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INTRODUCTION

Are you a business owner looking for a marketing agency but don’t know how to prepare? This is often a concern by many of our onboarding clients!

 There are many benefits of marketing agencies no matter the size, age, or industry of your business! However, there are also many options and characteristics to factor into the answer of what kind of marketing agency is right for you!

Today we will address what you need to know for your business and businesses needs before hiring a marketing agency! This will help you prepare for the search to find the best agency for you as well as help the agency see your marketing goals and it will help them better navigate how to accomplish that!

Individual Business Plan

Although you may have an everlasting list of questions, comments, and concerns for your potential marketing agency, it is important that you have a list of to-do’s for you and your business to better prepare yourself and your business for what is to come. 

Before you go searching for a marketing agency, have a look at some of the things that you want for your business. 

Listed below are some of the questions that you should answer for yourself

1. Game Plan
    • The first thing that you should do is to have marketing goals.
        ◦ This goal should maintain things such as-
I would like to acquire new customers,  generate high quality leads, increase brand awareness, establish industry authority, increase brand awareness, and increase revenue. 

    • This step is important because they give insight on what you want and the outcome to expect. Once you have this, it will be easier to find a marketing agency that offers services for your needs.

2. Price Range
    • Once you have the marketing goals that you would like to achieve, you need to have a budget. 
        ◦ What are you wanting to spend monthly on your marketing costs?
            ▪ This cost typically varies on the amount of  services that your business needs, the time frame that you are giving for completion, or other variable factors.
            ▪ The price range cost could be a fixed amount monthly for a range of services or this cost could be a Pay-Per-Click which is when an online advertising model runs ads on a platform such as Google. You will pay a fee every time someone clicks on your ad.

3. Who Is My Audience?
    • Who are you trying to reach? Your marketing services will focus on targeting prospective customers so therefore this is a very important step.
    • Knowing who your target audience is will help your marketing agency create a marketing solution that is proven to help you in your specific situation. 

4. Services Agencies Provide
    • What do you want? No, seriously. Are you looking for a one-stop solution for all of your marketing needs, or just one or two marketing services?
 You need to have an idea of the marketing services that you would like. Do you need one person to brand your SEO, or do you need web design and development, branding, SEO, Content, Social Media Marketing, and more.

This is important because the services that you want might not be offered by the marketing agency that you would like to have.

    • Different types of marketing agencies include;
1. Full service agencies (also known as integrated agencies)
    • Offer a complete range of services across all media and markets 
    • Full service agencies handle any and all of your needs including marketing, advertising, strategic planning, promotional marketing, and more.
    • They often use multiple tactics to get your marketing goals more efficiently creating consistency and predictability. 
2. Specialized Agencies (also known as creative agencies)
    • Specialized agencies are creative professionals that offer creative design services.
    • Typically, they do not offer strategic planning or technology services (website or app development).
    • Each specialist focuses solely on the area of expertise that they specialize in such as SEO, branding, photography, email marketing, and analytics.

5. Long-Term or Short-term
    • Before you decide on which marketing strategy you would like to go with, think about time.
    • Are your marketing goals long-term or short-term? 
        ◦ Short-term marketing goals would be the quick wins for your business. These efforts try to manage these tools by days, weeks, or even months. 
            ▪ Short term goals would be a promotion that could be an in store event or sale, or a promotion event on social media. 
            ▪ Typically, marketing agents are short-term.
        ◦ Long-term goals would be the goals accomplished through an extended period of time. These strategies typically take six months to a year to achieve the desired results.
            ▪ Long-term goals are Search Engine Optimization (SEO), content creation, and social media content. All of these tactics take a few months to generate your website traffic.
            ▪ Full-service marketing agencies help you achieve your long-term goals.

Most small, local businesses prefer full service agencies for a few reasons

1. Cheaper 
    • Like anywhere else, full service agencies offer bundles. Typically, you pay less for a packaged deal than you would for multiple individual services.
    • When you have a specialist, typically it can be hard to just stick to one agent. Most of the time you have to recruit multiple agents to cover the work that needs to be done. This can result in more costs and manageability 
2. Easier To Manage
    • Having one agency can be hard, let alone three or four. When you use a full service agency, they have all of your marketing under one platform.
    • This also applies for billing. You can have a clear estimate on your general monthly costs which will help you have a better understanding of your monthly business expenses.
3. Communication
    • Communication and results tend to be better with full service agencies. This is simply because they see the full vision that you are trying to achieve! Since full service agencies make a strategic plan, they have an efficient way to get there.
    • Specialist agencies can tend to produce less cohesive work - this is because multiple specialists are working separately to achieve what they believe is your goal. There is no teamwork to make a specified result. 

Stradigi would love to help assist you with your marketing needs. To find out more information, contact us today!