The Advantages of Working With an Integrated Marketing Agency

Consumers are constantly bombarded with marketing messages across various platforms. To truly engage and convert your audience, it's essential to have a cohesive, overarching marketing strategy. An integrated marketing agency combines expertise in web development, SEO, paid search, analytics, and creative solutions to ensure your marketing efforts are unified and effective. Learn how partnering with an integrated agency can transform your approach and deliver superior outcomes.

What Is an Integrated Marketing Agency?

An integrated marketing agency leverages multiple disciplines to offer your business comprehensive solutions and strategies that more effectively support your objectives. To understand the advantages of working with an integrated marketing agency, we draw the comparison of marketing strategy to physical health. We all know that physical health depends on many variables, including nutrition, an active lifestyle, and mental/spiritual well-being. If your family doctor, nutritionist, trainer, therapist, and guru were all the same person, these areas would work synergistically, bolstering each other, achieving the overarching goal while minimizing redundancies. It would also be incredibly convenient.

Unlike specialized or siloed agencies, an integrated digital agency can manage all aspects of your digital marketing strategy, from expanding brand awareness with multichannel marketing to creating targeted campaigns to foster brand loyalty, enhancing the customer service experience, and more.

Advantages of Working With an Integrated Marketing Agency 

An integrated digital market agency offers key benefits, whether you are developing a marketing strategy at the outset or looking to revamp an existing one that isn't working optimally. 

Holistic Strategy Development

People consume information on numerous platforms — often simultaneously. That means there are many potential touchpoints with your brand messaging. The key, however, is consistency. You want your messages to complement, not repeat, each other. This forms important landmarks to help map a prospective customer's journey with your brand — but in a way that holds their interest. You don't want them to tune out. 

Integrated digital marketing requires collaboration and consistency, which is challenging if you have to deal with multiple teams and agencies. Rather than playing the proverbial game of "Telephone," an integrated agency works as a unified, cohesive crew that is able to see the forest for the trees. Changes and adaptations can be made efficiently, and there is less of a chance for disjointed messages.

In-House Expertise and Collaboration 

Integrated marketing agencies like Marcel Digital offer the advantage of in-house proficiencies with vital elements of successful digital marketing strategies.

Paid Search

Showing up in a search is only part of the equation. The proper transaction keywords will ensure that you can strike while the iron is hot, tapping into a consumer's readiness to buy and driving conversions. Integrated campaigns optimize paid search efforts by putting more focus on the channels working best for your brand, augmenting search impression shares, performing location bid adjustments, and leveraging negative keywords, pay-per-click, paid media, and more. 

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an integral part of digital marketing. Having in-house SEO expertise means that the team is enhancing (money-making) page visibility and organic traffic to target consumers at different stages of the marketing funnel. SEO also informs different kinds of content to suit consumers' needs based on keywords they are searching. An integrated agency uses SEO to foster a symbiotic relationship among the various channels. 

Analytics

Once a strategy is in place, it is imperative to collect the relevant data and measure the right metrics so that you can refine it. Specialized or siloed agencies collect data to support their pieces of the puzzle. Integrated marketing agencies understand how the pieces work together and can track not only the performance information on any given piece but also how it affects the other parts of the strategy. This means knowing which analytics matter the most — and how to use them to effectively and efficiently adapt the marketing strategy to roll with the punches.

Web Development & Design

Many businesses develop their websites and then try to work out a digital strategy, overlooking the fact that their web assets can and should evolve. Website development is not something that just happens at the beginning. It is not a one-way street. When web assets become a properly utilized component of a comprehensive marketing strategy, they can help elevate its performance significantly. Integrated digital marketing agencies build/rebuild websites to better support marketing goals — for example, by integrating user experience (UX) design and conversion rate optimization (CRO). 

UX and CRO

A positive user experience can affect desired user behavior by increasing customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. Deploying CRO to optimize page speeds, mapping consumers' emotional triggers, and personalizing content leads to higher conversion rates. The ability of integrated agencies to understand and use UX and CRO to support digital marketing strategies means that your customers' needs and preferences are reflected and echoed at every touchpoint. 

What Integrated Marketing Agencies Can Achieve For You

Using the tools and integrated digital marketing services we've described above, an integrated agency can bolster your marketing efforts and bring you closer to achieving your business goals.

Alignment of Digital Touchpoints

When it comes to your interactions with your brand, consistency is paramount. Consistency is a hallmark of professionalism, and it is what will build trust with your customers. The more trust a customer has with your brand, the higher the likelihood they will be a repeat customer. Because there are so many potential touchpoints across different channels, it can be challenging to ensure that interactions on multiple channels will work together seamlessly to paint the desired picture of your brand. An integrated marketing team is familiar with all the parts and how to make them work together to create and maintain brand consistency and achieve your business goals. 

Driving Superior Outcomes 

An integrated agency ensures that the elements of your digital marketing strategy are working synergistically. The success of your integrated marketing campaign will be demonstrated by key performance indicators (KPI) such as brand reach and awareness, leads generated, customer engagement and satisfaction — and of course, conversion rates, sales, and revenue.

Maximizing Effectiveness

You've now made the smart decision to engage an integrated marketing agency. Now what? How do you know which agency is best for you? Here are a few tips.

• Know your business and business objectives inside out — and make sure the agency does too. Many marketing companies are actually interested in creating award-winning marketing campaigns (as determined by industry professionals). This doesn't always align with your goals. You want to work with someone willing to get to know your business in-depth and who has a vested interest in your success in particular.
• Do your research. Review testimonials. If you have been referred, ask these previous customers about not only metrics like ROI but also their insight into the agency's abilities. Look at the agency's ethics and values — do they accord with your own? Investigate current team members not only in terms of expertise but also how they approach work and how they measure success.
• Like any other business, the agency should build your trust as a client. How open are they to collaboration and communication with their clients? Do they make an effort to make you feel like part of the team, as opposed to someone they need to periodically answer to? 

The most successful campaigns are cooperative partnerships working towards measurable, unified goals. An integrated marketing agency can craft and calibrate a marketing approach that best suits your needs and can adapt quickly and efficiently to changing variables. In-house expertise minimizes redundancies and maximizes cost-effectiveness. It allows the agency to properly monitor and finetune the integrated strategy. Your integrated marketing agency should be there for the long haul, journeying with you to achieve your aims.

Augment Your Integrated Marketing Strategy with Marcel Digital

At Marcel Digital, we are proud to offer comprehensive integrated digital marketing services that align with your business goals. Our extensive, in-house expertise and collaborative nature let us craft inventive, holistic marketing strategies to align and maximize all digital touchpoints so we can drive superior outcomes for you. 

We don't just want to support your business. We want to propel your business forward. 

Our core values — authenticity, integrity, accountability, and curiosity — mean that we work diligently and creatively for and with your business. We know that your success is our success — and that the success of a marketing strategy is measured by how it improves sales and lead generation for your business. Let us show you what we can do for you.

Contact us today and ignite an exciting new era for your business. We want to get to know you and your business and collaborate with you so we can launch your next compelling integrated marketing strategy.