12 Signs You Need an Integrated Marketing Agency

The media landscape has changed along with consumers’ expectations.

A fully integrated PR agency with in-house specialty services will be the most valuable to a consumer brand.

Brands needs creative and strategy partners, applied intelligence, corporate communications, experiential marketing and deep industry-specific knowledge.

The story you want to share requires more than great relationships and a well-crafted press release and as the client, your brand or business should expect more than impressions.

Here are a dozen tell-tale signs it’s time to seek out an integrated PR agency.

1. Too Many Vendors

Are you juggling multiple vendors across different communication channels? It can be hard to unify messaging, track performance, and communicate with multiple partners each using a different marketing communications program.

An full-service agency ensures that one vendor manages your unified multichannel campaigns.

2. You’re Expanding Into Ecommerce

While you might think that ecommerce is solely the realm of sales, your sales and marketing teams should work hand in hand.

This ensures your brand identity is clear through every step of your customer experience. An integrated PR agency will minimize friction between your owned channels and your sales funnel.

A public relations agency with integrated marketing services keeps your business goals on track.

3. Messaging Isn’t Cohesive

Do you find your message is inconsistent across various marketing channels?

That’s when you need integrated brand campaign planning with brand strategy and creative services working hand-in-hand.

Integrated PR agencies keep your brand strategy on point no matter where your targeted audiences find you.

4. Digital Transformation

Whether your business has been slow to embrace a digital strategy or you’re developing your own tech stack, you’ll need change management and a steady hand on the wheel.

A modern, full-service PR agency should have dedicated applied strategy and intelligence leaders to effectively steer your digital transformation ship. You’ll move toward your long-term goals with the certainty and confidence that’s tough to find in today’s constantly changing media landscape.

5. ROI is Behind Expectations

Building brands requires upfront initial investments with many unknowns.

From market research to executing consistent messaging, a full-service communications partner ensures you meet your goals, with room to pivot along the way.

6. Attribution is Challenging

Attribution is a cousin to ROI in that it’s hard to track, making it a challenge to pivot your business strategy in response.

The best PR partner is able to directly connect data and action to desired business outcomes, not just vanity metrics. Those are the types of partners who can run award-winning PR campaigns.

7. You’re Integrating Your Teams Internally

Integrated PR agencies know all about working cross-functionally. They keep your marketing plan in lockstep with your visual identity for consistent branding.

If you’ve decided to restructure your teams and reshape roles, a modern integrated PR agency can help to strategize and optimize success as an indispensable business partner.

They’ll ensure your vision and plan doesn’t suffer even as people take on new roles or talent shifts around the office.

8. It’s Time to Scale Up

If your business has hit a ceiling recently, you’ll need everyone rowing in the same direction to take things to the next level.

Maintain relevance and engage the audiences you care most about without risking your brand legacy through periods of growth and disruption with the help of an integrated PR firm. Paid media, content marketing, and self-run advertising campaigns don’t make for effective marketing.

You need integration across every touchpoint.

9. Your Business is International

Communicating across borders brings not only fiscal challenges but regulatory ones. Knowing what kind of messaging is appropriate across multiple channels is familiar work for global integrated PR agencies.

If you’ve struggled to connect your efforts, it’s time for an integrated PR agency.

10. You Have a New Brand Story

If you’re repositioning your brand or ready to share a new story, you’ll need compelling, culturally relevant and unified multichannel messaging.

Integrated PR is a mandatory for effective change management of your brand.

11. You’re Seeking New Audiences

Do you have a new product or service? Are you looking to expand into an audience outside of your traditional market?

This is a sign to work with an integrated PR agency who can bring the strategy, intelligence and strategic plan to drive growth with new audiences.

12. You Foresee Brand Reputation Challenges

While most brands take the time to prepare for the worst, there are always unexpected reputation challenges for any business.

Whether it’s the impact of having specialists with cutting edge tools to proactively uncover blind spots or partnering with a team experienced in your industry, hiring an integrated PR agency affords the opportunity to see where issues could arise on which channels.

How to Choose an Integrated Marketing Agency

It’s challenging to know which integrated PR agency to hire. We’ve put together a list of questions to ask an integrated pr agency during your selection process.

If Citizen’s fully integrated PR services are of interest to you, reach out to us at any time, we’d love to hear from you.