According to Jacques Du Bruyn, Managing Director at Flume, being a full-service agency allows for the formation of a stronger partnership with a client. A lot of digital marketing agencies provide a social media offering, paid media and web development and call themselves ‘full-service,’ however, those are just the basics of what a digital agency should do.
Full-service digital marketing means providing every service that falls within the digital marketing spectrum, everything from digital creative to production (of design and animation); web and app development (UX, UI and actual development) to paid media (not just paid social media, the full spectrum of online paid media) to earned media and influencer marketing; to SEO and analytics (key for improving organic search rankings and gathering, storing and visualising information to make smarter decisions).
Strategy is also key. Digital marketing agencies are not often asked to be strategic from a brand or marketing perspective, usually only from the tech perspective. A strong strategic full-service agency can play a key role in forming brand marketing conversations, helping implement marketing automation and using funnels to drive sales for clients. Essentially, a true full-service agency needs to have a hand in the entire digital marketing process.
Full-Service Control
‘Flight time’ is a new term I loved the moment I heard it. Like a pilot logging in-air hours, a full-service agency gets more experience in various disciplines. When this kind of agency logs an hour, it’s exponential because it’s an hour across various disciplines, not an hour in one space. That allows a full-service agency to take learnings from one discipline and apply it to another because of the way everything is connected.
An agency that has full control over the value chain delivers more complete, effective work. In a full-service agency where the entire value chain is visible and accessible to everyone under one roof, creative can talk to paid, devs to SEO and conversations with the social media team can inform content creation. Nothing matches the power of the integrated approach.
Control And Experience
Full-service agencies also benefit clients because of the scope of their work across industries. Working across geographies and industries gives them exposure and experience that can have an influence on work for clients in other industries. That’s good for agency diversification as well, since if an agency’s work is particularly effective in a specific industry, it’ll only ever work in that industry, with a limited pool of clients. Full-service agencies also tend to have a more lateral understanding of services and offer solutions. They provide clients with a bigger toolbox to tackle challenges with, which is largely agnostic to services – it focuses on the solution.
We’ve had e-commerce clients tell us they want us to be responsible for ROI on their ad spend, but who haven’t given us control across the full chain. The buck can’t stop with us if we can’t control UX, the load speed of the site or the creative going out. Give a full-service agency control and they can be more accountable and the partnership will deliver exponentially better results.
FLUME DIGITAL MARKETING
https://flume.co.za
