You don’t have to take our word for it, but for most Central Florida businesses, hiring a marketing agency is a good bet.
It provides the opportunity to get concrete, sustainable results from digital marketing, all without the expense of recruiting a marketing director.
(In fact, you can retain the talent of an entire agency for less than half as much.)
With an agency on your side, you can be as involved in your digital marketing strategy as you want to be. You can also choose to stick with the things you’re best at. Either way, it’s up to your agency partners to prove value every single month.
Your digital marketing can run seamlessly in the background, delivering compounding results over time … if you choose the right agency.
For that, you need to look for “full service.”
There are plenty of so-called marketers willing to build you a website (usually from a cheap template) or make a few Facebook posts under your name. But until you have a complete digital marketing strategy, you’ll get limited and inconsistent results.
Digital marketing is like a toolbox. It’s usually not enough to master how a hammer works. You need to be able to apply all of the tools in the right way at the right time. Some of them will get used more than others, but many of them will have some role to play throughout your project.
So, what exactly does a full service agency do?
To say the best Central Florida marketing agencies “do it all” is too vague to wrap your head around – and it’s not exactly true, either. If you’re a local business, your best investment will be in search engine optimization, content marketing, and other digital mainstays … not, for instance, renting a billboard.
Nonetheless, a full service agency brings together the talent and capabilities you need to grow and scale your business. It all comes to the table, with no unexpected costs for outside talent, no licensing fees for software, and no additional training required.
Let’s zoom in on the most important elements of a full service marketing agency in Florida:
1. With a Full Service Agency, You Get a Complete Strategy
One of the big ways an agency adds value is by elevating the conversation from “tactics” to “strategy.”
Anyone can send out a few tweets. (It only takes a few minutes on Twitter to realize that “anyone” does.) But how do those tweets produce bottom line value? Most of the time, business owners jump into social media with both feet, only to realize they’re spending a lot of time for not much in return.
The same is true of many other individual tactics.
They can all work effectively, but few business leaders have the time, interest, or knowledge to get to that point. Likewise, every tactic has a use case. They’ll always need to be backed by a variety of other approaches that fill the gaps they leave behind.
That’s where a strategy comes in.
With a complete digital marketing strategy from a full service agency, your marketing campaign is laid down weeks or months in advance. There are still opportunities to review the data and refine it along the way, but the basic outlines are known. This helps ensure results remain consistent over time.
A basic strategy might include:
- Publishing two blog posts a week
- Promoting new posts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn
- Developing one video a week
- Incorporating calls-to-action into all existing content to start recruiting email subscribers
Anyone could sit down and do one of these things one time. But a marketing agency ties them together with a far-sighted vision and all the resources to achieve it. And a strategy doesn’t exist in a vacuum: It is based on your goals and the specific needs of the people you serve.
A successful engagement with a full service agency starts with your new agency partners learning about you and your business. Unlike a freelancer, who usually specializes in just one technique, an agency will foster deep knowledge about your challenges and opportunities, then customize a unique response.
Starting with your own insights, an agency helps you hone your digital brand and codify the things you already know, creating a detailed buyer persona. The buyer persona is a written representation of your ideal customer that acts as a North Star to “reality check” your future marketing campaigns.
As time goes on, personas get more detailed and new personas may be developed. All along the way, your marketing agency allies get better and better at communicating your brand value in your unique voice. A comprehensive and consistent approach is implied in every digital marketing strategy.
2. A Full Service Agency Uses Data to Your Advantage
The strategic perspective has another benefit: The ability to make use of all your data.
Data privacy is a pressing topic these days. You probably already know every visit to your website, social media, and more produces a huge amount of unique user data. That data can be used for good, to refine marketing and create products and services people will be genuinely excited about.
But how do you access all that data and bring its promise back down to Earth?
Lots of Central Florida business owners strive to do the right thing by having a website, creating some content, and even posting to social media. But many aren’t aware of the next step, connecting a data analytics suite like Google Analytics that surfaces visitor data for you.
Google Analytics is a free solution that gives you a look under the hood of your website.
It lets you see at a glance:
- How people actually arrive on your website
- Which page they start a website session on
- What they do next (and their whole journey)
A full service agency not only collects this data but makes use of it every single day. Like a high-powered team of detectives, your agency will examine the information provided by analytics and determine what hidden clues it has to offer. That takes plenty of experience and know-how.
Let’s look at a simple example.
A certain blog post on your website seems to be very popular, getting dozens of clicks a day. Since users know what the article is about before they click, it’s safe to say they have a real interest in the topic. But instead of learning more about your brand, they’re clicking away within just a few seconds.
The promise of your content is attracting attention, but the reality is falling short.
What gives?
This is just one of the many situations where professional marketers can act as problem-solvers on your behalf. It’s time to look deep at the content and structure of the page to discover exactly what’s wrong.
The answer might be:
- A technical problem on that specific page interfering with users who access the content
- A mismatch between the information the user wants and what’s currently on the page
- Lack of incentive to look elsewhere on the website for other potentially useful content
A full service agency not only can identify the problem at hand but also fix it. Over time, the consistent application of data means each element on the website becomes more useful, helpful, and effective at turning prospects into leads and leads into customers.
You can’t do that by “throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.”
In short, good marketing is scientific. And a scientific approach takes work.
Your marketing agency is there to provide it.
3. A Full Service Agency Proves Value Every Month
Starting from scratch, it takes about three months for a well-designed and well-executed digital marketing strategy to start bearing fruit. But that’s a major upgrade from hiring in-house. The recruitment process alone can take a year, with another year to get up to speed.
And no one ever said, “I’m looking forward to my marketing taking off in three years!”
With all the data at marketers’ fingertips, agency pros can see exactly what’s working (and what’s not working) within your entire digital marketing portfolio. While some methods need time to grow, others can safely be pruned back as customer feedback demonstrates they aren’t a good fit.
Marketing and advertising have often been thought of like a crapshoot – “you can never know” what part of your budget is being wasted. That’s not true in 2022. You’ll receive periodic updates showing exactly how your campaigns are performing, and they’ll be revised every month based on the lessons learned.
Without ROI, marketing is pure overhead. A reputable marketing agency stands behind its work and gives you all the information you need to make an informed decision. That compares favorably to the average freelancer, who may have plenty of excuses (or might just disappear when you need them.)
A full service agency will provide you with a clear, written contract. You’ll have goals to reach with associated milestones and service level agreements. There may be detours along the way, but on average, you should always be able to see that you’re moving toward the outcomes you want.
Only a full service agency can collect the data, act on it, and explain it clearly and effectively.
We know because that’s precisely what we’ve been doing for years.
Bringing It All Together: Define a Full Service Agency in a Nutshell
Combine all the pieces and you get a working definition of a full service agency:
A full service marketing agency is one that develops a complete marketing strategy for you and brings all the techniques, technology, and knowledge to execute that strategy under one roof. The agency gets to know your goals, needs, and customers and helps you develop an authentic brand based on them.
A full service agency is a partner that integrates seamlessly into your workflow while providing greater cost-effectiveness than an in-house hire and superior reliability compared to a freelancer. Experience means there is no “ramp up” time with a full service agency, and it uses data to get better and better.
A full service agency proves results every month and stands by you for as long as you deem fit.
You don’t have to go far to find a full service Central Florida marketing agency with proven results. Here at New York Ave, we’ve worked side by side with business owners to craft digital marketing strategies that make a difference – empowering them to grow and scale faster and better than ever.
Don’t wait one more day, let alone three years. Contact us today to find out more or get started.
