Do I Need a Marketing Agency or an Advertising Agency?

Should I hire a marketing agency or an advertising agency? And what the heck is the difference? Hi, my name is Jeff Harrison with the Local Voice and I wanted to bring this topic up because often there are times where people will contact me and they'll say, hey, do you run, do you run market, do you run ads? And the answer is yes, but that's not our primary focus. And I know that I'll get referrals from ad agencies who say I they really need a marketing agency and there is a difference. So I thought what I would do is I would just share a Google response. It's actually an AI generated Google response and said, hey, what's the difference? And if you see here, it says for local businesses, digital marketing agencies generally offer a broader range of services such as building brand presence, marketing products or services and boosting sales. While advertising agencies tend to focus more on advertising, advertising specific products, services or brands. Local digital marketing agencies can be particularly beneficial for businesses focused on regional markets offering personalized service, community.

Insights and cost effective strategies. So in essence, what they're saying is if you're hiring a digital marketing agency like Swing Point Media, the company that I own, then what that's going to do is it's going to allow us to have a broad range of things and we're really thinking longer term. And what I mean by this, I said, hey, if you want to have shade out on your yard, let's plant a tree and grow that tree. And then you'll have, once it's full, the shade will be there forever. But it takes time and usually we're talking about content marketing, in other words, content marketing. You're not familiar with it. It's pieces of like articles, blogs, videos, social media, podcast, yes, even emails are considered content marketing. Those are things that go out on a consistent basis that you're generating on a consistent basis and it builds awareness to your business. Let me give you an example.

If I were in a situation where I said, hey, my air conditioning is blowing warm air, why is that? So I go to Google and I type in, why is my air conditioning blowing warm air?

If I were an H Vac company, or I were, and I am a digital marketing company for H Vac industries, I would want to make sure to create a piece of content that answers that specific question. I would make sure I want to title that article that specifically like that. Now the only thing I might do to that is I would then localize it. And that's like I said, at the very bottom, we're more understanding of hate needs to be localized. So if I said, hey, why is my air conditioning blowing warm air in Palm Springs?

Well, now what happens is it's localized. That. And if that happens with somebody in Palm Springs, then the chances are they're going to see that article, read that article, find out what possibly is going on, and decide then, hey, should I call that company? Should I not, Can I try these things? And it still didn't get the. Still didn't get it working. And some of these things that you can DIY yourself, well, because they were so nice in providing this information, I'm going to follow up with them. I call it breadcrumbing. It's an opportunity to say, hey, these are some ideas. Let me give you some advice. And if it works, fantastic. If it doesn't, then you know who to call. But that will show up in search. This is an article. This is a, this is a piece of content. It could be you take that same article and you turn it into a video. And that video now is on YouTube. So now if I search YouTube for that same topic, guess what? The video is going to show up there.

And then I take that same video and I cut it up into little pieces and it's taking little segments of that video. We've all seen them. There's snippets are called reels, shorts. And I put it out on the social media. And now when people see that, does it convert people into buyers? No, I would say without hesitation the chances of that converting someone to be a buyer. No, but what it is, it will be a lead in. It's like giving someone your card at a business networking and you said hello and you just exchange very short conversations. And then the next time they needed something that you offered, they remember they had your card and they reached out to you. It's an intro and it's a lead in. Okay? So please, if you're doing this and you're saying, hey, I'm going to go all in on shorts, that's all I'm going to do. You might be frustrated now, unless, unless you are selling some items that we see like on platforms like on TikTok and Instagram.

You know, whatnot, Snapchat. And they're selling merchandise, they're selling shoes, they're selling jewelry, they're selling lipstick, there's whatever. But they're probably not selling local customer services or products like we're talking about here. So when you're doing this.

The marketing, every time we put one of these things together for you, every week. Let's say we do this every week for you and we create a blog post, we create a video, we create social media posts, we put it on all the platforms and we create an email to send to your database and we do that every week. Well, guess what, it's like compounding interest every time you add another piece of content, what happens? It compounds your visibility in the marketplace, it compounds your expertise at what you're doing, because it's not like you've only created one article and that's all you know about it. And it's also showing that you're an authority in that market or in that particular product or service. So it really helps with that. And just like adding one more branch or leaf to a tree, the next thing you know, you have this very protective canopy that anytime somebody asks about your information, you.

You'Re top of mind. And that's a lot of times what these other little short pieces will be. They'll be top of mind reminders. Emails, a lot of time are top of mind reminders. And by this, what I mean by, even though we get, for a lot of our clients, we're in that 40 to 60% open rate. Most people, industry standards are at 18 to 22%, but we have 40 to 60% open rate. That means 60 to 40% of their audience is not opening the email. But guess what, it's still doing its job because they're seeing it in their inbox. While they may not open it, guess what happens? Keeping them top of mind. Keeping them top of mind. We do this with one of our customers called desert barbecue cleaning. And they have a very high open rate. And 99% of their business comes from what? Email marketing. We send out something every week. It's very beneficial, very educational, a lot of fun. And their list continues to grow. Their business continues to grow. It's been around like 15 years and they're still cleaning barbecues. I'm not talking about these, I'm talking about built in barbecues. So that's a marketing agency. Let's talk about an advertising age for a second. Because it has a very specific role. Let's say I am. Let's, let's use my barbecue cleaning company. Okay. They want to add more names to the database because they recognize really the money is in the list. It's not in, it's not making so much content. It's really getting people on their day in their database. So the more people can get their database, the more they can share that content, which again, a lot of People don't think of that. They don't realize a distribution channel for the content, which is the email, is to send it out every week to your email marketing. Some people are like, well, you know, I feel uncomplicent in it every week. Are you. Are you kidding me? Send it out every week? Some people email me every day. Sometimes they get more than once a day. The people that I don't open stay top of mind. When I do open it, the timing is right and I read that article, but I may not open another one for, you know, three or four days or a week, but they're staying top of mind. I'm very familiar with them. I'm not deleting them, but an advertising agency. Let's again go back to my desert. My desert barbecue clean. I'm trying to build an audience. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to run a special. I'm going to run an ad, which is what we have going right now. If you went to their Facebook page, they have an ad going on right now where they're giving away one free cleaning for everybody who signs up. They're doing a drawing. It's worth $350 to have their barbecue cleaning done. So this is something that's ongoing to generate new leads into their inbox. Because we know that once they get into the inbox, the chances of them becoming a customer go way up. That's where they do their marketing. He's very specific about this. This is what we do. Another thing might be is let's say you're launching a product. Well, you don't have time because again, remember, content marketing is like growing a tree, putting one leaf on at a time as your content putting on there until eventually you have a very protective canopy giving you shade and protection from the elements. And it's constantly being seen. Like you can see your tree from a mile away. Like, oh, look at that big, huge tree. Oh, that's Swingpoint Media. Oh, that's whatever company it is. Right. So an ad agency will take that and say, let's do some. Let's run some ads right now. Give you per example, one of our doctors, we're doing a program for them called Low Testosterone for men over 40. And it's a free assessment. But the way to get it out there is to what put advertising dollars behind it. Now, simultaneously, we're also making content and putting on their website, we're also making videos, put it on their YouTube channel. But the idea is to get these people to What? Take that assessment, find out where they are. It's not something we're deciding, it's they get their score back and they say, oh geez, this is something I need, my score is really low or I'm in good shape, let's move on. We have a set up where guess what? They came into it. So this is a combo here. So they came in through the assessment, they took the assessment and let's say they are in that range where we say hey, there would be a good candidate. Well guess what happens, they get a report more detailed and then over the next 30 days we have 10 different emails going out to them that are what content. So we have a little bit of, a little bit of a combo there of saying let's run some ads to get some immediate attention and then if they're not going to make a decision right away to click the button for a free consult with a doctor, let's nurture them with more value that in that one to 10.

Emails they receive over 30 days that they'll then click the button and say, oh I want to, you know, it probably is time for me to make that appointment. I can turn my energy levels around, I can now build muscle again because my testosterone is low. These are things you can do now. We took it one more step and said, well what if we, for everyone who took the assessment, open up the emails but they still didn't sign up. What if we did a remarketing campaign or retargeting campaign to those people, those who gave them one more shot. Which quite frankly when you talk about advertising, it's the least expensive form of advertising because guess what, whatever platform you're on doesn't have to go out there and find these people. We already tell them who they are and now when they're, and we've all seen this, we open up our Gmail, all of a sudden there's an ad in there for testosterone or there's you're out, you know, you're looking on Google Search and you're reading, you know, the news of the day and all of a sudden going oh here's another ad for, for the low testosterone. What's the deal? And it's showing up just on their feed. It's not on, it's not, it's not on their wife's feed, it's on their feed. This is retargeting. So it's kind of the last way to convert these people into join it. So the difference between a marketing agency and an advertising agency, they can Work well together. That's why it says over here. When we first started, a digital marketing agency tends to do both where an advertising agency does one. So a marketing agency will tend to create content that will have a longer shelf life. If you watch my last podcast, we were talking about using podcast as a form of generating leads. And I was showing you some things where somebody's gotten like 700,000 views on a podcast video, video podcast that they did five years ago, or 444,000 views from a guy named Tom Perry or Tom Ferry, who is in the real estate industry, who did that about four years ago. So these things keep generating interest. It's like I said at the beginning, if I created a piece of content that said that answered the question, was titled why is my air conditioning blowing warm air? Well, does that only happen one time in the life cycle of a homeowner? No. People could search on that today, tomorrow, next year, five years from now. And would it be relevant? Sure. If it's not, if something changes in that process, we'll go back in there and we'll update that article, which then Google will award us because we've updated it. We had another situation like that with one of our clients, Lux Electric golf car. We first started with them in 2019. We started making articles and one of the biggest things that people ask is, you know, how long should I leave my golf cart plugged in? Should I leave it plugged in overnight? We said, well, that's a very highly searched term. There's a really low competition. Let's put something together for that. We put an article out, made a video. That article started getting consistently every month. Now, just to put this in context, the average local business owner, their website gets about 3 to 400 views a month. That would be really good. That's an average. Okay. When we first started Lux, it was just around 300 views. That one piece of content started, started creating new views, new viewers coming to the website, 1700, almost 1800 new unique viewers every month. And it did that continuously for three years. We only created the content one time. In that three year period.

Lux business grew exponentially. It grew so much that the owner of the company said, hey, it's time for me to sell. It's at the peak of his business, he was a little older, Everything was going great. He sold his business.

We're now back with Lux because we left after that separation and now we're back and we're building that content because the gentleman who took over their marketing, we not sure why he did this, but he built a brand new website and he took none of that content. Hundreds of articles, hundreds of videos, and he didn't transfer it to the new website. In other words, that new website had no authority, no expertise. It's like it didn't hardly exist. And their traffic, I'm not kidding you literally went to zero. Now it's back on the climb up, back on the climb up. That's what content can do for you. In fact, you should look this up. It says a blog on your website will increase your website traffic from one that doesn't by 55%. And guess what, those people who come to your website and read that article, do you think they're better or worse when it comes to quality of potential customers? Way up? Because guess what, they're already educated on what you do, how you do it, and also what else has happened because you have built.

Value in your product or service, there are less likely to be tire kickers or people who just have to negotiate and try to get you to cut, cut, cut before they buy. No, because they already see the value in what you've done. You spend time with them.

So here's the thing. Do you need a marketing agency or do you need an advertising agency, as the piece says? It says, well, depends. Depends on what you're doing. You might have additional marketing agency like Swing Point Media as an example who can do either one for you. We don't spend a tremendous amount of time doing ads because most of ours is evergreen, long form again, putting the leaves on the tree, making the canopy giving you great shade. We're mostly working on that. It does take time when people come aboard and say, I just had this conversation with somebody this morning and they said, well, you know, we need to get our business up. And I said, well, you know, I said, content marketing takes some time. I said, you know, three to six months. Like, I got a call over the weekend from one of my clients who we've been working with for about six months, and he was so excited. He said, my business has grown a lot. He said, We've added 35 new clients, which for his industry is a lot. And he said I had to hire another person. And he was, he said, thank you very much. Because the only thing he did differently was what we talked about in this podcast. We created content. Conversely, within the digital marketing agency that we own, we do have somebody who specializes in ads because there are times where we say, hey, somebody. Like I said, the assessment, the barbecue cleaning where we have to run some ads. Well, we don't want to, we don't want, we don't need them to go to another advertising agency just to run those ads. Conversely, if you're somebody who said, hey, I just love living in the ad world, I'm okay with that. Which, there's nothing wrong with it. Here's the one thing, and you probably know this if you're doing this, there's nothing wrong with advertising, but here's what you need to know. The moment you stop advertising, it's like turning water off from the faucet because there's nothing else out there that supports your message. In the market we live in, in the Coachella Valley in Palm Springs, California, there's a company called the General, and he has spent tons and tons of money on advertising and most of has been for brand awareness. And when we think about, even though now there are many other companies that, like I said in my last podcast, there's probably over 500 licensed, you know, plumbers in, in the Coachella Valley, at least.

We think of the General. Or there's a guy, he's an attorney, 760-777-7777. Walter Clark. He's done a great job of using paid advertising.

To build his brand.

If you went to his website, I'd say see if he has any content on there. Is he putting content on there that is answering these questions we're talking about that a marketing agency would do? I suspect he is. Same thing for the General. If not, they should be. Because what happens is, here's the thing. There comes a time with every one of my clients that there's a point where said we don't need to make any more content and the business is coming in, you don't need me anymore. Now, nine times out of ten, they continue to keep me because we're always doing this. We're making a podcast, we're doing whatever. But the relationship. There's not much more we can do. But what we can do is go back and make sure, like I said before, those articles are up to date, those videos are up to date. Do we need to look at something that, that is.

Let'S say, needs a title redone? Maybe it's updated like that one I showed you that, that in our last video that their, their title was of 2020. Well, that's a long time ago. We need to. No wonder nobody's watching that video because it's, it's something that needs to be updated. And, and 2020 was a long time ago. Now the other thing that we do, which is really kind of fun, is we use a product called Google Analytics. And then we also look at the YouTube analytics. And the reason we do that is because when we see something out of the ordinary, let's say we produce videos and we go to the YouTube channel and let's say their YouTube on average gets 150 views every time we put something out. Which again, we're local marketers, right? So we're not trying to get somebody worldwide. We don't care about somebody in Japan or Europe or something of that nature. We're saying, hey, this is our market. We want views and activity from our local market. So let's say it's averaging a hundred views, but then we see a piece of content blow up and maybe it gets 600 views. Well, we call that an outlier. And what we do with that is what do we do? We put some ads behind it and push it even harder. Maybe we actually rework a little bit and put an offer in there and run some ads behind it. That's the beauty of a digital marketing agency. Who does that versus just an ad agency. Because nine times out of 10, and I don't mean this in disrespect, an advertising age, I said they do specific ads. But what would happen is, let's say, would an advertising agency, they see an ad doing really well, they would say, hey, while we're doing this, let's create some nice content to support it. Probably not going to do it. They're just going to say, let's add some more money to the advertising dollars. Let's, let's up the budget and get more. Right? Once you're done, there's no net. You're on the high wire. When and when the music stops, you're way up in the air, but there's nothing down below you to catch you. Content is like that net. It keeps you bouncing back up. It keeps the market aware of who you are. All right, so today we're talking about.

Do I need a marketing agency or an advertising agency? Which one do I need? What's the difference and how do I know the difference? And then deciding, well, can I get one that'll do a hybrid? That's where you probably want a digital marketing agency. Reason I say digital marketing agency versus a marketing agency. A marketing agency will tend to do things non online. Like I'm talking about direct mail pieces.

Magazine things in magazines, newspaper, that type of stuff. We don't do that. Everything that Swing Point Media does is all digital. So anything in the on the Internet, that's what we do. Podcasting, live streaming, let's see blogs, videos, emails, websites, that type of thing. So if you need information again, I'm at Swingpoint Media. My name is Jeff Harrison and you've been with us on the local Voice and I just want to say thank you and if you have any questions, hey, hit me up. Go to Jeff wingpoint Media or send me an email at jeffingpoint Media and let me know. Let me just put that on the screen here. It's swingpump Media. Jeff swingpump Media. I'll be more than happy to entertain a conversation with you and see if I can help you decide in this case. Should I use a marketing agency? Am I the right digital marketing? She I may not be because, you know, if I try to be all things to everybody, I'm probably pretty mediocre at most of them. You want somebody says, I specialize in this, in this type of thing. I do local service based businesses. Okay. All right, well, have a great day. My name is Jeff Harrison. Please, if you like this, give it a five star. Share it with somebody who you think, hey, they could probably benefit from this episode. In the meantime, have a super week and I'll see you next week on the local Voice.