Something I’ve been thinking about a fair bit lately, who should write the overall marketing strategy for a company?
What I mean by this is most companies will have several different agencies working on a specific goal in achieving a company’s overall objectives, a search agency, (or digital agency), a web designer, a PR company, a advertising agency, a creative agency, the list could go on for a while but who decides on the overall integration of these agencies to achieve the client’s objectives?
It’s a tricky one really because each agency may offer the same services as the other agencies so there tends to be a lot of backstabbing to make the competitor look bad. The digital agency could be only looking (or know about) the online activity without the regard of how offline activity could benefit them.
Integrated marketing communications is more important today than ever, with online activity having a visible response across all marketing mediums. A television advertisement could have people blogging about it or talking on Facebook. Offline PR can have very real response online. So why do we not have overall marketing strategies?
An integrated marketing communications agency or consultancy or in-house manager is one of the most important role in any business’ marketing activity, in my opinion they will write the overall strategy for all disciplines and detailed plans of which agency does what and when. The implementation is then fed back to the individual agencies to do what they are best at and take this plan and implement it in a creative manor.
The integrated plan will enable all agencies to work towards a common goal on a specific timeframe, making objectives more specific and measurable. If the agency falls behind on these deliverables then they are held responsible.
The way the marketing landscape works today it requires an integrated marketing communications specialist, I would say they need to work very closely within the client’s organisation, the ideal way to do this is to hire a specialist consultant in this discipline who can write and manage the strategy throughout the life of the project. Once the project has been completed a new consultant should be brought in to replace them to keep the company developing at a fast rate of change, constantly with new ideas from new people.
