Whether your business is just getting started, or you are well-established, marketing is vital and can have a huge effect on your ability to grow. There are many options when it comes to how to launch and support your marketing efforts, including having an internal marketing team. In addition to internal sourcing, you also have the option to hire a marketing agency. When it comes to agencies, you will quickly find there are many choices to finding the right agency for your company. To help, we’ve broken down three digital marketing agency options and how they typically operate.
Boutique Agency
When you see the word boutique, you may think of a small clothing store with distinct product offerings aimed at a specific type of person. You’d be right, but the term boutique can also cross over out of the fashion world into any business that offers a specialized service to a specific clientele.
With a boutique marketing agency, you can expect to work with a small team of extremely dedicated individuals. They will offer very personalized services and work very closely with each of their clients. It shouldn’t be difficult to get an update or know who you should contact if you have a question. They should also offer a very reasonable price point.
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Because of the size of a boutique firm, they are able to offer customized services to their clientele. They can work closely with you to understand your needs. Even if they offer predetermined packages, they may be more flexible than a large firm on customizing an offering.
When working with a boutique marketing agency, they may be able to dive deeper into your particular market and discover the best ways to reach your customers, especially if you both are local to the same geographic area. They are also able to pivot easily and keep up with trends in order to try excitingly innovative methods.
Full-Service Agency
A full-service marketing agency is exactly what it sounds like, they will have the ability to cover your marketing needs from top to bottom. They will be able to help with strategic planning to execution, they’ll offer creative services and analytics, SEO and advertising, email marketing and social media. If you are working with a full-service agency, you shouldn’t need to go anywhere else for any of your marketing needs.
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One of the greatest benefits of utilizing a full-service agency is the ability to employ a holistic approach to your marketing across all of your products and platforms. Full-service agencies are usually divided up by specialty, so typically a different department or individual will assist depending on which service you are utilizing at the moment. However, having them all under one roof can make it easier for them to coordinate and ensure a consistent message across all mediums and platforms vs. utilizing multiple niche agencies for different services.
If the most important thing to your company is to have a brand presence that is extremely consistent and accessible no matter where people come across it, a full-service marketing agency may be the best answer for you. Full-service agencies are typically best for companies that prefer not to have their own internal marketing department but wish to outsource everything.
Specialty or Niche Agency
The last of the digital marketing agency options is a specialty or niche marketing agency. These agencies are extremely skilled at either one specific type of marketing, such as advertising, PR, or design. They may even specialize reaching a distinct demographic, like Millennials, or how to optimize on a specific platform such as Facebook or Youtube. They will have one primary focus that they will be working on with all of their clients.
A specialty agency will be able to perform their specific function better than many agencies. They’ll have more experience and data in their area of expertise. However, the trade-off is that if you’d like to work with specialty agencies, you would need to work with more than one in order to fulfill all of your marketing requirements. One of the best ways to utilize a specialty agency is in combination with your internal marketing team or combined with a more full-service agency.
When it comes to selecting a digital marketing agency, it’s not a one size fits all. No matter where you are in your growth journey and marketing resource exploration, we’d love to hear from you! Request a Consult.