Can Brand Agencies Prosper In The Digital Age?

Before we get a deluge of social media abuse, hate mail and irate phone calls from brand agencies the answer is, of course, “yes”.

Given sufficient incentive, desire and intelligence the traditional skills brand agencies possess can make them very potent partners for business moving forward indeed.

What Is A Brand Agency?

A branding agency is a type of communication expert which specializes in creating and launching brands as well as rebranding. Branding agencies create, plan and manage branding strategies, independent of their clients. Branding agencies may also handle advertising and other forms of promotion.

Source: Wikipedia

So when your business wants to do some print, radio or TV advertising commonly you would engage a brand agency to help you out with the strategy and the technical details of the advertising.

Brand Agencies Already Do Digital Marketing Don’t They?

Commonly, yes they do although the extent will vary of course.

Many will already build websites. They will commonly have some social media management on board as well.

They may even have some in-house or contractor skills in SEO.

So there is quite a bit of crossover with a “traditional digital marketing agency”.

Many will say that is sufficient, however, here at Oracle Digital we see the world quite differently.

What Does Oracle Digital See As The Digital Challenge Brand Agencies Are Facing In 2015?

As many visitors to our website will know already at Oracle Digital we are in love with data and analysis.

Data and analysis drives strategy.

Strategy drives creative.

Creative drives the marketing system build.

Deployment delivers your ROI.

Then you measure the data, analyse, improve and repeat.

The digital infrastructure today provides a unique opportunity to collate and analyse the data.

You can measure pretty much everything if you think it through and have the desire and skills to do so.

Compare the analysis of a year’s worth of historical data from the web on what consumers actually search for from the privacy of their own home, car or office against the data you get from a focus group placed in an unnatural environment and asked their opinions. No contest!

And the great news is that the quality of digital data available from across the web is becoming more and more precise, like understanding real results that point right back to your business bottom line, allowing for a much more in depth level of analysis and strategy in the very near future.

The Power Measurement Brings To Your Business

So we have collated and analysed the data. Decided on the strategies.

Created the deliverables for the online and the offline advertising campaigns and launched it all.

What now?

In our experience this is where a key differential between traditional brand agencies and innovative digital marketers kicks in.

Digital marketers who are up with the game will be measuring everything.

Phonecalls, form submissions, sales that come from TV, radio, print, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, organic web traffic. The marketing source, medium and channel is irrelevant – it can be measured!

The performance of this product group versus that product group and when the contacts / sales are being closed.

Each will be individually measured and the ROI on each one reported.

“Over” achievers will be identified to find out why they are over achieving and then apply that to other campaigns for increased overall ROI.

“Under” achievers will be identified and analysed for improvement or reallocation of budget to the better performing campaigns.

Nothing should ever be left to guesswork.

Owning Your Marketing

Hopefully the information presented above has got you thinking.

Things are never as simple as they seem but there is a huge amount of upside coming your way.

One other benefit of all this is the opportunity for you as a senior operative within a business or a business owner to take more active involvement in your marketing.

With measurement and analysis from digital data sources you can become involved at the highest level if you do not have the time for the detail or at a lower level if you do.

The data is not difficult to understand once presented in a simple user friendly interface and, no, that interface is not Google Analytics nor the multitude of reporting tools that rehash the raw GA data in a new format.

Suffice to say that, here at OD we have that problem licked to, however, we will keep that announcement to another day in the very near future.