, analyze short-term gains for long term successes, and finally plan ahead for the final checkmate. Like a great chess player, content marketers will plan for a combination of short and long term moves, with the common end goal of marketing success for their clients.
One of the greatest perils that stand in the way of marketing agency success is finding the key people needed to complete the project on time. When contemplating how to best avoid this peril many questions come to mind; the most important being, “How does a marketing agency find the correct professional content writers?” The answer: cultural fit.
Cultural fit is the checkmate that wins the creative mind game played by advertising executives. To understand cultural fit, let us first examine office culture. Every business has a unique culture. This culture is comprised of the types of people who work in the office environment, the actual office space, and the cumulative office environment.
- People: The people are the backbone of an office’s culture. In any office the employees (both independent and contract workers) all share similar qualities. These qualities help to define the office culture, and can range from great work ethic to sense of humor, political beliefs to personal interests, and everything in between.
- Office Space: If an office has numerous collaborative work spaces with open family-style tables, then it is likely that the office culture is one that lends itself to shared ideas. However, if the office contains mostly cubicles and corner offices with closed doors, then it is safe to assume that the office culture is more of an independent workspace.Now let us take a look at the office kitchen. Like many households, you can tell a lot about a business’ employees from their office kitchen. Perhaps one of the commonalities is a healthy lifestyle, or perhaps the kitchen fridge is stocked with passive-aggressive notes daring people to eat someone’s sub. Whatever the case may be, the kitchen reveals the inner personalities of employees.
- Cumulative Office Environment: As the name suggests, the cumulative office environment is the overarching culture that surmises your company. It is the living, breathing proof of your business’ motto. Finally, an office environment is what inspires the about us portion of a company’s website.
By understanding the office culture, a marketing agency is on the first step to defining it’s cultural fit.
- Cultural Fit: Cultural fit is the loan pawn that steadily makes his way across the board, ending in a collaborative game-winning move. Discovering what makes your culture unique is the epitome to creating a creative atmosphere that will facilitate marketing success. By identifying what makes an office unique, a company can better determine who is the best hiring option. For professional content writers cultural fit becomes an increasingly important element when creating their public profiles. Their public profiles need to show their style of writing, work habits, accomplishments, and their ability to understand a multitude of clientele.
- Another way to think of cultural fit is the round peg in a square hole mentality. No matter how hard you may try, a round peg is never going to fit properly into a square hole. Just as a health food nut is always going to feel ill at ease in an office that is stocked with soda and littered with the remnants of a McDonald’s snack wrap.
Cultural fit is crucial to finding the right people to make a marketing agency’s project a success. Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, a marketing executive for News Corp, stated that she “once hired a woman who really didn’t have the right background or experience for the job, but who I hit it off with during the interview. And because we got along so well, I was able to train her easily, and she ended up doing great things for us.” In order to exceed the expectations of their clients, marketing agencies need to first hire the right people. To do so, they must first examine their office culture, followed by the culture of their clients, and finally determine the cultural fit, only then will they be able to hire for marketing success.
Laura P is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments.
