As an owner, choosing the right marketing agency to grow your business can be challenging. If you’re not familiar with marketing, sifting through all the different services can take weeks… or months. And, of course, not all agencies are a good fit. Do you only operate on a local level? Is pricing a concern? Do you need an agency that can grow alongside you?
Many marketing companies promise the world. And, sadly, many business owners believe them. But, a good marketing company will build reasonable expectations. They’ll try to understand your goals. They’ll clearly communicate their capabilities. And, above all else, they’ll lay out how their marketing services can help you reach those goals.
In most cases, the marketing agency you choose will depend on the services you need. If you’re focusing solely on the digital world, you’ll likely look at digital marketing agencies. If you want to schedule a year’s worth of mailers, you’ll look for someone with print industry expertise. If you’re a small business, you might look at smaller agencies.
Of course, what you need is determined by a lot of factors: your target audience, your marketing budget, your business goals, and your existing marketing efforts. But, before we dive into those aspects, let’s take a closer look at some of the types of services available.
Digital marketing is an umbrella term for a number of marketing activities that aim to promote your business or product online. According to the Harvard Business Review, nearly one-third of small businesses outsource their digital marketing efforts. And, with the growing complexity of online marketing, that number is increasing yearly.
We’ll go into more detail below, but digital marketing includes pay-per-click campaigns, social media management, and website design. It can also incorporate other aspects of marketing, like integrating digital and print campaigns, marketing automation, and search engine optimization.
By hiring a digital marketing company, you alleviate the challenge of staying up to date with new social media platforms, Google search updates, and website trends. Even better, a good digital marketing company can ensure brand consistency in all of the places your brand exists online.
Brand development is one of the most fundamental things that marketing agencies do. Refining your brand message is essential to marketing yourself online, offline, and… uh… everywhere in between. By design, your logo is the most recognizable aspect of your business. Using different versions on your website, social media, business cards, and signage is, well, it’s a nightmare.
A clear, simple logo is crucial to your marketing success. So, of course, it pays to have a good logo. Not only does it set you apart from other businesses, it’s the first step toward creating a unified brand presence.
Many marketing agencies can create brand guidelines, which define your brand’s colors, fonts, logos, voice, and style rules. In a lot of cases, these guides serve as a jumping off point for all of your brand’s future content: printed materials, blog posts, letterhead, apparel, and much more.
When most people go looking for digital agencies, it’s because they need a new website. But, a good website is more than a one-time effort, it’s the cornerstone of all your marketing efforts. If you think about it, your site is linked on your business cards, your emails, your promo materials, your social media, and even your vehicles. It’s literally everywhere.
In one way or another, all of your marketing campaigns link to your website. Your business’ site helps you generate leads. It helps you increase sales. But, most importantly, it introduces new customers to your brand. As of 2023, over 70% of businesses have a website. So, really, you’re barely even a business if you don’t have a website.
When hiring a marketing partner, business owners want to be able to prove the effectiveness of the agency they hire. What good is a website if you don’t know how many people are visiting it? Why write blog posts if nobody’s reading them? How can you make informed decisions without data to back them up?
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a set of tactics that aim to improve your website, make it easier for search engines to understand, and – by extension – increase ‘free’ organic traffic. By using data-collecting marketing software, SEO experts can analyze your site and create tailored plans that are based on keyword research. Keywords help to guide your site’s content marketing efforts, including web pages, blog posts, and press releases.
But, best of all, SEO is rooted in concrete evidence. SEO specialists use a suite of software to track your site’s performance. From this data, they determine which marketing strategies are working, which are falling short, and what can be done to bring more visitors to your site.
When looking at marketing firms, a lot of business owners want an agency that can create video content. In fact, video is one of the most common lead-ins we see to other marketing services. An informative, high-quality video that showcases your company is a proven way to increase the engagement of your web pages, blog articles, and social media posts.
But, not only do videos help you gain more visits, they help you convert the visitors you already have. With videos, you can show your company culture, highlight product features, and inject personality into your marketing materials. Being helpful and, more importantly, being human is the best way to reach your audience, build a genuine connection, and create new business.
Really, social media is the new public relations. As the best way to engage in direct contact with your audience, it’s a crucial marketing activity for both large and small businesses. If you hire a marketing firm to handle your social media, you want to be certain they’re able to capture your voice, tone, and style.
An experienced social media manager won’t just post hilarious memes, national holidays, and cat videos. Sure, social media marketing is about capitalizing on a shared cultural grammar, but it’s mostly about building a community. When you hire a marketing agency to create your posts, they need to be targeted. Every post needs to work toward your goals.
Are you looking to build brand awareness? Are you aiming to advertise in-person events? Do you want to attract talented new employees? When used correctly, your company’s social media can help to achieve all of these goals.
Pay-per-click advertising, whether on social media or Google Ads, is a great way to quickly drive traffic to your site. Often, a good marketing agency will supplement long-term organic strategies with short-term pay-per-click strategies. By doing this, you get an immediate burst of traffic from your ad campaigns and slow, steady growth from your organic efforts.
But, one of the most important things that marketing agencies do is manage your ad spend. It’s no use spending thousands of dollars if those dollars aren’t properly targeted. By making regular adjustments to your ad campaigns, your agency can fine-tune them to ensure that no dollar is wasted and, more importantly, no customer is lost.
You’ve spent years building a fiercely loyal customer base… why waste that? Email marketing is a proven way to stay connected, stay relevant, and stay at the top of your customers’ minds. When paired with your other digital marketing strategies, it can help to boost traffic to your site, increase your site’s authority, and re-integrate lost customers into your company’s loop.
Before you hire a marketing agency, though, you can handle a lot of email marketing tasks on your own with a free service like Mailchimp. Mailchimp will let you build out your audience, make simple newsletters, and send them to a limited number of recipients. It’s an amazing platform for small businesses, especially because it’s able to grow with you.
And, when you grow out of Mailchimp’s free version, you can export your email list, hand it off to a marketing agency, and have them continue the good work you started!
All right, then, now that we’ve defined the types of services offered by marketing agencies, it’s time to help you choose a marketing team. While it may seem like a lot of work, it’s important to remember that you’ll always end up paying, whether it’s with your time or your money. So, if you want to save money, it’s time to settle in, grab a pencil, and start doing some legwork.
According to recent studies, over two-thirds of businesses don’t have a marketing plan. So, if you’re here, you’re already on your way to better things! But, before we get too congratulatory, we’ve got to ask… what are your marketing goals?
Good agencies build good strategies. But, a great marketing agency will look at your goals and build a strategy around them. If you’re taking a trip, you want to know the destination. If you’re building a house, you want to know how many bedrooms it’ll have. And, if you’re creating a marketing plan, you want to know what success looks like.
Once you’ve defined success, it’s time to start thinking about strategy. Of course, when you hire a marketing team, they’ll probably adjust your strategy. But, in the meantime, you need to know what to look for. Do you primarily need help with digital marketing? Are you struggling with your brand identity? Or do you need a little bit of everything?
Once you’ve determined what you need, you can start looking at marketing companies based on the services they offer. If you’re a small business, you may only need a single service. A small, boutique agency might be better suited to your needs if you only need occasional help with social media, Google Ads, or video production.
Before you choose a marketing firm, you’ll want to take a look around. There’s, like, so many of them. Luckily, Google’s taken a lot of the work out of this step. By searching ‘marketing agency near me’ you can, for the most part, get a nice list of local agencies. Since you’ve defined your goals, you can pare this list down by eliminating any agency that doesn’t offer the services you need.
Of course, when vetting a potential agency partner, you can’t just rely on their websites. After you’ve gathered your list of agencies, you’ll want to assemble a list of questions to ask them. You’ll want to ask about the agency’s expertise, their experience, and whether the agency’s processes can be tailored to your business.
To gain valuable insights into the type – and quality – of work each marketing company does, you should request samples of their work. Whether they’re from a recent marketing campaign or older work that’s relevant to your industry, samples are the best way to see if the agency’s work fits your company.
If you’re trusting an agency with your brand message, you want to be certain – absolutely sure – that it’s in good hands. Any marketing firm worth their salt should be eager to provide you with examples of their work.
If you’re looking at a new website, ask for some recent designs. If you’re considering social media management, ask who else they manage. Or, if you’re interested in all the services they offer, schedule a meeting to sit down and browse their portfolio.
Once you’ve narrowed down your search, it’s time to get down to business. Ask the agency you’ve selected to provide you with a proposal, pitch, or service agreement. From this, you’ll be able to determine a number of things, including whether or not the agency is within your budget.
Naturally, this is where things get difficult. Let’s say you’ve found a great agency but their pricing isn’t in your budget. In this case, it may be useful to ask them about reduced or collaborative packages. For example, if you’re looking for a web designer, maybe your costs can be lowered if you provide written content. Or, if you want help with social media, you might be able to lower costs by reducing the number of monthly posts.
Oh boy, here we go… pricing! Of course, asking how much a marketing agency costs is kind of a loaded question. Depending on the services you select, prices can vary wildly. Obviously, if you only need a single logo designed, your price will be lower than if you need video editing, website design, photography, and social media marketing.
However, most digital marketing agencies work on two models: a la carte or full-service. Many agencies offer a combination of these two models, so it’ll likely be useful to understand what your options are before you start asking for proposals.
Many business owners want an agency that delivers their services a la carte. When starting out, being able to pick and choose services one by one lets you get a feel for the agency you’ve chosen. In this way, you’re able to determine if they’re a good fit before investing a large sum into a more comprehensive marketing package.
While it’s impossible to say exactly how much your a la carte marketing services will cost, here are a few industry averages:
Once you’ve found a trustworthy agency with a solid track record, you’ll want to inquire about full-service marketing. Full-service marketing is a way to bundle all of your company’s marketing needs into one package. As a way to streamline your marketing efforts, full-service is the way to go, as it ensures all of your materials are consistent.
If you’re a small business, full-service marketing is the best way to gain the advantages of hiring a complete marketing team without having to perform all the tasks in house. For example, you could hire an internal marketing manager at $60,000 per year. But, then that manager would still need to delegate certain tasks, such as video production, website maintenance, or graphic design.
But, with a full-service marketing team, you have all of these services at your fingertips. So, you pay around the same cost, but you don’t need to hire out additional work. In this way, you can better anticipate your total costs and, ultimately, save money.
You knew from the start that you were reading a commercial, so here’s our pitch: you found us for a reason. You’re looking to choose a marketing agency and we believe that we’re the right agency for you. With decades of experience and a huge team of marketing professionals, we’re Kalamazoo’s best agency for a broad range of services.
Whether you need help ranking on Google, photographing your products, building a presence on social media, identifying your target audience, or designing a fancy website, we can help. And, with all of our services performed in house, you can rest easy knowing that you’re working with a team that understands the local market.
So, if you’ve been searching for a marketing firm that’ll listen to your goals, develop strategies to help you reach them, and execute those strategies to a high level of proficiency, we’d love to hear from you.
(That’s the end of the commercial part, we hope you enjoyed the useful parts!)
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