Digital Agencies: Creative vs. Marketing

With the whole world living life through the internet- buying things, communicating with each other, researching, and entertaining themselves, it's no wonder that brands want to do everything they can think of to enhance their online presence. This starts with a website, and maybe some internet marketing, but can go as far as launching creative, interactive marketing campaigns on a multitude of social media channels. And at some point between all of this digital excitement, the internet marketing agency hands over their accounts to the creative digital agencies.

So what's the difference between the two?

Internet marketing agencies tend to focus on marketing techniques such as search engine optimisation (SEO), Pay Per Click ad campaigns, press releases, and email marketing. They often have web developers and designers working in-house as well, that way they can offer their clients a full-service internet marketing experience. Often brands new to the internet acknowledge that they need a website but they don't understand what SEO or PPC even is. It's not until their website has been live for a few months that they realise they need to generate traffic to it. That's when they'll call their web development company and ask them to help improve site traffic.

While all brands require some amount of SEO, especially when writing their meta details, it is predominantly small brands that are dependent on people finding out about them and their products via Google searches or ads. People interested in buying Coca-Cola usually don't do a Google search for "fizzy drinks", but people looking for a local electrician might do a search for "Fulham electricians". As a result internet marketing companies often work with smaller, or service-led clients. Having said that, a leading jewellery designer might want people to be able to find their products from just typing "earrings" into a search engine, or Nike might want people to see their latest sneaker designs by typing "cool kicks" into a search engine.

Creative agencies tend to be made up of digital specialists. Graphic designers of a very high level, social media gurus, as well as people with offline marketing experience who can conceptualise marketing campaigns that combine offline with online. These agencies might execute a marketing campaign that consists of a video ad on YouTube, a Twitter competition, and an interactive application on Facebook. Then they can find creative and cool ways for those campaigns to tie into offline marketing. A few years ago for instance, Dazed and Confused Magazine got together with Adidas to launch a guerrilla marketing competition, where participants were encouraged to convert grey areas around London into green ones. They had to videotape themselves in the act and then submit them to the magazine, for the chance to be featured and win prizes. The competition was marketed online and offline, the work was done offline, but involved the use of technology, and then the winners were featured online and in print. This is a good example of a marketing campaign that not only gets the brands followers involved, but moves them seamlessly from online to offline.


------

Adaptive Consultancy is a London-based digital agency company specialising in website design, eCommerce, and internet marketing, including SEO, PPC and SMO. For more on digital agencies visit www.adaptiveconsultancy.com/