When the Skout team recently got together on a boiling hot summers’ day in Manchester, one of our goals was to discuss and define our core values as a business. It’s not that we didn’t have any values prior to this, but we decided they were due a little refinement and updating! Despite the heat, we put our thinking caps on and found it was a really useful exercise. It made us all take time to think about why we do what we do, but also crucially how we do it.
One of the values we highlighted was being integrated. As this is a word which could be applied in many different ways let me explain its meaning to us a little more. As a B2B PR agency and communications specialist, being integrated means a number of things.
Firstly, integration is about ensuring our work for clients is always aligned to their specific business and marketing goals. PR is so often at risk of being a marketing afterthought, and when it is, the impact is usually lessened as a result. We want everything we do to be an integral part of the bigger picture – ultimately driven by the client’s business success. Ensuring our work is fully integrated into the client’s wider marketing strategy is therefore essential.
Secondly, being integrated means working with, rather than for, the client. From our initial story foraging through to campaign strategy and delivery, we work best when we’re in a partnership. We think there are few situations where an agency should be doing everything. There are skills on the client side as well as in the agency. We think that recognising this and making the most of successfully integrating the two is essential for success.
Thirdly, our integration value is about delivering more value for money. With integrated B2B campaigns being one of our main services, it’s no surprise that we champion the notion of making marketing content deliver on as many levels as possible. This is about joined up content and campaign planning, creating one core theme with different angles and pieces of content to support multiple channels radiating from this. In this sense, integration is our way of ensuring our clients can shout consistent messages from every rooftop and make the most of their marketing budgets.
Integration may seem a little cliché as a company value, but we really felt that it should be in the mix because is it so crucial to what we do and how we operate. A modern PR programme is such a multifaceted part of B2B communications, linking to SEO, content and inbound marketing, social media, lead generation and much more.
Why not find out more about how and why we integrate, alongside our other values, here.
