Integrated Marketing Agency: The Ultimate Guide

In today’s online business landscape, digital marketing is among the top strategies to complement offline marketing efforts.

However, there are dozens of platforms to consider. While using as much software as possible is great for creating a solid online presence, cohesiveness often becomes a problem.

Whether you’re building a new business or developing a new campaign for your existing one, hiring an integrated marketing agency can significantly boost your efforts. An agency has a team of experts to help its clients achieve their goals through an integrated campaign.

In this article, let’s dive deeper into integrated marketing agencies, from the definition and benefits of hiring one to tips for choosing the perfect agency. We will also list five of the best agencies in the market.

What Is an Integrated Marketing Agency?

An integrated marketing agency refers to a company specializing in various aspects of digital marketing communications and related services.

These agencies often have teams of experts to provide key marketing services. Some of the most common departments include branding management, cost-per-click (CPC), search engine optimization (SEO), web design, and inbound marketing.

Furthermore, those teams work together to ensure a cohesive marketing campaign.

For that reason, employing an integrated marketing agency is like having a whole marketing team taking care of your company’s activities, from branding and designing to sales promotion, lead generation, and public relations.

Benefits of Hiring an Integrated Marketing Agency

One of the best benefits of hiring an integrated marketing agency is having a more cohesive campaign across marketing channels. This ensures a stronger company identity and helps reach the target audience.

That said, an all-in-one marketing service has a lot more to offer. Here are five advantages of collaborating with an integrated marketing agency:

1. Cost-Effective Digital Marketing Strategies

Getting all of your marketing efforts taken care of by one agency is more cost-effective than hiring different companies.

An integrated marketing agency studies its clients’ goals, values, and purpose. It will then conduct market research, create campaigns, and develop strategies to attract the client’s target audience and improve brand awareness.

For that reason, working with a reliable integrated marketing company ensures efficiency. It enables business owners to access marketing services that could not fit their budget otherwise.

2. Work with Experts to Create Integrated Marketing Campaigns

For first-timers, running a business on their own can be tedious. What’s more, organizing a cohesive campaign is challenging.

By hiring an integrated marketing agency, business owners will work with a team of professionals.

As they have a deeper understanding of different marketing strategies and how to attract potential customers, achieving a successful campaign will be less demanding.

Suppose you think about leveraging PPC (pay-per-click), video advertising, and User Interface (UI) design. These companies will tailor those strategies to suit your needs. Moreover, they may suggest other marketing solutions to yield even better results.

On top of that, business owners won’t have to worry about hiring marketing specialists and training them. Overall, working with an integrated marketing agency helps business owners save time and energy when managing their business.

3. Gain Access to More Resources

Every digital marketing strategy requires tracking and analytics tools. Those tools, including Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and Yoast SEO, help marketers get clearer insights into their business performance and the latest trends in the niche.

They enable marketers to analyze what works and what doesn’t when creating an integrated marketing campaign that delivers results.

With numerous possible strategies to implement, purchasing all supporting resources and tools can be costly – advanced marketing tools are often subscription-based.

The good news is that hiring an integrated marketing agency helps minimize costs. Here are some resources these companies often include in their service packages:

• Web development tools.
• Website design tools.
• Keyword research tools.
• Search engine optimization tools.
• Competitor analysis tools.
• Automation tools.
• Courses and knowledge base.

4. Multichannel Marketing Opportunities

With multichannel marketing, businesses use different platforms to interact with their target market and potential customers, delivering a consistent message to achieve their business goals.

For example, business owners can leverage social media platforms, websites, blogs, and forums to create an integrated marketing plan and spread the word about their campaigns.

Business owners can also incorporate traditional marketing mediums like television, newspapers, and magazines to boost public relations.

As an integrated marketing agency takes a holistic approach in the marketing industry, implementing a multichannel marketing strategy ensures consistent messaging across multiple channels.

Combined with a buyer persona, a multichannel approach can significantly improve the customer experience. It enables marketers to target specific demographics better and reach them on the channels they are most likely to engage.

On top of that, multichannel marketing helps marketers generate more traffic and improve brand recognition. For example, driving traffic from a promotional email to a blog post to help users discover more about the company.

5. Improving the Customer Journey

The sales funnel consists of several stages which demonstrate the customer journey, starting with awareness and passing by evaluation to reach conversion. Integrated marketing specialists are well-aware of these stages and what strategy to implement based on the customer position in the funnel.

For example, marketers will conduct direct marketing strategies, including sales calls and industry conferences, when their leads are at the conversion stage.

This enables integrated marketing agencies to generate qualified leads and turn these leads into paying customers.

The process is much easier for these agencies as they can provide their clients with a 360-degree view of their target audiences. The information may include who they are, where they come from, and how they interact with brands.

Those details help integrated marketing agencies determine the perfect solution to the prospects’ problem. When delivered at the right time, business owners can expect increased conversion rates thanks to these strategies.

In addition, integrated marketing companies often provide sales support, which can be provided by an expert, department, or set of tools. It’s among the best features to have as it helps the sales team communicate with and retain customers.

How to Find the Right Integrated Marketing Agency

With many choices available, finding the right integrated marketing agency can be a long process. This section covers five steps to make finding the right agency to optimize your integrated marketing campaigns a straightforward task.

1. Determine Your Goals and Needs

Before looking for an integrated marketing company, business owners should determine their goals. Without clear directions, even the most effective digital marketing strategies can’t yield successful results.

Therefore, this step helps them decide which marketing services are required to achieve their integrated marketing campaign goals.

Some of the most popular marketing goals include improving brand awareness, boosting online presence, and generating high-quality leads. It goes without saying that achieving these goals requires different strategies.

For example, SEO is great for improving search engine rankings, establishing thought leadership, and increasing website traffic. Whereas social media marketing reinforces company exposure and helps retain more customers.

Clear goals also help business owners find an integrated marketing agency that offers all the marketing services they need. This ensures cost-effectiveness as business owners won’t need to hire several agencies for different marketing services.

2. Research Existing Integrated Marketing Agencies

This stage is where business owners find integrated agencies and conduct in-depth research about them. The aim is to get a shortlist of trustworthy agencies to choose from.

Here are some aspects of a reliable integrated marketing agency:

• Online presence. Integrated marketing services often engage in digital marketing. Therefore, they must have a robust online presence as they claim to be experts in the field.
• Branding. Study the agency’s culture, values, and identity from its website and social media content. This helps business owners find out their target demographic, which is vital to determine if the agency is the right fit for their businesses.
• Level of effort. Even after hiring an integrated marketing company, business owners should never take marketing tasks off their plates. The client and integrated agency should work together and think long-term to yield the best possible results.
• Team composition. Ensure that the agency team members working with your company will actually be your collaborators.

In addition, if your business has a strong remote working policy, ensure your chosen integrated agency has no issues with that. Apart from saving up lots of time, the flexibility shows that the company is confident with its technological capabilities in this digital age.

3. Analyze Their Services and Portfolio

Each integrated marketing company has its own service offerings. So, business owners need to consider them when narrowing down their options.

Here are some marketing services that integrated marketing companies often offer:

• SEO. It involves all of the efforts to help a web page rank high. This method covers relatively extensive steps, from keyword research and optimization to improving website speed, internal linking, and adding image alt texts.
• Content marketing. It’s one of the must-have services as content is king in digital marketing. It involves creating high-quality content, from blog posts to social media images and podcasts, to help a business’s target customers solve their problems.
• Social media marketing. It uses multiple social media platforms to spread the word about a business or its marketing campaign.
• Email marketing. Building mailing lists and sending out promotional messages are some of this strategy’s main steps.
• PPC advertising. It enables website owners to display advertisements on other sites, paying a commission to the publishing site for every click on the ads.
• Web design. Hiring an integrated marketing company and getting this service is more lucrative than hiring a separate web design agency as graphic design work and website development services are often costly.
• Video marketing. It refers to the use of videos for promotional activities. An integrated marketing company will assist its clients throughout content planning to video production.
• Copywriting. Working with an agency will help the company develop concise, promotional written texts for landing pages and social media posts, and traditional advertising like posters, flyers, and billboards.

In addition, it’s recommended to check the agency’s portfolio as it will provide more precise information about its products and services.

This step also helps business owners figure out whether an agency has developed a successful integrated marketing campaign in their niches. If it did, companies can determine if the implemented strategies would fit their goals.

4. Check Client Reviews

Reviewing user-generated content (UGC) is a great way to determine if a service is reliable. Unlike influencer marketing and paid advertising, UGC is written by real customers who use the company’s products or services.

These reviews provide transparency as not all customer testimonials are positive. Furthermore, they show if a company is customer-centric and always strives for improvement.

Some of the best online review platforms include Trustpilot, UpCity, and G2. Integrated marketing agencies with dozens of customer reviews are often among the leading ones in the industry. However, be wary of negative testimonials.

5. Ask Them Questions

Once you’ve listed a few integrated marketing agencies, don’t hesitate to reach them to understand how they work.

Also, it’s a great way to check how they plan and implement integrated marketing campaigns. Here’s a checklist of what to ask an integrated marketing agency you’re looking to hire:

• Ask if they offer all marketing services your business needs.
• How will the agency integrate your digital marketing campaign?
• Who will be working on your campaign?
• Is it possible to have a meeting with not only the account manager but also the team members?
• If there are changes in the campaign, who is responsible for communicating them?
• Are there any steps you should take before moving on to a new campaign if there are issues with the current one?
• Is there a customer support team you can reach for questions and concerns?

Clients should also check how their chosen agency tracks and analyzes the campaign’s performance. A comprehensive analysis demonstrates that the integrated marketing company uses best practices to ensure a successful marketing campaign.

Top 5 Integrated Marketing Agencies

To help with your research, let’s have a look at five integrated marketing agencies to consider:

1. Digital Silk

Digital Silk strives to “Create Superior Digital Experiences” by offering branding and digital strategies for a results-driven digital marketing approach.

Whether you run a B2C or a B2B company, Digital Silk provides a variety of integrated marketing services, which include:

• Brand management.
• Logo, graphic, and web design.
• Web development.
• Mobile app development.
• eCommerce development.
• Social media marketing.
• Software development.

On average, Digital Silk sets a $125/hour rate for its clients. Depending on the project’s scale, the agency will propose a price range based on the estimated hours it will require.

 2. Dotlogics

Dotlogics offers services that revolve around website design and development, including branding and digital marketing. The good news is that this agency not only supports WordPress sites, but it also offers Drupal, Magento, and Shopify website development services.

Here are some of the other services to take advantage of:

• SEO.
• PPC.
• Web design.
• Brand management.
• Social media marketing.
• Email marketing.
• Web development.
• eCommerce development.

Like most marketing agencies, Dotlogics offers an average rate of $125/hour.

3. Disruptive Advertising

Disruptive Advertising strives to build lifelong partnerships with its clients. By providing insights and action plans, this agency aims to make the best use of its client’s marketing budget.

Disruptive Advertising offers integrated marketing campaigns in these areas:

• PPC.
• B2B digital marketing.
• Social media marketing.
• eCommerce marketing.
• Email marketing.
• Paid advertising.
• Video and motion ads.
• Landing page design.
• Conversion rate optimization.

Choosing to hire Disruptive Advertising, business owners may expect to pay a $225/hour rate. While it is more expensive than other options, it’s reasonable given how varied its services are.

4. KlientBoost

KlientBoost focuses on creating high-quality content to boost a business’s conversion rates.

This company schedules calls to keep its clients updated with their campaign’s performance. Also, it provides quarterly business reviews so that the clients can plan better strategies for their upcoming projects.

KlientBoost specializes in these areas:

• SEO.
• PPC.
• B2B digital marketing.
• Social media marketing.
• Content marketing.
• Video marketing.
• Email marketing.
• Graphic design.

This agency is an affordable option for business owners who are on a tight budget. The rates average $100/hour.

5. Clay

While other companies incorporate popular strategies like SEO and PPC, Clay focuses on enhancing its clients’ customer journey by delivering an intuitive UI/UX design for both B2C and B2B companies.

Among its integrated marketing services, here are some of its unique offers:

• Brand management.
• Logo and digital product design.
• UX enterprise.
• Web development.
• Mobile app development.

Clay costs a little above the industry average: $175/hour.

Conclusion

Throughout this article, you’ve learned everything you need to know about integrated marketing agencies.

These companies use a holistic approach to ensure a cohesive marketing campaign across the multiple channels where marketers implement their campaigns. Their services often cover SEO, PPC advertising, social media management, web design, and copywriting.

Here’s a recap of how to find the right integrated agency:

1. Determine your goals and needs to have clearer business directions.
2. Research existing agencies to get a list of companies that offer the services you need.
3. Study their services and portfolio to gain insights into how they run campaigns.
4. Check user reviews to find out if clients are satisfied with their services.
5. Ask them questions to get further information about the services offered.

If you still have any questions, don’t hesitate to share them in the comments. Good luck with your marketing campaigns!