February 2017 | Epic Marketing

To Hire Full-Service, Specialist or go In-House?

The hardest questions in life are often deciding between good and good. While we acknowledge that there’s no “one-size-fits-all” answer to this question, we’re going to focus on the benefits of a full-service solution.

In a nutshell, a full-service advertising agency works best when the various elements of a business are leveraged and synergized to help with one another. At Epic Marketing in Utah, we’ve spent the previous 12 years perfecting how we utilize every resource in every relevant department.

If you’re here because you’re not convinced of the advantages of a full-service solution then I’d like you to imagine the following statements as true or false questions:

•Your social strategy can be leveraged to boost your SEO and PPC campaigns.
•Your print and direct mail campaigns can work in tandem to enhance your web design or email marketing campaigns.
•Your web analytics can reveal in deeper granularity who your demographic is and which campaigns should target which audience.

Even if you think just one of these statements is false, wouldn’t you like your Utah advertising agency to believe they’re true?

Experts Who Advocate For Full-Service Ad Agencies

Gerald Vinci, Owner of Vinci Designs LLC –

“[Agencies] do not diversify their service offerings enough to meet the needs of their customers. This is a problem for most agencies who remain extremely one-dimensional…If we offer only the bare essentials they are forced to hire multiple vendors to complete the project and no customer wants to add more work and frustration to their plate.

Gina Rodriguez, Digital Marketing Specialist at Keenability –

“[A full-service agency] benefits the client in the long term since they are able to have fewer account managers and people to email…Not only does it make it easier for the client, but also for the agency — especially if the agency manages the website as the SEO team, social media manager and content writer all need to work in sync with one another to be successful.”

Mark Mulhern, President of Digital Marketing at iCrossing (east region) –

“In the beginning, digital was new and separate and a different set of skills that needed to be addressed by specialists,” he said. “But now fast forward to 2017 and…everything is happening…in the digital funnel and there is real value in a client having one partner who understands every phase of that.”

Advertising By the Numbers

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According to Statista, The US has, by a long shot, the largest advertising market in the world. In 2015, approximately 190 billion U.S. dollars were spent on advertising in the United States. This figure is more than double the amount spent on advertising in China.

It’s projected that by 2018 the United States will collectively be investing approximately $220,000,000,000 into media-based advertising. This is a near 40% increase since 2011.

To every advertiser’s misfortune, this massive increase in advertising spend comes bearing gifts:

An increasingly saturated market
A more competitive landscape

These two misfortunes work together to make your advertising campaigns more difficult, so shouldn’t you have every medium, campaign, and individual working together as well?

What You Won’t Find Elsewhere

Whether you’re an enterprise level business, or a brick and mortar store, we’ve got a collection of definitive conclusions as to why full-service is almost always the right solution for your business. Here are just a few.

1. No One’s Playing Favorites

“If the only tool that you have is a hammer, the solution to every problem is banging on a nail.”
– Mike Teasdale, Planning Director of Harvest

There’s one thing every agency has in common: they want to retain your business. With this objective in mind, a full-service agency has the capacity to be impartial towards services and partisan toward results. They’re interested in providing you with a solution that works so they can retain you as a client.

Because full-service agencies aren’t pigeonholed in just SEO or just public relations they can diagnose the best solution(s) to cure your advertising or marketing ills.

2. Go on a Date Before You Agree to a Relationship

With a full-service agency, you can utilize one service or all of them. You have the option to try SEO before deciding if you want social media services, or web development before you pull the trigger on media buying.

Specialty services put a lot of bearing on their sales or growth teams to structure their contracts over the course of 6 months or a year. The commitment you might already be unsure of comes with even bigger dollar signs.

Here, our clients are billed month to month and pay for services on a needs basis. This is the kind of autonomy that keeps our clients coming back for second and third dates. They stay with us because they want to, not because we’ve forced them.

3. Marketing Monogamy

This is where your personal preference will determine which solution is right for you. With every agency, every 3rd party product or service, there also comes a new relationship. Deciding what services you need and how you’d like to manage them will determine which model will be right for you.

FULL-SERVICE ad agency MODEL

SPECIALTY OPTION

The full-service model is meant to reduce and optimize:

•Cost: Full-service agencies almost always have flexible pricing models that principle their costs around “The more you bundle, the more you save.”

•Talk Time: With a full-service agency you are empowered to be as involved as much or as little as you’d like. Because you’re managing one relationship as opposed to several, you have more time to devote to your full-service agency or other projects on your to-do list.

•Reporting: At Epic Marketing, we consolidate everything you need to know about all your services into one report. After approximately 12 years (144 months of reporting) we’ve left behind the vanity metrics and focus on reporting KPIs that matter to your business.

As a Full-Service Advertising Agency in Utah, We Handle:

Research/Analysis
Strategy
Media Placement/Buying
Creative
TV
Video Production & Editing
Print
Mailers
Billboards
Radio
Online Marketing
Direct Mail
Pay Per Click
Search Engine Optimization
Graphic Design
Web Development
Social Media
Campaign Development
Campaign Tracking Tools
Brand Identity
Production/Printing
Public Relations
Script Writing
Copywriting

We can effectively run any or all of these categories. We do so with our complete in-house team. This allows for consistent messaging, plus it’s less stressful, much easier and economical for business owners.

We help our clients plan, build, and maintain every aspect of their marketing and we can handle all of your advertising needs. We stand out from other ad agencies by functioning as an extension of our client’s staff, acting as their marketing arm at a fraction of the cost of a full-time marketing specialist or hiring a team of other agencies.

See how we can help you reach your advertising and marketing goals.

What is it that makes a good ad? Is it the pictures/video? Is it what is written or said? Is it the creative elements that cause you to feel something after you have been exposed to it?

We believe that a good ad is one that is written and designed to emotionally connect with its target audience. Once connected, your ad’s rhetoric strongly persuades its consumer to want the product or service. The individual recognizes a need for it and feels a sense of urgency until the purchase is made.

Nonetheless, this is all easier said than done. When you’re competing for ad space in 2017 there’s little vacancy for mediocrity. Anything short of disruptive or highly targeted ends up falling short. Here are some ad related statistics that will acquaint you with the advertising industry of today–

-In 2015, digital ad blocking grew globally by 41%.

-Approximately 90% of TV viewers report, “always skipping” ads on DVR.

–Adobe reports that only 8% of people pay attention to online ads, 16% for radio ads and 14% for billboards. Ads in apps and games bottomed-out at 5%.

There are a wide range of ad styles and each are appropriate depending on the product or service that is being offered. With that in mind, here are some things that, if done correctly, will improve the quality and response to your next ad:

Compelling Hi-Res Visuals

After experimenting with the effectiveness of online imagery, Dan Zarrella of Hubspot, reported that, “[A] 37% increase in engagement [was] experienced when Facebook posts include[d] photographs.”

Visuals are one of the first things people look at when viewing an advertisement. In advertising, the old adage, “a picture is worth a thousand words” really fits. For example, you can probably think of some advertisements you’ve seen that are mainly just an image with little text. The ad visual should complement the ad headline, copy, and overall message.

Take a look at how we optimized images and responsiveness for a client website to increase web form conversions by 550%.

Effective Headline

Without question, digital advertisers are in the business of capturing attention. Though you may have put hours, weeks or even months into prepping the content that’s behind the click, your headline is what must compel them to do so.

In regards to the average Google searcher, Forbes reports, “it now takes people on average about eight or nine seconds to find the result they want.”

Moz also reports, “80% of readers never make it past the headline.”

We naturally search the internet with impulsiveness and impatience. When it comes to search engines, we’re anxious to get from A to B as fast as possible. We reserve our consciousness and focus for our destination and not the journey. So it would make sense that we ought to create headlines that cater to our naturally click-happy audience.

Because headlines are implicitly the first thing your viewer pays attention to, your headline should be attention-grabbing but should also encompass the overall message in a short sentence. Headlines can be thought-provoking, strictly informative, humorous, etc., but effective headlines have one thing in common: they all leave their reader wanting more.

Well-written Copy

If your headline and visuals have been effective enough to keep viewers reading, well-written copy will be the next aspect of your ad that will compel viewers to take action. If Moz’s report about 80% of users never making it past the headline is true, that means, if we read between the lines, 20% of users do make it past the headline.

So what now? Ad copy should be creative, concise and easy to read but also have compelling and relevant content. Avoid using jargon or excessive information that doesn’t contribute directly to the overall message of the advertisement.

Calls the Viewer to Action

Without a strong call to action, your advertisement probably won’t get the results you’re expecting it to. A call to action is defined as something in the ad that gives them an incentive to call or contact you now. Your ad’s call to action should be well thought out and defined. Make sure that your contact information is clearly visible and not surrounded by clutter. Though you may feel it’s important that your visitors become informed, have a positive branding experience with your company or visit a high number of pages, remember you ultimately created your ad so people can convert.

See how we helped a new york city client achieve 386 unique first-time callers in a single month.

Here are some key factors to consider when crafting your CTA-

– More than 90% of visitors who read your headline also read your CTA copy.

– Making CTAs look like buttons created a 45% boost in clicks for Create Debate.

– Emails with a single call-to-action increased clicks 371% and sales 1617%.

Overall, great advertisements connect to their audience and provide memorable, informative, and compelling content that get viewers respond to the call to action. Need help creating great ads? Contact Epic Marketing to find out how we can successfully boost your digital marketing campaign with great ads.