THE WHOLE IS SO MUCH GREATER THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS
In business, the best way to make more money is to become more efficient. In marketing, the best way to be more efficient is to streamline your services. That’s where we come in.
Have you been juggling too many vendors for too long? If so, it’s time to consider the benefits of a full-service, fully integrated advertising agency like Stream Companies. With the people, the process, and the communication to keep marketing on message across media, you can do the extraordinary!
Some New Advertising Tools for Your Belt
When all you have is a hammer, you tend to treat every problem like a nail. Up until now, you may have had providers that specialize in just one area of marketing. No more—our full-service agency can handle ad services across a wide range of media:
We customize our services to meet the unique needs of your business. Get a better response from your audience with clear, consistent messaging and the tools and tactics to make data-driven decisions.
There’s so much value in having one agency control every aspect of your marketing funnel! Not only can we keep your marketing on message, but we can optimize the funnel at every level to drive more traffic online and at your brick-and-mortar location.
WHAT IS AN INTEGRATED AGENCY?
An integrated agency, also known as a full-service agency, specializes in a variety of digital services. It is well positioned to help clients take advantage of the strengths of several channels as part of a holistic marketing strategy.
Vendors that focus on one channel are solely concerned with service delivery. Integrated agencies, as a result of their greater scope, are “solution focused.” In other words, their goal isn’t just to deliver a quality service, like paid search or email marketing. An integrated agency will consider how to combine services to produce better, more efficient results.
So, when an integrated agency launches a paid search (PPC) campaign for your brand, they might take the leads generated and nurture them with an email campaign. A cross-channel strategy, guided by an in-house team of account managers and subject matter experts, will:
- Unify your brand and campaign messaging across channels
- Streamline the buyer’s journey to make it more efficient
- Use various channels to strengthen the value of the others
THE BENEFITS OF AN INTEGRATED MARKETING AGENCY
How will you handle the marketing for your business? You essentially have three options:
- Build an internal team to handle all marketing in house.
- Contract out specific marketing needs to specific vendors.
- Hire a full-service, fully integrated marketing agency.
We’re here to help you understand how a full-service agency partner may be the best bet for you. For marketing campaigns that drive measurable value and more engagement from your best prospects, there is no substitute for an integrated agency.
With the power of integration, your marketing efforts will have:
A UNIFIED MESSAGE
An integrated marketing campaign is like a themed party. You brainstorm an exciting idea and then dream up ways to execute it. Your decorations, games, and food should all be on theme, or else you risk your “audience” (the partygoers!) misunderstanding.
An integrated advertising agency partner knows your message and will unify it across media channels. And they can keep more than general brand themes on message. Your agency can tailor marketing materials to specific shoppers and keep those messages consistent across media.
Imagine someone who lands on your website, looks at a product a few times, and then leaves without buying. Now imagine you can reach them with emails, banner ads, and more ads that remind them of the product they were considering!
EXPERTISE
A fully integrated agency has a high level of expertise. Not only do they broadly understand marketing strategy, but they have knowledge across many marketing specialties such as paid advertising (Pay-Per-Click/PPC), social media, search engine optimization (SEO), and email marketing.
A full-service agency’s creative expertise is unequaled. They offer graphic designers to create captivating visual concepts, copywriters to drive home your products’ USPs, and website development and UX professionals to enhance the website experience.
With savvy project management to bring all this expertise together, your projects will be delivered accurately and efficiently.
COST-EFFECTIVENESS
Integrating your marketing keeps costs lower than they would otherwise be. You reap so many rewards from aligning all your marketing efforts. Many of the ideas, concepts, and materials we develop can be passed from one medium to another.
The video ad we filmed for your website would also be perfect for a social media post. Those dazzling descriptions we put together for your whitepapers? You may see the same phrasing in your web copy. Unified messaging and multi-use materials (and a strong sense for how to deploy them) are easy on the budget.
And an agency’s experience in aligning marketing across channels can’t be discounted. Integrated marketing experts will know how different channels interact. Effective use of one channel can boost the power and reach of others. That’s the power of integration.
For instance, Stream’s paid search (PPC) specialists collaborate with search engine optimization (SEO) experts to ensure you’re not bidding on keywords you already rank highly for organically. And our social media team knows how sending the right social signals can enhance your SEO.
All these teams work together to lift each other, and only an experienced, full-service agency can consistently spark that level of engagement. There’s no “I” in team, but there is a “team” in Stream! (Sort of—if you jumble the letters around.)
NO TRAINING NEEDED
Unlike an internal hire, you won’t need to train your integrated advertising agency. They will, of course, need to meet with you to learn more about your business, brand, unique selling points, and specific marketing needs. But marketing itself? They know their stuff.
Your agency professionals will arrive qualified, experienced, and knowledgeable about the latest developments in digital and traditional marketing. These experts are ready to go on Day One!
And you’ll be grateful for that because results take time. For instance, you’ll often need three to four months of posting quality, 100% unique web content to see it begin to affect your organic search rankings. You need a team that’s ready right out of the gate so not a moment is wasted.
READY TO SCALE UP WHEN YOU ARE
Want to go after a new market? Need a new website—or perhaps a branding refresh? Ready to bolster your position in your market by doubling down on marketing efforts?
You may not be ready to make these moves today, but when the time arrives, you’ll want the expertise of an integrated agency.
With an internal team, you might have to hire more staff to achieve your new goals. And you may not have the expertise within your organization to branch out into an area of marketing that’s new for you. On the other hand, if you outsource to various vendors, you may find it difficult to keep them all on the same page.
With an integrated marketing agency, you won’t have these concerns. You can scale up or scale down as circumstances and your budget require. You can even add one-off projects, like a website redesign, that require more specialists but only for a limited time.
Stream Companies may be a large agency, but we’re an aircraft carrier that can turn on a dime when needed! With us as your partner, you can adjust and re-adjust your marketing strategy with input from one of the most experienced teams around.
DRIVE CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT
At the end of the day, consumers are the best judge of marketing campaigns. So, what do people think about integrated marketing? 65 percent of them like integrated campaigns, according to one study. And 42 percent of surveyed consumers said they still experience advertising campaigns that haven’t been integrated.
Clearly, a gap exists between what consumers prefer and what they’re actually getting from companies marketing to them. Keeping things cohesive does present a challenge. But when your customers are more willing to engage with integrated campaigns, the results are worth it.
STAY AHEAD OF BIG TECH CHANGES AND INDUSTRY TRENDS
It may be surprising how quickly the field moves in digital marketing. From constant changes to Google’s search results algorithm to the rapid evolution of data analytics, a full-service and fully integrated agency can help you stay ahead of the game.
Keep your marketing team in house, and you may not have time to research the latest changes. You may end up employing last year’s trends in your strategy, some of which no longer work. As an agency that lives and breathes digital advertising, we research and adapt to the latest trends as they happen—not after the fact.
INTEGRATED DIGITAL MEDIA: HOW IT ALL WORKS TOGETHER
Within the ecosystem that is integrated marketing, the subfield of integrated digital advertising is essential. There are more digital channels to capitalize on than ever before. The number of platforms, from social media to connected TV, seems to grow by the day.
It’s a lot to keep up with. A fully integrated agency with a strong digital presence, however, will help you chart the course on the most important channels! Here are some ways an advertising agency can align your digital marketing efforts.
INTEGRATE SEO AND INBOUND MARKETING
Content marketing and inbound marketing are not separate from SEO. To the contrary, SEO relies on web content as the widest, most effective reach for online visibility. At a full-service agency, the content that copywriters, graphic designers, and video experts all create for your site will be optimized by SEO specialists.
Yes, the SEO-inbound axis is yet another specimen of integration. Inbound content, whether of the written or visual kind, drives more qualified traffic to your website. And no inbound topic is chosen without careful consideration of what your best prospects are searching for online.
Your content should be optimized for more than just Google because traffic comes from places other than search engines these days. Believe it or not, you can integrate your content into all manner of digital media. Those videos, images, and/or articles can find a home in your:
- Social Media
- Direct Mail
- Video Platforms
INTEGRATE SOCIAL MEDIA AND SEO
Social media is a powerful marketing force—especially when you target the right people with content that’s relevant to them. But can it be more than that?
Can social media help your SEO efforts? The answer is yes—though maybe not in the way you think. All evidence indicates that social media is NOT a direct ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. But just because it isn’t a direct factor doesn’t mean it won’t impact rankings at all.
Social media posts that link back to the SEO-optimized content on your website will drive more traffic. As people click the links on your social media posts and land on your website, more people will spend more time on your website—and this affects SEO.
When SEO and social media teams integrate, they can determine which pages of content will be most effective at driving business if highly ranked. For a dealership with a surplus of Honda Civic models on the lot, a “Honda Civic review” article could be an excellent candidate.
The social media teams can use this information to craft posts around the content you want to rank and drive more traffic to it. A small conversation between teams is all it takes!
INTEGRATE ORGANIC AND PAID SEARCH
Search engine optimization (SEO) drives web traffic to your website organically—but it takes time and continual optimization to be truly effective. Paid search supplements SEO as a more immediate stimulus by driving ads to the top of search results—but you pay per click.
As you might imagine, you can integrate SEO and paid search to drive more valuable traffic in a cost-effective way. Here are some ways a marketing agency might leverage them to help your business achieve success online:
- Use organic content to build stronger paid search campaigns. Paid search ads can link to the SEO-optimized content on your site, rather than simply the home page. When a user clicks on an ad, they want whatever happens next to answer their need.
- Use paid search to target hard-to-reach keywords. All the best keywords are already taken, SEO says! Well, paid search can be a great antidote to that problem. For those keywords that are highly competitive, paid search ads will increase your visibility.
- Keep paid search away from organic’s success! For every hard-to-reach keyword, there’s one you already rank highly for. SEO teams can communicate this to paid search teams, so you don’t unnecessarily bid on keywords you rank highly for organically.
You see better results when the right hand knows what the left hand is doing. In an integrated agency, SEO and paid search work hand in hand to drive traffic from the search results page!
THE BIG PICTURE: SEO IS INTEGRATION
To market effectively in the digital space, integration is essential. Search engine optimization is no longer a single concept—a tool one professional can master to boost your visibility.
Rather, it’s what happens when all digital specialties come together—when professionals from different backgrounds pool their skills and resources to deliver premium digital content. SEO is the best evidence of integration, and it’s one measure your full-service agency is sure to use!
HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT AGENCY FOR YOUR BUSINESS
So, you’re aware of the advantages of hiring a full-service, fully integrated agency. But how will you choose your agency partner? It’s a huge decision and one you shouldn’t make lightly. These tips will help you decide who to work with as you prepare to integrate your marketing.
LOOK AT THEIR PORTFOLIO
How will you know if an agency is a good match for you? Simple—check out their portfolio. See if they have experience in your industry and learn what kinds of clients they have worked for in the past. These could be signs that they are a solid fit for your business.
If a potential partner agency doesn’t have experience in your industry, they may still be a good match. See how they have run campaigns for other clients and consider how that may translate to your industry and brand. If you can see a connection, you may be in business.
Stream Companies has extensive experience in the automotive, healthcare, education, communications, retail, and B2B sectors, among many others. We do our best work in a variety of verticals!
CHECK OUT THEIR CASE STUDIES
You have specific problems you want your agency to solve. Wouldn’t it be nice to know how your future partners have solved similar problems before? In many cases, you can. Check out their case studies—a reputable agency will likely have several on their website.
An agency that produces case studies is an agency that wants to analyze what worked in their clients’ advertising campaigns. That’s exactly the kind of company you want as your partner—one that will go the extra mile to evaluate progress and develop a process to solve problems.
ASK QUESTIONS
When you have an agency partner in mind, take time to ask questions. Get to know them better and see whether they’ll be a good long-term partner—because success in marketing is always best seen in the long run. Some questions you may want to ask include:
- How will you integrate my digital marketing campaign?
- Who will be working on my campaign?
- What happens if there is an issue with one of my campaigns?
- Who can I contact if I have questions or concerns?
At Stream Companies, you’ll have a dedicated account manager as your point of contact. They know everything about your account, so you can make one call to address your concerns! You can also speak with anyone else on your account—content strategists, copywriters, graphic designers, you name it.
YOU’RE RUNNING A BUSINESS, NOT MANAGING VENDORS
Imagine the convenience of making one simple call to address your marketing needs. Without an agency that integrates your services, you may feel like you’re playing a game of telephone. When you have to call your digital agency, your traditional agency, and your website provider, so much can get lost in translation. You end up with marketing materials that feel less connected because it’s hard to keep all your people on the same page. When problems do arise, you need multiple calls to solve them. With an integrated advertising agency, the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. When you have meetings, they include your entire marketing team to Stream-line efficiency. Spend less time in calls and get back to what you do best: running your business!
THE RIGHT TEAM OF EXPERTS FOR YOUR BUSINESS
Whether you’re leasing cars, seeing patients, or selling widgets, you want a marketing team that knows your business, your market, and your brand. We know how to get the right people on your account.
We never make you single-source dependent. One is the loneliest number, which is why we use the Noah Concept—at least two of everything! We double and triple up on the number of experts on your account. With multiple specialists who have a handle on your business and its unique needs, there’s always someone available to champion your marketing and move your initiatives forward.
CHOOSE MORE EFFICIENT, EFFECTIVE MARKETING TODAY
At Stream Companies, we take a high-touch approach to every client. With eyes on your account at all times and at every level of our organization, we always deliver on quality.
In the end, integration is all about efficiency and effectiveness. See what a full-service, fully integrated agency can do for you and drop us a line today!
