As a digital marketing agency, our approach is to have our web and social content gurus involved in your project as early as possible. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case in other organisations or industries.

Ask anyone who has worked with web or social content and they’ll tell you that in some cases, the digital team are the very last stop on a project’s journey.

Truthfully, almost everyone has a horror story about only being consulted two weeks before a project is due to launch, being provided with nothing but complicated, jargon-filled project management documents, and given the sole instruction of ‘oh just put it on the website’.

Thankfully, this is a world away from how we work at Elastic. We insist on really getting to know, and understanding both our clients and their brands as we believe this leads to the best results.

So, with that in mind here are three huge benefits to getting your digital marketing team involved in your project from the very beginning.

Your digital marketing team can better understand your project

It’s safe to assume that if your digital marketing team really understands your project, then they’re going to be better equipped to convince your target audience of its worth, right?

If that’s the case, what better way to get them to understand your project than by involving them in its development right from day one?

By involving them from the start, they’ll have a better understanding of:

• the aims of your project
• how to measure the success of your project
• how best to explain your project to an outside audience

The last point there is possibly the most important. It’s the job of your digital marketing team to explain your project to people who are unfamiliar with it.

However, by not involving your digital marketing team in your project from the start, they become an unfamiliar audience themselves, and it makes them less able to market your project effectively.

Also, by involving them from the start not only do they gain a better understanding of your project, you also cut out the time required to brief them on your project later.

Your digital marketing team can better understand your audience

Part of the development of any project is finding out who it’s meant to appeal to. By sheer coincidence, building a target audience is also the first part of any digital marketing activity.

Knowing and understanding the target audience doesn’t just let us target the right people, it’s a guide for how we shape our messages to make sure that they’re relevant and grab the right sort of attention.

By being part of your project’s development, your digital marketing team will find it much easier to step into your customers’ shoes, and create a fantastic campaign for your project.

It also ensures that your marketing team won’t just know who your target audience is, they’ll also understand why you’re targeting that particular audience.

Your digital marketing team can get to work much earlier

It seems like a daft question, but how much time would you prefer to have your digital marketing team spend working on your project?

• Two weeks
• Two months

It seems obvious, but you’d be surprised by the number of times a digital team will be given a timescale of two weeks or less to plan and put together web and social media content for a project.

The reality is that putting together a really great campaign takes time, thought, and understanding. Given two weeks, your digital team might be able to create something that covers the basics of your project, but it won’t have the understanding required to really be effective.

However, if you embed your digital team as part of your project from the start they can start work immediately: coming up with ideas, experimenting with language, creating test images, and identifying target audiences.

First steps

As we said before, when it comes to building a brand, a website, or a social media campaign, we’re committed to really getting to know you first, and making sure you’re supported from start to finish.

So, if you’re looking for someone to take care of you from day one, get in touch.