Is it just a coincidence that an integrated agency has been B2B Marketing’s Agency of the Year three times in the last five years? No coincidence at all, says Claire Davidson, Head of Strategy and Planning at Twogether.
The idea that integrated agencies are ‘jacks of all trades’ and masters of none is a bit of an outdated misconception. After all, why would spreading the workload across different agencies make a campaign made better? It sounds like hard work and a recipe for chaos to me.
Instead of telling multiple people the same thing, you tell one integrated agency what it is you want and know their success relies on blending experts under one roof all working towards a singular goal. It’s a holistic approach to marketing with a single source of accountability. One that relies on collaboration every step of the way.
Where do you begin?
You begin with the end in mind. What is the core problem we are trying to solve? As an integrated agency, you can look at this problem from multiple perspectives – using these different skillsets to help drive a more holistic understanding of the problem and identifying the right types of ideas to meet the campaign objective. This could be driving demand, nurturing known opportunities, or increasing brand credibility.
Integrated agencies can then use a broad range of data sources to drive a greater audience understanding and identifying an unspoken truth to drive the creative response. Specialist teams work collaboratively to define the right ways to reach the audience, the message and deploying the campaign effectively.
Pace and impact
Momentum comes from the optimization of each stage of the campaign, with no bias on any specific channels. As there’s expertise within each discipline in an integrated agency, you’re able to dial up or slow down different channels or content without any conflicting agenda, compromises, or delays.
The integrated approach measures how well you’re doing by utilizing an individual KPI dashboard to provide a single view of success. This helps you understand how different channels are contributing and linking to the outlined objectives of the campaign. Also, this single view with multiple inputs allows the agency to react faster to issues.
There’s a single point of contact that designates various departments under one roof, as opposed to the message being parroted and different agencies having their own solution, which may not gel with one another.
A flywheel effect
An integrated agency has both depth and breadth of marketing expertise working synergistically to deliver a marketing flywheel – getting your campaign to a tipping point, so the campaign wheel continues to spin with minimum effort. With a united focus on a single goal, this enables optimization across every stage of the process to build sustainable momentum in demand generation and move campaigns from good to great.
The proof is not just in the campaign results, but also within proven operational efficiencies such as speed to market, alignment with lead processing, and agility to optimize and scale.
