How can an integrated agency manage and leverage its internal digital capability?

How Purple as an integrated agency manage and leverage their internal digital capability

Purple, like many other agencies, sit comfortably in the space of providing integrated agency services, albeit to a set of specialist sectors such as health, B2B and retail.

We pride ourselves on being able to satisfy all our clients’ marketing communications needs under one roof – providing a strategic approach to integrating communications and engaging experiences. We build strategies and campaigns that are targeted, defined and coordinated towards performance across ALL relevant channels.

What we have seen is that increasingly our clients’ focus is on measurement and performance, and the ability to prove tangible returns on their marketing investment. This very often puts a more digital spin on things, and places digital at the forefront of our consideration, as a central or leading element of most campaigns.

This digital-first mentality has meant that our internal digital capability has had to grow over the last 10 years, to build greater expertise and capability in the areas where our clients most need support.

This focus on our clients’ needs (and, as importantly, the areas where can add real value) is fundamentally how Purple manage and leverage our internal digital capability.

By not trying to be everything to everyone, we have been able to build and develop core digital expertise that supports our central proposition of making communications that actually work.

Digital is at the heart of everything we do, but with digital being such a broad church, Purple have focused on its place in communications strategy and creative, campaign development and creative production.

We have built depth in many areas to complement our wider specialist integrated services, where we already have experience of management and performance:

• Digital data, management, analysis and insight
• Customer journey analysis and development
• UX and CX
• Content planning
• SEO and keyword analysis and content strategy
• Campaign planning (including paid digital media – display, PPC and social)
• Campaign website and landing page development
• Mobile applications
• Digital content, including written, graphical, video and animation

For us, understanding where our strengths lie – and also what our clients come to us for support with – has enabled us to build and leverage a complementary digital capability.

We are not a digital agency, but even the most dedicated digital marketer would most likely agree that focusing on one single element of marketing, such as digital for communications, is going to be less effective than a more inclusive, integrated marketing approach.

We believe that integrated agencies need to be true to themselves, understand where they can add the real value, and not to try to be everything to everyone.

We are not the agency for large-scale digital transformation or e-commerce; we are not the agency for platform led marketing automation or big data. We are not a website agency or a social media management agency.

What we are is an integrated marketing communications agency with a digital-first mindset, who understand the role of digital in the delivery of effective communications for health, B2B, retail and leisure & hospitality.