Marketing agencies (whether traditional or boutique) create strategies to improve the merchandising of goods and services of a particular brand. These strategies are conducted not only via ad campaigns but also by increasing the company’s visibility, the brand’s identity (branding) and by fostering flawless pre and post sale services.
Once you hire a marketing agency, expect them to analyze your brand and your competitors as well as identify your ideal target market. Once this is done, the agency can design a content strategy that suits your needs best, whether it is by putting together a website, creating social media and search engines advertising campaigns, or coming up with diverse graphic designs and audiovisual materials (likely a combination of all of the above), anything that can push your brand forward with your target audience.
The key is for the marketing agency to design strategies that while persuasive, are not intrusive. Basically, it’s not about just generating publicity around your brand but about successfully reaching your target market in a friendly and effective way. Strengthening your brand’s identity is a crucial step in that direction so that when your brand’s name or logo pops up in social media, customers feel confident about the quality behind your brand.
Some key services that digital marketing agencies offer are as follows:
- Improving the UX (user experience) on your website: by ensuring that navigation is easy, visually attractive and effective at showcasing your products and services, your website can fulfill its mission of presenting your brand in a favorable light, foster positive user experiences and consistently boost conversion rates to favorably impact your sale revenues.
- Boosting Web positioning: the content and the structure used to display said content on your website must be strategically designed to better suit search engine patterns. This is achieved by implementing a technique known as SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Embedding SEO on your website’s structure and content is crucial to facilitate that search engines like Google or Bing easily find information on your website which in turn can boost its positioning and rankings.
- Streamlining customer engagement and communication: maintaining an open and effective communication with customers (whether existing or potential) is key for every business. A marketing agency can help you foster interaction with your clients via the implementation of different tools such as forms or online chats on your website, or interaction strategies on your social media (to name just a few). The more you facilitate good quality communication with your customers, the better it is for brand positioning and loyalty which in turn should benefit your company’s bottom line.
- Creating advertising campaigns in Google and Social Media: the main drivers for these types of campaigns are designing powerful ads (attractive, engaging but not invasive) and identifying and paying in targeted search engines for the use of some strategic keywords that are relevant to your business activity. This is known as SEM (Search Engine Marketing).
WHAT IS A BOUTIQUE MARKETING AGENCY?
After reviewing what marketing agencies can do for you, let’s dive into what a boutique marketing agency is. A boutique agency is a small advertising firm that provides customized services to its clients.
As opposed to traditional agencies where an army of advisors take care of several different accounts at the same time, boutique agencies have a lean structure and everyone including top management gets involved in every project they take on. As a result, customers benefit from personalized attention and very short response times (which come in handy particularly when launching a new campaign or product).
By functioning as a smaller and highly dedicated team, boutique agencies usually offer more flexibility in their service and are prone to providing 24/7 access, an advantage that many big traditional agencies fail to offer.
Also, dedication to each project is often exclusive and therefore boutique agencies have a selected group of accounts. This structure allows them to take a comprehensive approach and to offer personalized services for each project. This is a clear contrast with traditional agencies that often apply similar strategies for their multiple accounts, with little service personalization if any at all.
WHAT TYPE OF MARKETING AGENCY IS BEST FOR YOU?
Using a marketing agency is clearly beneficial for your business, but what type is best for you? There is no definitive answer, it really depends on what your goals are. If you are just getting started with your business and what you need is basic digital marketing advice, maybe a traditional agency is a good answer.
But if you have a specialized product and you need out of the box solutions where you can count on a highly dedicated team ready to provide personalized service, a boutique marketing agency is a better fit for your needs.
