14 Benefits of a Full-Service Marketing Firm

Benefits of a Full-Service Marketing Firm

In this article, we’re going to cover 14 benefits of a full-service marketing firm, but first let’s answer a couple of important questions.

• What services does a marketing firm offer?
• What does a marketing agency do?

What Services Does A Marketing Firm Offer?

The terms marketing firm and full-service marketing agency are used interchangeably, but there are subtle differences between the two.

Marketing firms have a number of professional individuals with great people skills that can identify a business’ needs and create a solid business plan. However, much of the work required to implement the strategies identified are oftentimes farmed out to other third-party service providers.

There’s nothing wrong with this. Strategy is important. Though when work is farmed out, it often leads to higher costs since each company or individual involved needs to make a profit.

What Does A Marketing Agency Do?

Conversely, a full-service marketing agency brings together a number of talented individuals with different skill sets that can benefit their customers’ needs all under one roof. Using Back40 Design as an example, we employ experts in the areas of web design & development, SEO consulting, digital marketing, social media marketing and more.

The downside with many marketing agencies is that they tend to sell service packages and are short on research and strategy.

The 14 Benefits of a Full-Service Marketing Firm

1. A More Affordable, Valuable Investment.

Employee salaries, benefits, training, and equipment make up a big chunk of most business’ monthly expenses. Now, imagine adding a team of 10+ marketing specialists to your payroll. That’s pricey.

Agencies employ a full marketing team so you don’t have to, making hiring an agency a much cheaper option for most startups, small and medium businesses. Typically, you’ll only pay ad costs plus a retainer or management fee for services.

2. Technology to Manage and Optimize Your Campaigns.

Marketers need more tools than just a computer and the internet to do their jobs effectively. Tools and software cost money.

Full-service marketing agencies utilize tools for nearly every aspect of a marketing campaign: social media scheduling, graphic design, photography, website analytics, programmatic ad placement and buys, PPC ad campaigns, keyword research, rank tracking, content marketing and development, local listing management and reporting. Let’s just say it adds up.

The benefit with an agency is that it’s all included in your retainer or management fees.

You’re also not paying time and money for someone on your staff to research the best tools to use and figure out how to use them.

3. Knowledgeable on Current Trends and Updates.

Digital marketing is an ever evolving field. What applied one year ago, may or may not be relevant today. Staying up to date on the latest trends, best practices, and features for every tactic in your marketing campaign is important. Using outdated tactics can tank your results and, in some cases get your site penalized or even deindexed in Google. Yikes.

Hiring a reputable, full-service agency that has experience to back up their claims can help your business stay competitive online.

Let us show you how your business could perform better online. Set up a free discovery meeting today. 

4. Diverse and Deep Skill Sets.

Finding a unicorn of a person that specializes in all things digital marketing is impossible. Just like with multi-tasking, trying to do too many things means none will be done well.

For example, let us compare search engine optimization and social media management.

SEO is highly analytical, requires in-depth knowledge and research. 

• • This person must love data.
  • Keyword, competitor and SERP research can take days for a single client.
  • They venture deep into the Google rabbit hole and have to process all of that information to provide strategic insights and plans for content creation.

Whereas, social media requires personality, warmth, and creativity. 

• • This person must write engaging copy specific to the platform.
  • Social is more than just writing. They must also possess photography and graphic design skills, and enjoy interacting with people.
  • They also have to stay current on trends and be continually experimenting with content.

That’s not the same person.

Luckily, agencies employ specialists for each tactic so that the right person is in the right position, and your campaigns can see success across all channels.

5. Scalability for Your Business Needs.

Having a marketing team can be great, but it can be a challenge for seasonal businesses due to staffing requirements. That’s why outsourcing your marketing to a full-service agency can be a great solution for small and medium businesses.

With an agency, you simply pick up the phone or send an email. Requesting to scale back your budget for the month or to scale up and add new tactics is much easier since they have a full team of resources to utilize.

6. Experience that Achieves Results.

Every marketing tactic requires different skills and approach. When hiring an agency, you should consider their experience overall and in each tactic you’re considering. Ask for references or case studies. A reputable agency should have no issue sharing their client successes or explaining the rationale behind the different tactics they recommend for your business.

Set up an initial discovery meeting with our team to get started on your campaign. 

7. New Ideas. Constant Improvement.

Staying current with latest industry trends and specializing in one tactic provides added benefits – you get new ideas!

An agency is a team of people who just really love marketing. And, when it’s what you love, you want to try new things and continue to improve your work. The best performing campaigns are ever evolving, just like the medium itself. It’s research, plan, implement, optimize, repeat. Over and over to continue growing and adapting your campaign to continue generating sales and leads.

If your marketing team is struggling to keep up with their workload, they don’t have time to research and evolve their campaigns. We see the scenario with business owners, too. Hiring an agency gets you a specialized team constantly working to improve your campaign every day.

8. Consistent Branding and Messaging.

Branding is all about consistency. That’s easiest to achieve when the same team handles all your marketing; therefore strengthening your brand.

An agency serves not only as marketing managers but as brand ambassadors for your business. They can create and maintain a cohesive design, message and tone across your business’ social media, website, and printed materials. This is especially important when building a relationship with your customers and potential customers.

If you’re relying on a small in-house team of 1 or 2 people, this can be a struggle – especially if there’s turnover.

9. A la Carte Services to Complement Your Marketing Team.

As we mentioned before, it’s important that the right person is in the right role. That includes people on your team. If you have a small marketing team that excels at social media but doesn’t have PPC or SEO experience, you have an opportunity to expand your team by utilizing an agency.

Full-service agencies allow you to subscribe to a holistic package or choose services a la carte. This works well but only if there’s an overarching strategy leading both the agency’s efforts and the in-house marketing team’s efforts. It requires open and honest communication. Creating a marketing plan complete with a content calendar and audience personas in addition to regular meetings between the two teams will help ensure consistent branding.

An alternate set up that can also foster success is having a single point of contact on your in-house team to serve as the liaison between your agency and your business leader(s). An example of how this could work is letting the agency take lead, producing the strategy and managing the campaigns, but the in-house liaison helps capture photos an agency wouldn’t have access to or keep approvals on track with management.

10. A Team of Resources.

Full-service agencies don’t solely offer campaign management. They’re full service because they can support your business needs through all aspects of digital marketing, including graphic design and web development.

All digital channels generally drive traffic back to your website. Your website should be created with the purpose of converting users into buyers (or leads). Having brand consistency throughout the design of your website and your campaigns creates a good customer experience.

Having a templated website is often not enough for most businesses. You need control and flexibility of a website when running SEO, PPC and social media campaigns. Again, for consistency.

Website experience and landing page relevance are paramount in the success of SEO and digital ad campaigns. When your marketing specialists work alongside your web development team, they can easily optimize your website for ultimate campaign success.

When that doesn’t happen, it can be tragic.

Imagine clicking an ad promoting an offer for dog grooming services, and then you land on a web page that talks about training techniques. You’d be confused. You may even question the legitimacy of the brand.

It sounds like common sense that your ad should drive clicks to a related landing page on your website, but it’s an issue a lot of beginner campaign managers make. Leading customers to the wrong page not only costs you a potential customer but it costs you money. Digital ad campaigns are traditionally pay per click or pay per impression. If your ad campaign is set up poorly, you’re wasting money.

That’s why it’s important to hire an experienced agency that won’t be using your money to learn how to run an ad campaign. Their specialists are trained and tested before ever being able to manage or set up your campaign. Agencies know how to optimize ads for conversions, making the most of your budget.

11. A Single Point of Contact.

One of the best benefits of working with an agency is that you have a single point of contact that manages your campaigns, your strategy and your brand: your account manager. This person is like the executive chef in a restaurant. They check all the orders before the plates are delivered to the customer. In the digital realm, they work with the team of specialists managing the tactics within your campaign to make sure everything is running smoothly and your goals are being met.

Why is this important? If you need to make changes, there’s only one number or one email to contact. They know you and your business. They take care of you.

Account managers are also good sounding boards for new ideas. Since they are so familiar with your goals and business, they can come up with creative ideas that can help propel your business forward.

Ready to meet our team? Book a free consultation with our team to discuss opportunities to grow your business. 

12. Adaptable to Handling Quick Timelines.

When working with an agency, you’re working with a team. That generally means they can handle quick turnaround times much easier than a small, in house marketing team. This is possible because there are several people handling pieces of the campaign, rather than a single person that has to drop everything to switch gears. They can more easily add more people to your campaign to effectively manage your needs, as opposed to hiring seasonal marketers to help with a boom in business. Agency teams are already vetted and standing by, able to help. This also helps make sure no part of your plan gets put on the back burner while focusing on the new, more urgent promotion.

That being said, good creative does take time and digital marketing campaigns require time to optimize for performance.

13. Teamwork Really Makes the Dream Work.

A holistic marketing strategy with multiple channels and tactics works best to drive business. Each tactic works to guide potential customers through its section of the buyer funnel, ending in a conversion.

Account managers lead the way and keep the overall strategy at the forefront. They work to ensure that each part of the campaign is working in harmony. Then, specialists can work together to help ensure each other’s success.

Working with an experienced digital marketing team leads to more success. Not just from experience but from the teamwork itself. The greatest success can come from brainstorming ideas and utilizing other team members’ skills to aid their part of the campaign. The creatives, the analysts, the developers. Everyone has a role to plan in a successful campaign. Though, you (the business owner) may never witness the teamwork happen, you can certainly see it in the reports and ROI of a successful campaign.

14. Create, Track, Optimize. Repeat.

One of the most important parts of digital marketing is defining measurable goals and tracking performance. Tracking provides data. Data provides information to improve. Whereas agencies have the tools and software to implement tracking per tactic, these tools don’t often connect to each other. An account manager must also analyze the data and how it relates to the overall business goals, then use that information to optimize your campaigns. They must also be able to explain that information in a way to their clients that makes sense to them. This level of reporting and analysis takes time but is one of the most crucial elements of successful campaign management. Because without it, you’re just making guesses. And, you don’t want to pay people to make guesses with your marketing dollars.

Marketing Agency Services

As a design and digital marketing agency, Back40 Design provides 6 core services for our clients. We understand that every client is unique, and that not all services are a fit for everyone. During a free initial consultation, our account executives will assess your business goals to develop a custom plan and proposal for services that meets your business needs.

Why A Full-Service Marketing Agency and Firm Hybrid Works Best

Back40 Design is a hybrid of the full-service marketing firm and full-service marketing agency models, providing the best of both. We don’t just serve the Oklahoma City or Edmond areas of Oklahoma. Back40 is a national company that provides services to businesses through the United States. We regularly perform competitive research to understand the needs of each business we work with. Without such research, it would not be possible to create a strategy or even determine what services a business truly needs to be competitive in their niche. Cookie-cutter services do not provide the value needed to get ahead and stay ahead in a competitive business climate, and Back40 does not take shortcuts in this area. Our research identifies your strengths and weaknesses. If you need a website design, local SEO or organic SEO, social media services or something else – we’ll tell you. But if you don’t need a particular service, we’ll be sure you’re told that, too.

Get started today by scheduling your free initial consultation.

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