With literally thousands of both traditional and digital marketing agencies available to choose from, for many business owners the first question they ask is, “What marketing services do you offer?”.
Here at Alchemy Consulting this is not a simple answer as we offer a variety of traditional advertising channels as well as several product combinations that we have trademarked. We are also not a “one size fits all” agency, but focus on understanding what a prospective client is looking for and then design a program that fits both their current budget and capacity for new business.
In an effort to answer this question comprehensively, we have prepared this extensive guide. In the following sections, we’ll introduce the various marketing channels that we provide and discuss how each can contribute to a successful marketing campaign.
What As A Full-Service Marketing Agency?
A full-service marketing agency is a company that provides a variety of services to their clients, covering all areas of marketing. These services can range from traditional advertising agency marketing methods, such as print advertisements, direct mail campaigns, and scripting radio/television spots; to digital marketing strategies such as SEO, PPC, and social media marketing.
Full-service agencies are uniquely equipped to help businesses achieve their marketing goals, providing comprehensive solutions that consider every marketing channel. By aligning strategies across various services, these agencies can deliver consistent messaging and more significant impact for their clients.
What Are The Benefits Of Hiring A Marketing Agency?
Hiring a marketing agency provides a host of benefits for your business. An agency’s wide variety of services can help bolster your marketing efforts, creating a comprehensive and effective strategy. They also offer expertise in areas of marketing your in-house team may not have, enhancing your marketing campaign’s effectiveness.
Perhaps the most important criteria for hiring an agency is the fact that marketing agencies employ a team of experts who stay up-to-date with the latest marketing strategies, industry trends, and technological advancements. By outsourcing to an agency, you allow your business to tap into this pool of expertise and innovation.
Finally, hiring an agency can lead to better ROI on your marketing spend. Marketing agencies are adept at aligning their services to your business goals, ensuring that every marketing dollar contributes to achieving those objectives.
Who Needs Digital Marketing Services?
In the digital age, virtually every business owner can benefit from digital marketing services. Whether you’re a small enterprise just starting or an established company looking to revamp your existing marketing strategies, digital marketing is an essential tool. It allows businesses to reach a wider audience, increase visibility, and engage customers more effectively.
Digital marketing services are particularly crucial for businesses seeking to improve their online presence. With an increasing number of consumers relying on the internet to find and evaluate products or services, a well-implemented digital marketing strategy can help your business stand out in the crowded digital landscape.
The Marketing Agency Process (Well, Ours At Least)
At Alchemy Consulting we follow a tried-and-tested process to ensure that our agency services yield tangible results. This process typically involves the following steps:
1. Understanding Your Business Goals: We start by understanding your business objectives. This information guides all our marketing efforts, ensuring that every strategy we develop aligns with your larger business goals.
2. Assessing Your Current Strategy: We then evaluate your existing marketing strategy, identifying what’s working and what isn’t. This analysis helps us understand where improvements can be made.
3. Developing a Tailored Marketing Strategy: Based on our understanding of your goals and the evaluation of your current strategies, we develop a tailored marketing plan. This plan outlines the marketing tactics we will use, the marketing channels we will target, which members of our digital marketing team will be working with you, and the milestones we aim to achieve.
4. Implementing the Strategy: Once the marketing strategy is approved, we implement it, carefully tracking progress and adjusting our tactics as needed to ensure optimal results. Over time additional services might be added as your company grows or you have new products to offer clients. We integrate traditional marketing along with online marketing for most of our clients.
5. Measuring and Reporting: We provide a comprehensive monthly report on our marketing efforts, providing clear insights into our services and results, what’s working and how our efforts are contributing to your business goals.
Digital Marketing Services List
Here’s a comprehensive list of marketing agency services we offer to help your business thrive in the online landscape.
Website Design, Build, And Host
Your website is the 24/7/365 salesperson for your business. It is often the first point of contact between your business and potential customers. A good marketing agency will assist in designing, building, and hosting a website that aligns with your brand’s ethos and appeals to your target audience.
At Alchemy, we are Story Brand certified guides. A StoryBrand website is a website that uses a story to effectively connect with the audience and market a product or a service. It tends to use the main formula of any good story (characters, emotions, problem, guide, plan, solution) as a way to show visitors why they need the product.
There are two distinct advantages to this methodology. First is that your website will speak directly to the problems faced by your prospective customer and demonstrate how you are “the Guide” that can help them find the solutions. Second, your website will not look like the sites of your competitors. Marketing companies frequently produce generic content that is safe, but doesn’t generate the inbound marketing impact you are looking for.
Here’s an interesting experiment I encourage you to try. Look up the websites of your six top competitors and take a screenshot of the home page. Do the same with your website. Then print all of these out and lay them out on your desk or conference table. Is the message nearly the same for all of them? In fact, if you covered the company name would it be difficult to distinguish one business from another?
Now put yourself in the position of a prospect looking for what you offer. If they are searching online for a vendor, and all the websites look alike, what is their conclusion? It’s price, because in the client’s mind everyone offers the same thing, so which one is the least expensive!
Our Story Brand based website development process yields great websites that help your company stand out in a very crowded marketplace.
Hosting refers to where your website “lives” online. Your site is loaded onto a hosting server and assigned a unique IP address on the Internet. (IP stands for Internet Protocol, it is the identifier that allows information to be sent through the web.)
There are three primary considerations when selecting a hosting company: load speed, security, and redundancy. In brief:
- Load speed refers to how quickly your website is formatted on the screen of someone who selects it from a list or types in your URL (Uniform Resource Locator), your “address” online. The search engines place a high priority on rapid load speed as part of their algorithm.
- Security. We read stories every week about data breaches. A hosting platform is a primary target for hackers. Having extensive security measures in place is imperative, especially if you sell products or services directly from your website.
- Redundancy refers to two things. Does your hosting company have multiple servers in different locations nationally or internationally with copies of your site loaded onto them? If one server bank goes down for any reason, are they able to still make your site available from one of these locations. Second, how frequently is your website backed up? If there is a problem within your site, can you reload from a recent backup without a serious business interruption?
We have tested at least a dozen hosting companies over the last decade. Ask us what we’ve learned.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Developing a powerful website is the first step. Having people find it is the second. Search engine optimization is the process of helping your business get found online. Almost every digital marketing agency offers seo services. However, only an experienced seo agency will emphasize both types of optimizing your website.
A company that builds websites will typically focus on one aspect of SEO: on site. That is, they will properly use H1, H2 and H3 header tags. Images will be geo-tagged, a privacy policy and terms of service will be available. An xml sitemap will be installed, as will schema markup (both of these help the search engine spiders quickly understand how a website should be categorized). Other considerations are metatags, content word length, and proper keyword density.
A full service agency will complete the onsite SEO, but will also focus on what is called “offsite” SEO. It is this category that is what creates the long term impact on where your website ranks, and how frequently it is presented in search results. Any agency you might select needs to offer both if your investment is to provide the best return.
What is offsite SEO? Here again services can include:
- Claiming geographically and business category relevant citation and directory sites.
- Properly registering with the five aggregator sites.
- Developing keyword rich “city pages” that help the search engines understand where you work
- Consistently creating high domain authority backlinks
- Curating and originating content to add to your website on a regular basis.
An agency might offer search engine optimization, but as a business owner you want to be certain they will help your clients find you easily through both on and offline work.
Paid Advertising Management
This service involves managing online advertising campaigns on platforms like Google, Bing, and/or Facebook ads. This might include PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, banner ad advertising, and retargeting advertising, all of which aim to attract potential customers to your site. Here again, not all agencies are alike. Many agencies use third party companies to outsource paid ad management. Particularly in the case of Google Ads, this can cost you extra ad spend.
Pay Per Click Advertising
PPC is a digital marketing strategy that involves running ads and only paying when a user clicks on them. This strategy can provide immediate visibility on search engines and social media networks, and when managed correctly, can offer an excellent return on your advertising investment. The main advertising platforms are Google, Bing, and Facebook, although other social media platforms offer paid ads.
More than any other service that digital agencies offer, paid advertising is an area where it pays to retain an experienced team. If your agency doesn’t have a variety of clients using this service and understand the nuances involved in designing a proper campaign, you will waste money.
Why do I say this? Simple, PPC advertising is every bit as complicated as a comprehensive SEO strategy. It requires careful attention to detail to help improve and maintain the Quality Score that is the primary criteria for how much your ads cost. That score is based on a complex algorithm that includes how the ads are designed, bid pricing, where a ‘click’ takes the person, and at least a dozen other parameters.
This is an area where the Alchemy team really performs! We have been helping our clients with paid ad campaigns for more than a decade, and have managed over $10 million in client ad spend.
Retargeting Advertising
I like to refer to retargeting as the single marketing strategy that makes all of your other marketing more powerful. Here’s why I say that. Most every advertising dollar you spend is designed to get someone to visit your website. But Google tells us that 96% of the people who visit a website bounce off without making a purchase, filling out a contact form, using a chat bot, or picking up the phone.
Retargeting is a form of online advertising that targets these visitors to your site and places your ad in front of them as they continue to search online. Retargeting can help increase conversion rates by reminding potential customers of your products or services for days or weeks after they leave your site.
Here’s the best part…it’s really inexpensive when compared to other paid advertising campaigns. Where you might spend $20 or more for a single click with Google, Bing, or Facebook, retargeting advertising costs are based on each 1000 impressions. In many cases 1000 impressions can cost $30 or less.
This is another marketing channel where agencies also outsource, and this is not to your advantage. It means the digital marketer you have retained isn’t actually managing your ad spend.
Our retargeting team uses a proprietary demand side platform to manage our clients ad spend, we develop all ad creatives in house, and participate with the 11 primary ad exchanges that work in the US. We manage every step of the process.
Banner Ad Advertising
Similar to retargeting, banner ads are a form of online advertising that involves placing a designed advertisement on another website. These ads can drive traffic to your website, increasing brand visibility and potentially boosting sales. Ad placement is a competitive auction managed by the ad exchanges. Here’s how the process works:
- Campaign objectives are defined
- Our graphics team creates several sets of ads. Each ad set consists of 16 different ad sizes to conform to the ad spaces allocated by websites that accept outside advertising.
- Using our demand side platform, we define the parameters of your campaign. These include daily and monthly ad budget, times of day to present your ads, number of times any one person can see your ad in a day. We can also target or block specific websites from displaying your ads.
- Once the ad exchanges approve the ads, typically this is done within 24 hours, we launch the campaign.
- We monitor the ad responses, “split-testing” one ad versus another to continually refine the campaigns.
What makes banner advertising so intriguing is the various ways these campaigns can be targeted. For example, a “hyper-local” campaign can be focused on one or more specific addresses and a radius around each. During the time period established everyone with a smartphone within that radius will be exposed to your business.
How can this be applied in the “real world”? For one of our landscape contractor clients, we targeted a neighborhood that met his criteria for homes that might need their sod replaced. We designed and launched a hyper-local campaign into that neighborhood and in the next 90 days he generated just over $50,000 in new sod jobs.
Another application of banner advertising is a “time lapse” campaign. Here we can literally go back in time and create a list of everyone who visited a location for the last year carrying a smartphone. An example of this strategy is a campaign we designed for a jewelry store client. We identified 47 other jewelry retailers in the metro area. Since people who buy jewelry frequently buy more jewelry, we broadcast our client’s store and message to more than 90,000 customers of his competitors. Our client enjoyed a 12% increase in his revenue year of year.
As you can see, paid advertising is far more than just clicks on Google or Facebook. These are additional marketing services your agency should offer.
Reputation Marketing
Reputation marketing involves managing and improving your business’s online reputation. This could include managing reviews, addressing negative feedback, and promoting positive customer experiences.
According to several independent surveys, 87% of all consumers look at a company’s online reviews before deciding to contact the business. Even someone who is referred to a business by a trusted friend will first look for reviews.
People want to know that other customers or clients you have worked with had a good experience. Online reviews, especially Google reviews, are how they verify this. There are many sites that encourage people to leave reviews, but with rare exception we always emphasize that customers should be directed to the Google Business Page to place their review.
Notable exceptions to this rule would be restaurants, who should focus on Yelp. Hotels and vacation destination resorts will have better success with Tripadvisor.
A marketing agency should offer several services to help their clients implement a consistent review process. This might include training for the sales team on the best time to ask for a review, and providing tools to make that request easy. For example, a business card with the link to your Google Business Page so a customer knows exactly where to leave the review.
Your agency should also provide coaching for how to respond to the occasional poor review. Every business will get them at one time or another. The issue isn’t that a bad review was left, what is important is how you as the business owner reply. This is important as you work to reestablish a good relationship with that customer, but even more important for future prospects to see that you do care about what customers think and make an effort to correct a perceived problem.
A strategy that is particularly powerful is video reviews. These can be short, 90 seconds or less, and easily created using a smartphone. Prompting your customer with a couple of questions before recording the video will help them focus on what will be most valuable to future prospects who watch the video.
Another reason to emphasize reputation marketing is the fact that the online reputation of a business is one of the primary factors in the search engine algorithms. A company with the majority of excellent reviews will be listed more frequently in search results and earn higher page rank.
When interviewing potential marketing agencies, ask for a detailed plan on how they will help your business enhance its online reputation and maintain that over time.
Social Media Marketing
Social media today has become an important channel for almost any local business or professional practice. However, it can also be a huge waste of time and money if not managed properly. Many business owners have the belief that they need to be active on all the available social media platforms. This is a mistake.
How can a marketing agency help with social media? Their service should include crafting tailored content, managing posts, responding to comments, and measuring engagement to help your business grow its online presence. The variables for this service are how many social media platforms are you active on and how many days each week do you want fresh content posted to these sites?
When developing a social media strategy the most important criteria is understanding how your ideal customers use social media. This is easily done, just ask them! It doesn’t make sense to invest in advertising on social media platforms that your customers don’t use.
That being said, here are some policies that we share with our clients:
- Business and professional practice owners and top managers should all have a LinkedIn profile. This should be updated as responsibilities and jobs change. Maintaining an active LinkedIn presence is easy and can be done in just 30 minutes a week. Your agency should be able to advise you on the steps to do this.
- A Facebook business page is also valuable as it, along with your website, is a positive indicator that yours is an active business.
- All other platforms: Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, YouTube, or any other should only be engaged with if your customers look to that platform for information on what you sell.
A mistake we have seen is turning social media management over to a team member based on their age (young) or the amount of time they seem to spend looking at their phone during the day. Too often this results in an inconsistent posting schedule and content that may not represent your brand in the best possible light.
Examples Of Content Marketing Services
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience. Content can take many forms, including blog posts, videos, eBooks, infographics, webinars, and podcasts.
Key to a successful content marketing strategy is developing a content plan. Your agency should help you analyze your customer lists and segment them, defining the specific types of content and frequency of communication with each segment. The second step is to develop specific messaging and the format to be used. Then the agency should draft content for your review, and once approved develop the graphics and final formatting.
This process applies to both digitally distributed and traditional printed formats.
Content marketing is one of the longer term strategies for most businesses. It’s easy for the business owner or a team member to start content projects, but then other seemingly more urgent tasks become priorities and before long, the content program languishes. That’s one reason to engage an agency for this marketing channel. What seems initially like a small marketing activity can easily get overlooked.
Email Marketing
Those who say that email marketing is dead are very much mistaken! In terms of return on investment, email is still the highest ROI of any outbound marketing channel, and should be included in your mix of marketing channels.
Email marketing involves sending emails to a list of subscribers to promote your business. This could include newsletters, promotional offers, and updates about your products or services. Well-designed email marketing campaigns can foster customer loyalty and drive sales.
What gives email marketing a bad name is the huge volume of “spam” mail that is sent from promotional companies with minimal regard to whether the recipient actually signed up to receive email from them. Many of these senders will cross reference their subscriber lists, meaning they can send you more offers from different sources. As soon as you unsubscribe from one it seems like you get another from the company based on a “different list”.
To initiate a properly designed email strategy you will need an “auto-responder.” This is a software tool that allows you to load a series of emails that can be delivered over time to your list(s). This technology has become quite sophisticated in recent years in that you can transfer an individual to a new email sequence based on how they respond to what you have sent them.
Several auto-responders offer a free plan that allows for a limited number of contacts and emails. For between $25 and $100 a month there are many options that will accommodate lists of up to 5000 contacts.
In many cases a marketing agency may already offer an auto-responder service included in their monthly plan. If they do, an important question to ask is what their process for “warming up” any email addresses you might use for a campaign. This is a way to insure a higher deliverability as well as keep an important email address (like your personal business address) from being banned as a spam source.
How Much Do Digital Marketing Agencies Cost?
The cost of hiring a digital marketing agency varies depending on the specific services you require, the size of your business, and the agency’s expertise. Some agencies charge a flat fee for their services, while others bill per project or on an hourly basis.
The best approach to comparing agency costs is to first have a clear understanding of your business goals and the timeline you would like to achieve them in. Then schedule a discovery meeting with an agency and review these with them.
A reputable agency will take this information and ask you a lot of questions. Some of these should be related to the budget you have available for marketing, and the capacity your business has to take on new customers. This is so they can best prepare a proposal for you that will have the specific marketing channels they believe you will need to achieve your objectives. That proposal will include pricing information. Understand that if you choose any type of paid advertising campaign there will be a management fee that you pay to the agency and the cost of the actual ads, the “ad spend,” that is collected separately.
Is A Marketing Agency Better Than An In-House Marketing Team?
Whether a marketing agency is better than an in-house marketing team depends on your business’s unique needs and resources. Perhaps the best reason to retain an agency is that they will have a team with specialized expertise in a wide variety of services. Also, marketing is their full time focus, so staying current with trends and the latest software tools is mandatory for them. For a single monthly retainer you get access to a team of experts for less than the cost of having several in-house people doing the work.
An in-house team may have greater control over marketing strategies and can often respond more quickly to changes within the company. An agency will base their proposed price in part on the number of hours they expect to work on your business each month. There may be occasions when their response time is not as fast as you’d prefer.
For local and regional businesses and professional practices, the investment in an agency is typically less than trying to do everything in-house.
How Do I Hire A Marketing Firm?
When you have made the decision to retain a marketing firm, and have identified your marketing goals, it’s time to find agencies to consider. Here are some questions business owners frequently ask:
1. Should I limit my search to local companies only?
Probably not. If yours is a very specialized company offering a very unique product or service in your local market then a local company might make sense. However, for most business owners there is no reason to limit your choices. You want to work with the firm that offers you the best package of services, pricing, and representatives that understand your business goals and are committed to helping you achieve them.
One lesson from the Pandemic is that a Zoom meeting is a great way to get business done and allows us to meet “face to face” with people across the country.
2. Should I find an “industry specialist” for my marketing needs?
This is a common thought. “I’m a dentist, I need to find a marketing company that only works with dentists.” There are certainly many agencies with particular areas of expertise, and these should be on your list of potential candidates.
Consider this— an agency that only works with your business niche will be offering you the same program they have already implemented with one of your competitors. Even if you select an agency from another state, they will have their standard package for the type of business and not be as willing to customize a series of products for you.
Another reason to engage an agency who works with a variety of business types is the cross-pollination of ideas. Something that is working with roofing contractors may have application to a garage door company.
3. Once you’ve identified several agencies it’s time to do your research. Look at their own website and see how clearly they convey their value proposition. Check their reputation, and read testimonials or reviews from their clients. Don’t hesitate to ask for references or case studies.
4. Finally, meet with your top choices. This will give you a chance to ask specific questions about how they work, their experience in your industry, and how they measure success. This process will help you find the right marketing agency that aligns with your business needs and goals.
Overall, marketing agencies offer a wide variety of services that can help your business grow and succeed. From developing comprehensive marketing strategies to executing specific marketing campaigns, these agencies provide the expertise and resources to boost your brand visibility and increase sales. So, whether you’re a small business looking to expand or a large corporation needing to enhance your online presence, a marketing agency could be the solution you need.
Launched in 2003, Alchemy Consulting is a full service agency offering both digital and traditional marketing strategies. We have assembled a team of specialists that are able to quickly implement the specific products to help you achieve your business goals. You can learn more at www.thealchemyconsultinggroup.com or by calling toll free 877-978-2110.
