What Is a Marketing Agency: Implications and Choosing Guide for Your Small Business

As a small business, it's more important than ever to get your message out into a crowded world. We explain how a typical service marketing agency has changed in recent years, so that you can be sure to hire the right one.

As a small business, you may consider hiring a service marketing agency. It's a good solution because the only way you can grow and scale your enterprise is to double down on the bits that only you can do while outsourcing activities outside your core skill set. The cliché of the solopreneur wearing dozens of different hats only gets you so far, and some of those hats will always fit better than others – so you'll want to offload some of them early in your development.

But just as you will need to ensure minimum knowledge of things like management accounting to help you choose the right bookkeeping service that adds value and does not rip you off, you'll need to understand a bit about specialist marketing agencies before you can hire the right one.

You'll also need to appreciate how much marketing agencies have changed in recent years for a range of reasons. Then, you'll be in a position to evaluate and compare the best providers for you and your small business – and excitingly, this is no longer limited to those operating in your immediate area.

What is a marketing agency?

A marketing agency is a firm that offers marketing services to clients from different fields. Their main goal is to promote growth and increase the client's income by meeting their business goals.

Through effective marketing strategies for products and services, a marketing agency helps businesses boost their profits. By focusing on the client's target customer, the agency constantly refines digital marketing strategies. Their goal is to help the client reach their business objectives.

What services does the marketing agency offer?

Marketing agencies offer different services to businesses, both offline and online. If your business operates primarily online, collaborating with an online agency is often the most suitable choice – with no need to search for local options.

Online agencies typically provide online marketing services bundles to businesses and organizations of different sizes. They help clients develop and implement strategies to promote their products or services using digital channels such as websites, search engines, social media, email, and mobile apps. These services may include:

• Market research
• Marketing strategy
• SEO
• Public relations
• Content marketing
• Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
• Email marketing
• Social media marketing
• Web design and development
• Conversion rate optimization
• Analytics, etc.

As part of their craft, specialist marketing agencies will understand your market and business model, and have experience in identifying the right approach for you – this is important because of the fragmentation of the marketing mix and the many channels within which it now operates.

How to choose a marketing agency for a small business

Making the service marketing agency choice is important because, ideally, the relationship will be a lasting one that grows with your business, maturing the strategy over time and becoming more closely aligned with your success.

Firstly, you should define your goals. Know what you want to achieve – be it boosting your brand, increasing web traffic, or getting more leads. Also, decide on an affordable budget to prevent overspending.

The service marketing agency you will consider should take time to invest in qualifying you as a client and understanding your business goals. It might not be immediately obvious in terms of how you go from ‘sell more of our products/services' to a plan that involves elements such as raising awareness of your brand, segmenting your audience, and driving specific sales campaigns. As such, a responsible professional agency will know early whether your two businesses are a fit for one another in terms of skills alignment, culture, values, and collaboration approaches.

Next, ask business owners for advice or check catalogs with company listings. For example, if you're looking for an SEO-focused agency, SE Ranking offers an SEO agency catalog that aims at helping small businesses find the right SEO partner. As you have a list of agencies, explore their websites or listing entries to read the case studies and reviews.

Last but not least – ask your questions to ensure whether they deliver their promises and how open and honest they are in their responses.

How marketing agencies have changed recently

Advancements in the digital world have significantly transformed marketing agency methods and structures. Traditional strategies have evolved into a more integrated approach, seeking to deliver a consistent message across various channels. The goal is to center these strategies around the customer's needs.

This change in marketing dynamics also implies a structural shift within agencies. In the past, account managers typically interacted with clients, building relationships as the ‘face' of the agency, while the creative writers and art directors operated internally and were rarely seen by the client. Instead of account managers serving as the main link between clients and the agency, clients now often interact directly with the creative team. Account managers have taken on a coordinator role, linking various disciplines to achieve campaign goals.

Those niche experts may not be agency insiders either, but freelance consultants with unique expertise, working for a range of agencies and direct clients. The rise of the professional gig economy was already well established before the pandemic era, as the omnichannel world creates an array of micro-niches in which a marketing consultant can dominate and become the go-to person: in wedding planning on TikTok influencer engagement strategies, share-of-voice optimization tactics for coffee bean beverages in the South East Asian market, etc.

If you're a marketing generalist, then you're more likely to end up in a client-facing role, synthesizing these niche providers and knowing whom to call on for what job.

This leads to another significant change:

The rise of the virtual marketing agency

This evolution was again already well underway pre-pandemic because the nature of marketing agency expertise was a natural fit for the world of short-term contracts for multiple clients, delivered in a location-independent way.

While the specialized graphic designer delivering on a campaign brief may have been a digital nomad for years, the account manager still worked out of a ‘proper' office in a downtown central location until very recently. Even when working from home, they are equipped with sophisticated online collaboration tools.

The term 'virtual agency' may, therefore, be misleading. The transition does not impact the quality of the service delivered, despite what the 'virtual' description may imply. Such resilience and adaptability in service delivery may also indicate an equally flexible approach to managing industry changes. The survival of agencies during the worldwide pandemic lockdowns is a testament to this.

Evolving marketing agency structures

As a small business owner seeking the right marketing agency to hire, please don't be put off by the ‘virtual' description if you see it.

Teams who have learned to collaborate successfully on a distributed basis are resilient and effective, and also less hierarchical. If you're all operating in a Slack group together, there's nothing to stop you from pinging your assigned copywriter directly. Not to cut your account manager out of the loop, but just because you happen to both be online, you can get a quick answer immediately. It doesn't matter whether that copywriter is in the same city or continent – they're perfectly capable of dealing with a client directly.

Choosing a completely remote agency can be a budget-friendly option as they're rewarding consultants for their specific talents and hours only and don't have rent expenses. Your overall budget can go further with a remote marketing agency, resulting in a greater return on your marketing investment – though you might miss out on some benefits like business lunches.

A digital transformation of a marketing agency

A service marketing agency is increasingly becoming a technology broker. They craft bespoke software-as-a-service (SaaS) bundles for their clients, which they operate as managed service providers. They collaborate with specific partners to gain deep expertise – and obtain certifications to provide their clients with hassle-free onboarding and maximum ROI.

Briefly, you don't have to become an expert in HubSpot or ZOHO – you simply contract a marketing agency that will help you configure it to integrate with your Ringover phone system and other software tools.

As a small business owner planning to invest in SaaS through a service marketing agency, consider the licensing structures, tool complexity, and pricing models. It's crucial to read the fine print to ensure you're not overpaying for your tech stack compared to contracting each element directly.

Knowing what you're paying for and setting clear expectations can ensure that you use your marketing budget effectively to meet your business objectives.

Educating marketing agency customers

What is a marketing agency education process? Let's uncover this since keeping our agency's clients informed is essential to the marketing agency process. Their role involves teaching clients about current marketing hurdles, such as adapting to new digital platforms, understanding changing consumer behaviors, and keeping up with fast-evolving tech.

For example, new tools for targeted social media advertising and personalized marketing campaigns powered by AI can be used for audience connections and brand development. Understanding these possibilities encourages clients to explore new avenues for achieving their business goals – as well as equips them to anticipate potential issues and plan countermeasures.

Such education provided by agencies helps clients make informed decisions in sync with their business objectives. It fosters a productive relationship with the client where both parties understand how to navigate their challenges.

A data-driven approach to the marketing agency services

Marketing agencies now rely heavily on data-based strategies for their services. This is possible due to the vast amounts of data available, such as online behaviors, social media engagement, and buying patterns. These insights allow agencies to develop detailed profiles of different consumer groups and design marketing strategies that directly appeal to them.

Using a data-informed approach also helps optimize various aspects of marketing campaigns – from the content of the ads, and the platforms used, to the timing of their release. Combined with testing methods to find what works best and continually tweak their strategies, they can ensure maximum ROI for you.

Advanced analytics platforms are also used to measure the success of marketing efforts accurately. They track key metrics like conversion rates and the cost of gaining new customers to assess if a campaign is effective and make any necessary changes. Therefore, businesses should choose marketing agencies with a strong data infrastructure and a proven record of using data to drive success.