Is Marketing Now Part of the Digital Agency World?

The web is now so much more than a marketing channel. In today's very digital world, it forms such a large part of an organisation's communications, that it really cannot be seen as something to be dealt with as a separate entity. Yet, rather surprisingly, many organisations still treat digital as a separate beast entirely.

I have lost count of the number of conversations I've had where the digital team and the marketing teams work independently of one-another, often seated in different parts of the building, or sometimes in a different building altogether! Yet, this seems crazy. When the digital world is now so much part of our everyday lives, are these organisations' marketing teams missing a trick?

The internet is where a large proportion of our social interactions take place, on sites such as Facebook and Twitter; it's where we often discuss, showcase or incubate our passions - think Flickr for photographers, Etsy for creative arts, online gaming - the list is endless; it's where we conduct our business networking on sites such as LinkedIn; it's where we learn about everything from industry advancements to how to bring up our children... you get the picture. Over the next couple of years we're going to find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between our on and offline lives.

So if all this happens online, why do many organisations still insist on having a separate digital team and marketing team? I think it can largely be attributed to the organic growth of digital, beginning as a niche channel, often viewed as a very techincal discipline (which to some extent it is) which required specialist digital knowledge. As the importance of digital grew, so did the digital team, separately from the marketing team.

Yet with the obvious prevalence of the online channels in today's marketing strategy, are marketers now doing enough to harness the power of the internet?

The importance of an integrated marketing strategy has been clear from the day we coined the phrase 'marketing'. Send out a consistent message through multiple channels and the overall benefits gained are more than single channels of communication executed independently. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We all know this. So what can marketers do to harness the true power of digital?

The first big step towards this is understanding that digital is no longer a separate discipline. Marketers should be versed in both on and offline marketing. If you have a big team, use specialists of course, but the over-arching view should be FULLY INTEGRATED. Yes, some campaigns may run offline only, and some may run online-only, but the overall view should be consistency across ALL channels. By investing in a campaign which hits the target audience at every possible touch point (and online there are many), the results could be astounding. It's just a shame that we don't see more of this.

Digital is not scary. It's amazing! It's a marketers dream - it's trackable down to the minutest detail, you can even track brand sentiment (that's another post entirely), ROI is easily calculable, your target audience can be engaged in two-way conversations, implementation and roll-out can be comparitively instant, multi-variant testing of campaigns can be done at the touch of a button. But possibly most importantly, the digital world is becoming increasingly entwined with our offline worlds - think iPhone apps like MapMyRun, Nike Plus, numerous augmented reality apps. As this merger continues, the importance of a multi-disciplined marketing team will become increasingly apparent. As will the importance of an integrated agency that really is an integrated agency. Bluhalo is lucky enough to be part of an integrated agency network - GyroHSR - where we work as a truly integrated team, harnessing the magic of digital and the power of offline media.

Jocelyn Kirby
Marketing & Business Development Manager
Twitter @JocelynKirby