Join the dots to create the full marketing picture

One of the biggest misconceptions is that a full-service agency will offer more than anyone else. That’s not true. It won’t. If you’re starting up and need experts, there’s a sea of freelancers out there to help with your Google Ads or building your website. A good full-service agency is valuable because it understands when each discipline should be used and, more importantly, how they work together. This is what becomes incredibly important when businesses start to grow.

When you’re starting out, marketing is relatively straightforward. One person could look after the social media, a freelancer sorts the web updates and there’s an occasional PR campaign. Everyone knows what’s happening because, quite frankly, not that much is happening. But, when the organisation starts to grow, this changes.

We’ve seen it many times; a new agency is appointed to improve SEO, paid advertising is brought into generate leads, sales start developing their own presentations (marketers, take a breath, we’ve all been there and seen that beautiful deck destroyed). Product launches need campaigns and you start to see marketing is happening in all directions, by talented people, but not everyone is pulling together. Individually all the activity makes sense, but the dots aren’t being joined and the picture starts to become blurred. Also, you’ve now got a marketing manager spending so much of their time coordinating lots of individuals that one eye has been taken off strategy.

This is the problem a full-service agency can solve. And it’s not always by replacing every supplier or sitting all the services under their roof; sometimes it’s by bringing the experience of similar scenarios to deliver clarity. Most agencies will look at commercial objectives first and then decide the combination of disciplines needed to achieve it. Sometimes that’s PR, sometimes it’s digital and sometimes it’s a brand refresh and launch with new website.

We love a problem. We think a lot of people involved in agencies feel the same. So, it’s not about what we can ‘do’ for growing businesses, it’s more about what problems we can solve. Growing businesses rarely need more marketing, they need a function that works together. It also makes the relationship very different, too. Instead of having five separate conversations, producing five individual briefs and being the centre of all coordination, marketers speak to one team who is across the whole business, spotting opportunities, challenging thinking and making sure every activity is interwoven with the next. The focus shifts from the doing to the outcomes. When you appoint a full-service agency, you’ll feel the shift from PR, digital, brand to conversation on whether the business has improved share of voice, is generating stronger leads, attracting the right people and is growing sustainably. Having a finger on the pulse of what’s happening inside the business avoids the risk of putting lipstick on a pig if a part of the internal process isn’t working or customers aren’t happy.

This is what a full-service agency should be measured on. The question isn’t whether you need more PR, paid ads or a new website, it’s whether all those things are helping your business grow in the same direction. Making marketing make sense and joining the commercial dots.