Want to invest more in your outbound or inbound marketing and drive more qualified leads, but don’t have the time or resources to do it? You might be considering hiring a marketing agency. But before you convince your team to get on board and take the leap, it’s important to know what exactly marketing agencies do.
You might think you know what marketing agencies do — ”Um…marketing, duh.” But what you may not realize is that there’s a lot more that goes into their processes and capabilities than you think.
Here’s the rundown.
What Does a Marketing Agency Do?
A marketing agency is a company that serves various clients in one or more areas of marketing, all in an effort to help them achieve their business goals. Most of a marketing agency’s functions can be placed into three fundamental categories:
- Identifying marketing opportunities that align with your business goals
- Executing marketing strategies and tactics
- Measuring and analyzing the performance of marketing strategies and tactics
And once they’ve completed those three stages, they’ll take a step back to reevaluate your business goals, then do it all over again — lathering, rinsing, and repeating to strategically drive your business forward.
What Services Do Marketing Agencies Offer?
Some marketing agencies offer just a few marketing specialties. For example, if you’d like to create a new logo, you may choose to hire a marketing agency that specializes in branding and design. Or if you’d like to film a series of product tutorials, you may opt for a marketing agency with a focus on video and video editing.
But here’s the thing — great marketing agencies employ a team of diverse experts that will help you with all the marketing goals, strategies, and tactics you’d like to accomplish. Because, let’s be honest, your business goals can’t be achieved with just one marketing tactic. And if they can, you may need to take another look at your goals and reach a little higher.
Marketing agencies don’t pigeonhole you into one service over another. Instead, they provide a robust skill set that allows you to come to them for whatever you need. You can trust them to execute whatever tasks are written in your marketing plan (more on that later!).
Just some of the marketing services agencies may offer include:
- Website design & development
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Paid media
- Content marketing
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
The Marketing Agency Process (Well, Ours At Least)
All great marketing agencies start with a marketing plan. This is a comprehensive document that outlines your business’s marketing strategy for the upcoming year. It includes all the elements of your marketing strategy, including your goals and each of the tactics you’ll use to achieve them.
At Evenbound, creating a marketing plan is a key component of the “Foundation” phase of our proven process. From there, we go on to our “Launch,” “Rhythm,” "Report," and “Optimize” phases — which all include steps for carrying out and evaluating the things written in your marketing plan.
Here’s a better overview of our process and its phases:
- Foundation - We’ll learn a little bit about who you are, as well as how and why you do what you do. Then, we’ll audit your website, industry, and competitors. With all of that information, we’ll write your marketing plan.
- Launch - We’ll set up the documents, systems, and platforms we need to execute on what’s written in your marketing plan. This could include things like conducting keyword research, developing buyer personas, brainstorming content strategy, and optimizing your website.
- Rhythm - We’ll get settled into a consistent rhythm (30-day), completing tasks that capitalize on your marketing goals. This could include blogs, SEO updates, social media posting, email marketing, and more.
- Reporting - We'll provide real-time data on how every element of your marketing plan is performing. Using a variety of tools and platforms (shoutout Google Analytics and HubSpot), we’ll check on KPIs to see how we can improve our strategy and maximize your conversions.
- Optimize - From those reports, we'll identify key opportunities for optimization, and we'll bake those strategies and tactics into our next 30-day cycle.
