Trust, Partnership, and Success with an Agency Partner

You need extra hands on deck to create content and execute successful marketing campaigns. But you’re worried about working with an agency that doesn’t understand your business like your in-house team does. You can tackle all of these challenges and more with an agency partner.

What is an agency partner? Instead of outsourcing work to fill capacity gaps, agency partners and the people who comprise them are an extension of your team. They focus on relationships built on a strong foundation of trust so that when you work with them you’ll feel heard and supported. 

Building and growing strong relationships with clients is central to how Brainrider works. The relationships we nurture with our clients enable us to cater and adapt to their business needs as their companies grow and change.

Becoming a trusted advisor isn’t about being the smartest person in the room; instead, it’s about demonstrating understanding, empathy, and making sure the client feels heard.

As an agency partner, we’re here to listen

Our client conversations (and relationships) start with two questions:
What is the work that you need done?
What are the capabilities this work requires?

Preparation, knowledge, communication, and trust are at the core of how we work with clients. Our team will show up prepared for every conversation with open minds, ready to listen and ask questions to get at the heart of your objectives. We’ll use our knowledge to help you meet your goals and adapt to your team’s thinking style for more effective communication.

We’re here to listen and meet your needs. Most importantly, we’re happy to help by building custom solutions. Working with an agency partner shouldn’t feel transactional. That’s why we work hard to be a team of collaborative, kind, and friendly marketers and creatives who care about your success.

Cultivating trust and partnership in action

At Brainrider, we #ridetogether and practice what we preach when it comes to our people-first focus. That means our top priority includes you and your people too.

One of our long-standing client relationships started with an already strong relationship with an individual marketer rather than any sort of traditional business pitch. “He just called us because he knew what we were like to work with and what we were good at. He liked working with us and that he could trust us,” says Brainrider Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Nolin LeChausseur.

This marketer wanted Brainrider to be a part of his core team because of the strong relationship he had with our agency. Committed to getting the right people on the right projects, he knew that Brainrider would be able to help build his new in-house team.

The adventure began once this West Coast-based tech company laid out their needs for us. They asked if Brainrider could provide a contingent workforce. At the time, we’d never done anything like it. But in true Brainrider style, we didn’t say no. Instead, our leaders were determined to figure it out and deliver.

We asked more questions about the client’s needs and timeline and hit the ground running to figure out how to assemble a trusted embedded team.

With a small team of only about 30 ‘Riders, we buckled down and figured out how to navigate the exciting operational and creative challenges that came with this new opportunity. We needed to hire a team in the U.S. from our then Canadian-only, Toronto-based agency. Within about two weeks, Brainrider was converting contract-based talent to full-time employees and starting up a U.S. subsidiary.

Our policy is people first – no matter what

Thirteen years ago, we set out to build a better agency. Our foundation lies in trust and partnership. That’s why we put people first. Successful marketing demands creativity and collaboration with kind and caring people you want to spend time with.

In 2014, our Bay-Area tech client ultimately opted for a larger company to tackle their global marketing efforts. However, they loved the Brainrider team. They’d worked so closely with our team and wanted to hire them to continue working with that new vendor instead. Brainrider took a step back to think about this relationship where we’d focused on the long term, offering constructive help and being easy to work with. So we put our people first, allowing them to go on to work with this new vendor so they could keep the roles they’d already worked so hard in. It was a challenging decision, but by putting people first we were able to serve our employees better and further strengthen this client relationship.

Eight years later, relationships remain central to our work with this client. We began with a team of just eight employees working on customer success stories, which were central to their content marketing. Today, we have 88 embedded employees and counting. We have our people-first focus to thank for our ongoing relationship with this established client.

How an agency partner can help retain your best people

Brainrider is a global network of creatives and marketers you can count on. Internally, that means giving our team flexibility and taking care of them by offering wellness days and company-wide days off. With this type of flexibility, our employees (your extended team) can recharge to keep delivering their best work.

 

As an extension of your team, we’re here to fill capacity gaps on the production side, as well as for creative and digital work.

Our talented production team gets the right people working on the right projects while making sure that no one is being stretched too thin. Our producers are constantly working on more accurate resourcing so we can all avoid burnout and continue meeting deadlines.

Putting our people-first policy and our focus on relationship building into action, Nolin flew down to our West Coast client’s U.S. site weekly. He dedicated his time to managing two sets of relationships. Nolin ensured that the newly embedded Brainriders had what they needed from creative support to employee benefits.

He also worked with the client to provide ongoing support by maintaining and managing the creatives who we’d embedded so the client wouldn’t have to worry about retention. We use this approach for all of our clients regardless of which resourcing model they’re using.

At the end of the day, we know that your continued marketing success can only stem from strong relationships built on trust. After all, success is what we can expect when we truly put people first.

Written by Samantha Blackwood, Intermediate Content Specialist at Brainrider

illustration of three people co-working together
Featured FLEX Model

Our people. Your extended team.

Every team and business goal is unique — we built our flexible resourcing model with this in mind. Need support on a single project? Maybe you need reserved and guaranteed capacity? Or a fully-embedded team of people? A mix of all three? We’ll help you determine what your extended team looks like.