There are lots of areas where digital (or any) marketing agencies can leverage technology to complement their offering.
1) Create unique marketing automation journeys on top of existing open-source products, and have full creative control of the user experience/user journey.
2) Integrating Growth / MarTech Tools (like CRM, A/B Testing, Helpdesk, etc.) properly to ensure that the campaign benefits are multiplied.
3) Websites (along with mini-sites, landing pages) are getting more complex. You should be able to take care of site security, issues like a progressive web app (PWA), site speed optimization, or simply making the website mobile friendly – that too within the constraints of the given content management system (CMS).
And besides this, the marketing (design and messaging) needs to be tweaked, optimized, and well-integrated into these frameworks to get the desired result.
4) Build digital assets (often digital tools, e.g. – simple and free cloud-based payroll tool to build an audience for an HR consulting company) that engage the audience and deliver value to create a lasting impact.
It is proven that in content marketing, “functional tools” are much more effective and have a longer shelf life, referral, and recall than thought leadership or curated content.
5) Build deeper and contextual (to the business and industry) web analytics layer on top of traditional analytics data to mine insights and act upon them (E.g. when you see traffic increase on a website, what is the actual quality-weighted improvement of traffic from different sources, by different campaigns). At times, you have to pull data from different sources to mash-up and derive composite analytics.
Such deeper insights help derive business metrics from generally available vanity metrics.
Most importantly, to achieve great results, you need a combination of both the right brain (creative) and left brain (logical thinking) to come together. It just changes the perspective.
The challenges which most brands owners face are endless communication loop between agencies (creative+marketing, and tech) when these functions are being performed by two different agencies with different working style.
What are your options:
1) Build – The best option. However, you need to manage two opposite personality types in one team, which is not an easy job. It’s disciplined vs. creative, methodical vs. inspirational, geek vs. bohemian. My intent is not to generalize, but highlight the difference in team personality at a broader level.
2) Buy – Acquire a small tech company to fulfill the requirements. Good solution, but cultural integration can be a challenge, and you can gravitate to the same problem that you can have when you build a team in long term.
3) Partner – Do a tightly integrated partnership with a tech agency and dry-run the working relationship on smaller projects or internal hobby projects!
4) Outsource – Find tech firms online or through reference and outsource the tech side to them.
This is interesting and valuable leverage that any digital marketing agency ought to build, to stay ahead in the hyper-competitive market of building long term relationships.
What are your views on this? It will be a pleasure to know your views, and discuss and learn from you!
