Ultimately tech is what stands in between you (or your client) and the customer. Whether you are talking about marketing or sales.

A creative agency will look at your Brand, and help you create something visual to engage with your customers. They will sell you on building relationships, creating connection and emotions through these experiences.

They will talk about personas, and spend time carefully crafting content and visuals to needs/wants of these personas. They will also identify ‘pain points’, and focus on making the on-boarding as frictionless as possible.

Some agencies will talk about data, and request to look at your analytics.

 

Don’t get me wrong, all of these things are very important to creating a successful experience of whatever it is you are building.
So from a creative point of view, lets recap on what we are doing:

1. Looking at Personas and sometimes data to create a useful engaging experience to customers

2. Collecting data on behaviours

3. Encouraging/Incentivising customers to share their experience of the brand (usually via social media)

 

Now comes the tech. Up to this point, all the work has been done around creative, with some marketing insight if you are lucky.

 

Here is where it ends.

 

Now the project is written up, and “thrown over the wall” to some coders to build.
Ultimately, you would now need to work with marketers, who know how to get this content out across the channels they specialise in.

 

With a tech agency, everything is integrated. Digital Strategists can look at your marketing objectives, and define how they can be measured. Its at this initial stage that the success metrics for the campaign or product are defined. Not after you are won over by pretty designs.

We approach the problem solving with the customer in mind. We ask questions about what is actually going to be needed to make this achievable. For example:

– Are they going to get an email?

– Will it be available on mobile?

– Do we need to A/B (split test) content or UI based on target personas/groups?

– Is your audience using an older system in a corporate office, meaning everything needs to work in IE7?

 

Defining these parameters and potential barriers up front means that you don’t get half way through a project or campaign, only to be told that the fancy animated UI that was crucial in the creative sales pitch wont work, as 80% of the target customers are using a browser that doesn’t support CSS Motion Path (something the coders used).
If you are looking for both engaging creative and measurable results for your campaign/project, you need to work with an agency that has the full picture in mind, and can outline a detailed strategy for success. Whilst creative designs are important, ROI (whether that be financial or engagement) is arguably more important.