What Being a Digital Agency Means to Us

If you ask 10 different people what a digital agency is, you’re bound to get 10 unique answers. That’s because the word “digital” is used to describe a range of diverse business strategies, tools, products and technologies that require a varied set of skills to create.

Gartner® offers this definition of a digital agency:

Digital agencies are strategic and creative marketing agencies focused on user experience, mobile, social, data gathering and analytics apart from providing creative services and promotional offerings (supported by analytics and optimization of the promotional mix). Once dominated by communications and promotional activities, digital agencies today help explore new sources of growth, including market diversification and product ideation and development. Leaders have business transformation consulting skills to help extend core businesses into the digital world.

Since “digital” is in our name, we wanted to share what being a digital agency means to us and what areas of digital our team is focused on delivering.

Identifying new revenue channels and creating digital products that connect people are at the core of what we do. To put it simply: Our team is inspired to create meaningful and unique digital experiences that enable growth. Growth can come in the way of net sales, but it may include any business metric or key performance indicator.

Just like our name suggests, we are practical in our approach and nimble in our execution. By being nimble, we deliver short-term wins that springboard our clients to the next level.

When we established our company in 2010, the founders saw a need that was not being met by the traditional marketing agency. Most agencies focused on design, branding, marketing and advertising to attract customers. They also embraced the web and created beautiful websites – even if they were largely more for aesthetics than for functional value.

Our founders identified a gap between the offerings of traditional agencies and the needs of organizations to drive conversions by offering self-service experiences to their customers. We knew creating digital products that helped our clients’ customers accomplish their desired tasks could build brand loyalty. They can also lead to streamlining data and improving operational efficiencies across the organization.

The organizations we work with include those that have complex products, sales processes, lead generation or customer onboarding processes that require several touchpoints and data integrations. While our focus is on the digital product, we ensure our solution aligns with the business’s existing brand and marketing strategies, organizational structure and legacy architecture.

Our solutions also have to align with the people and processes of the organization to make the most impact. It is important to have a team that understands how digital strategy works alongside traditional business processes to deliver success.

The makeup of our team looks different than those of a traditional marketing agency. Our team members have diverse skill sets that allow us to design, execute and maintain effective digital solutions:

• Digital strategy
• Data analysis
• User-experience research
• Interaction design
• Web architecture
• Custom web development
• Project management
• Hosting
• Technical support

Creating a focused but multidisciplinary team that can tackle complex business problems is challenging. But at Spry, we wake up in the morning eager to solve problems for our clients and always strive to make a positive impact with the digital products we create.

The biggest differentiation between a digital agency and a traditional marketing agency is that a digital agency focuses on retainer work versus short-lived project work. That’s because digital products don’t die at launch.

Introducing a new online revenue stream is often just the beginning of the life cycle. As technology and business needs change, refinements and enhancements are identified. And every data point provides an opportunity to evaluate, analyze and test, to continually improve the digital product.

Our process includes creating digital roadmaps for our retainer clients. With an eye on continuous improvement, we plot and prioritize enhancements based on ROI.

Now that you know what our brand of digital is, we hope you will reach out to learn how we can help your organization to grow with digital.