Being the head of a growing Digital Marketing Agency for the last 5 years, I’ve always pondered how to make our services more generic (Productizing) to scale up our business. Starting Fortify 5 years ago, we had a generic list of services offered from Website Development, Social Media Management, and Social Media Ads. Our clients at that time were pleased with our implementation of what was expected of us, but I felt something was lacking to help them maximize their potential growth in digital marketing.
One common pitfall of companies starting their digital marketing campaigns is treating each activity as isolated. There is a tendency for firms to implement different digital marketing activities separately from each other. Take, for example, the notion that one will focus first on Social Media before fixing or developing a good website and vice-versa. Take a clothing company that puts our excellent, engaging content on social media but has an e-commerce site that is slow and hard to navigate. Eventually, there will be a fallout in the customer journey at the purchase or decision phase, and that customer may never return. For a business to succeed in Digital, there is essential synergy between different activities in the customer journey.
Looking at our role as a digital agency, we wanted our clients to embrace the idea of synergizing their digital activities in their customer journey to maximize their growth potential. We saw this as embracing the concept of collaboration between our clients and us over the mere implementation of digital activities. To do this, we devised a framework for unlocking our client’s value in digital by developing innovative digital strategies across the customer journey.
Our first step in collaborating with our clients is to align digital marketing activities with their business objectives. Our digital agency must understand its business and landscape to achieve this, leading us to our framework’s research and analysis phase. Here, we gather relevant data and analyze it to know what we are dealing with. Once we understand the landscape, we will develop a digital marketing framework that will support our clients reach their business objectives. Our digital marketing framework is rooted in our belief in using an omnichannel approach to ensure a cohesive and unified customer experience across all digital channels. Once all of these steps have been aligned with our customers, that is the only time we implement them. During the implementation phase, we closely monitor the performance and recalibrate activities or strategies as needed.
As we continue, it would be difficult for digital marketing agencies to productize services. Digital marketing activities must not isolate services without considering the customer journey, as this can limit growth potential. At Fortify, we ensure that our clients engage in sustainable digital marketing activities to achieve their business objectives.
