What Does a Marketing Firm Do?

After all, the reason why most business owners consider bringing in outside marketing help is to accelerate their growth—and knowing exactly what a marketing firm can do to push your business forward is the most important step to identifying the right marketing firm for your business.

What Marketing Firms Do

There are a number of ways a marketing firm can work with your business, largely dependent on your marketing budget and how hands-off you want to be with your marketing. Starting at more hands-on approaches for companies who want to keep marketing in-house or need to accommodate smaller budgets going up to the biggest, most-hands off ways of doing marketing, marketing firms can usually do the following things for your business:

Overarching Marketing Strategy

Marketing strategy consulting is perfect for businesses of any size, whether a small business handling most marketing tasks in-house or a multi-national company with countless working pieces. Marketing strategy is what sets a path forward for marketing tasks and ensures that marketing can achieve business goals. Marketing firms often develop marketing strategies as the first part of their marketing work with a client or perform marketing strategy consulting as a stand-alone service.

Marketing Training

For companies that want to handle marketing in-house, bringing in outside expertise from a marketing professional can help your marketing perform better and your marketing team better understand their role in your company’s success. Not all marketing firms provide training but those that do often provide it in tandem with marketing strategy consulting. Marketing training can take many forms but typically focuses on day-to-day tasks your marketing team needs to complete to drive your business growth, such as social media posting, blogging, email marketing, or creating and sending other marketing messages.

Website Design

All businesses need a website in today’s fast-paced world. Potential customers go online to find out about your company before anything else, whether it’s check out your website, looking at social media posts, or asking friends on Facebook for recommendations. Your website is the core of your marketing arsenal and so is the focus of many marketing firms today. Many marketing firms focus on building a web presence for your company by designing a website or cleaning up an existing one to align with your business goals.

Marketing Collateral

Similar to ad agencies, marketing agencies often create marketing collateral, or the materials used in marketing. In years past, marketing collateral focused on things like business cards, pamphlets, flyers, posters, door hangers, and lots of other printed collateral. Today, marketing collateral encompasses a lot more, ranging from social media profile branding to logos to images and videos for digital content. Marketing firms usually create marketing collateral for clients as part of their marketing work and creating collateral can be one of the core tasks a marketing firm can help your business with.

Digital Marketing Campaigns

Digital marketing focuses on marketing online, through social media, digital and social ads, SEO, SEM, and many other kinds of digital marketing. At Orsanna, digital marketing is our main focus and drives everything we do for our clients. We, like many other marketing firms, focus on individual campaigns for our clients with specific target goals, such as creating in-store lift for certain products or increasing specific KPIs for a business through digital marketing efforts.

Traditional Marketing and Media Campaigns

Traditional marketing and media campaigns have been around for decades, like billboards, radio and newspaper ads, mailers and more. While these might be considered “old fashioned” by many marketers, traditional marketing still has a place in modern marketing campaigns. Traditional media is often best used for awareness campaigns for new products, businesses, or services. A marketing firm works to secure placement in traditional media, create the marketing collateral, including billboard artwork, ad copy, or radio spots, and analyzes the results of the campaign.

On-Going Marketing Support

For companies looking for long-term marketing support, on-going marketing is often the best solution. On-going marketing incorporates multiple campaigns and often many different types of marketing integrated into a complete marketing package. Marketing firms that offer on-going support typically handle all marketing tasks on behalf of their clients, from writing social media updates to maintaining websites to helping determine business goals informed from marketing information. On-going marketing support is the most hands-off when it comes to marketing tasks and can provide your company expert support on the long-term.

Just because you have a smaller marketing budget doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from outsourcing some of your marketing tasks to a marketing firm. At Orsanna, we work with budgets of many shapes and sizes, tailoring our marketing approach to our clients’ needs and goals. First and foremost, if you’re looking to outsource your marketing to a firm, be sure to ask what the marketing firm can do for your business, rather than general advice or plans applicable to any business.

If you’d like to learn more about what we do for our clients, be sure to take a look at our portfolio. We offer free initial consultations to help you better understand how small business marketing services can help your business achieve your growth goals.