Why the Next Agency You Hire Needs to be Integrated

If you want to grow your business, you need to consider bringing on a digital marketing agency. There are many benefits to hiring an agency to support your digital footprint, even more so if the agency has many integrated services. This blog looks into what it means to be an integrated agency and how this will benefit your business.

Integrated Marketing Agency

For the most part, digital marketing agencies have been siloed up until this point. The SEO team works on SEO, the PPC team on paid search, the social team on social and so on. Often times, businesses find themselves hiring several agencies to work on each area of their digital strategy, making their digital strategy fragmented. As digital continues to grow, we are seeing more and more opportunity for these teams to work together on their marketing strategy. An integrated agency is an agency that offers all types of digital marketing services and the teams work together to build an integrated strategy. Here are some reasons why you should choose an integrated agency moving forward:

Search Intent - Bringing SEO & PPC together

As Google continues to modify search results to better suit a user's search intent, the more SEO and PPC professionals needs to work together. Users online can be broken into two categories: those with a research intent, and those with a purchase intent. You will notice that very different results show up for both of these types of users. Research Intent: Queries that suggest a research intent will shows results with Rich Cards and Quick Answers and not many ads. This type of result is a great space for SEO professionals to optimize a website for organic reach and long tail traffic. Purchase Intent: Queries related to purchase intent, such as 'Hotels in Dubai', will likely have 4 competitive ad spots at the top of the results with a Google map result following the ads. The organic results, in this instant, will be below the fold, and, even though it is still important to optimize for this keyword, this is a key opportunity to bid within paid too. This example shows that keyword research is a process for both SEO and PPC professionals to work on together building a strategy around search intent and when/how each keyword should be used.

Social Signals - Bringing SEO & Social together

Even though Google doesn't explicitly say that Facebook shares improve a page's rank, increasing it seems that social signals are boosting the power of content within search results. This gives SEO and social departments an opportunity to work together on a strategy around social signals. For example, you may want to improve the rank of 10 top pages on your website. As well as optimizing the pages for certain keywords, you could set up a series of posts on Facebook around each page and apply some ad money to boost each post to get more reach. The goal would be to get more likes and shares on the content within Facebook and, ultimately, get backlinks from other sources sharing your content in the news or on other publisher sites. This 'attention' will then drive the rank of this page up in the search results.

Technical Services - Bring IT & Everyone together

By hiring an integrated agency, you will have access to developers that can quickly and efficiently apply new tools to your site to help improve your marketing impact. More and more developers are playing a role in all aspects of digital marketing. Here are some examples:AMP: Google AMP has proven to boost SEO traffic via AMP'ed content on your website. AMP is implemented on the back end via a developer, and can be tricky if you don't know what you are doing. Integrated agencies are likely to be applying new tools like this to all their clients' websites, and so have experience in implementing the tool and also understand what bugs and hiccups are caused by these new tools.AdWords Scripts: AdWords scripts are pieces of code written by a developer, that can be applied to paid campaigns to automate a bidding strategy. For example, an ecommerce store will want to bid higher on certain keywords during sales seasons. An AdWords script can be written to bid higher during these times, removing any room for human error. This is just two examples of how developers compliment digital marketing nowadays. We would say they are paramount in supporting an integrated digital strategy.

Looking for an integrated agency? Give us a call or drop us an email.

Share this on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.