Barefoot’s Integrated Approach Supports Our Clients’ Unique Needs

It’s common for organizations to encounter silos across their teams, and as consultants, we often find ourselves mediating between different teams with differing goals. One of the most common divides we’ve observed is between marketing and IT departments. Marketing is typically focused on creating a great customer experience and driving revenue, whereas IT’s priorities revolve around security and system maintainability.

Both goals are valid and necessary, but issues arise when they hire separate partners. Marketing departments look for agencies to assist them in achieving their objectives, and IT departments engage technology integrations partners. Unfortunately, these different partners often do not collaborate effectively, leading to inefficiencies and misaligned objectives.

Barefoot’s Customized Marketing Strategy

At Barefoot, we collaborate across all departments. A great example of an integrated team at Barefoot is our experience technology team. This team comprises  martech strategy experts, consultants, and developers, and it’s responsible for transforming creative concepts into connected, cross-channel digital experiences.

Below is a list of every discipline the experience technology team collaborates with.

Client Partnership: This group develops a deep understanding of our clients’ businesses and drives clarity regarding business priorities and brand identity.

Strategy: This discipline leads and leverages consumer research to identify opportunities and design consumer journeys.

Marketing Science:  This crew digs into consumer data to help reveal insights based on consumer attributes and behaviors as well as identify data points we can use to trigger and personalize experiences. They also determine how to measure the experiences we build for our clients and how to augment and improve the data.

Experience Design:  This discipline includes graphic designers, user experience designers, copywriters, multimedia producers, and production and creative directors. The team leverages data and insights from the strategy and marketing science teams to produce creative ideas for the overall consumer experience.

Media:  These media experts focus on paid interactions, identifying how to target specific audiences, buying media, search marketing, and performance marketing. While media teams are often siloed in many organizations, we have found that leveraging its audience insights helps improve experiences in owned channels, too.

Project Management:  This discipline helps coordinate all the other disciplines by pulling together talent from across the agency, identifying interdependencies and keeping us all on track with project requirements.

Our collaboration process with clients is quite unique. Within the experience technology discipline, for example, we strive to operate as marketers doing technology versus technologists doing marketing. We let the vision for the experience guide and inform how we use technology instead of letting predetermined technology dictate decisions about the experience.

This integration strategy gives our team a “big picture” mindset. The end-user experience is our guiding light and top priority. We are not simply executing prescribed tasks; we’re thinking through the business problem our client is trying to solve and watching out for potential pitfalls. We regularly ask ourselves, “Is there a better way to do this?” and “Is anything missing (e.g., measurement plan, SEO, security, etc.)?” If so, we proactively suggest changes.

How to Find Better, More Holistic Client Solutions

To focus on our customized marketing strategies and help our clients develop holistic solutions, here are some key principles we follow: 

Focus on users: The end user is the reason why we do what we do. We constantly need to keep users in mind.
Keep it simple: Digital experiences can quickly become cluttered with unnecessary features. Simple is almost always better.
Inspire delight: Delivering against requirements is not enough. We look for opportunities to make experiences delightful.
Exhibit craftsmanship: A well-crafted solution is more than functional. It is designed for high performance, efficiency, and maintainability.
Deliver unique value: We don’t want to simply be executional vendors for our clients — we are business partners. We bring our experience and knowledge to advise our clients, enabling them to benefit from our expertise. We often discover things that our clients did not realize they should address. Sometimes these are simply best practices or governance; sometimes they are security vulnerabilities, legal risks, or opportunities to drive efficiency.

Hiring an already integrated team to help you bridge the gap between your marketing and IT departments will save you time and money in the long run. An integrated approach ensures your goals will be evaluated in relation to one another. Sales, cost, time to market, user experience, messaging, measurement, best practices, maintainability, accessibility, amplification, security, and compliance are all goals to consider. 

If you feel like there is a misalignment between your creative agency and your development partner, it might be time to consider an integrated approach. If you’re interested in learning more about how Barefoot can help you benefit from a cross-channel experience, please  reach out. We’d love to chat!