Do all digital marketing companies do the same thing?

YouTube video (Phil Risher, Flash Consulting) explaining the different "layers" of digital marketing for local service businesses, contrasting basic execution (social posts, ads, websites, SEO) with deeper consultative work (analytics, reporting, strategy, ROI and year-over-year growth). The speaker argues many agencies deliver surface-level services while true value comes from integrating business reporting and focusing on measurable growth.
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In this video, we're going to discuss what makes a digital marketing company good, what is different than this digital marketing to that digital marketing, aside from just the price. And we're going to look at what it actually means for a return on investment perspective for your business, short term and long term. And so my name is Phil Risher. I'm the owner of Flash Consulting and we work with local service businesses to help them increase sales and keep their technician schedules full. And we're kind of a hybrid, we do digital marketing and consulting. And, and so we really partner with businesses as that consulting side of things to bridge the gap between technical digital marketing and small business. And I actually was the director of business development at an air duct cleaning company and I had a background in digital marketing. And I realized, wait a sec. Business owners need someone like us that can sit in the middle and tell them what needs to happen and then implement it into their small business. And so in this video, I'm going to go through what I found, areas of opportunity, what, what I see from a digital marketing perspective and the different layers into it. And so we're going to go through this, these layers here of digital marketing. And I've really, I actually made this because I was trying to articulate it in a meeting. And this really helps explain the different layers of digital marketing. So the first two up top are what you'll get the cookie cutter stuff that you'll get from most digital marketing companies. You'll get some type of like social media content creation, running ads, like Google Ads, Facebook ads, some type of content creation. And now there are variables between running different types of Google Ads. Not everyone can just do Google Ads. And they're all the same, with one caveat to that is that if you run Google Ads, Google Ads particularly are changing in that Google is using AI and saying, okay, let's put this copy here, let's put this copy here. You can't get as much copywriting juice as you used to. With that being said, there is still keyword research and a lot of things that go into it from an analytics perspective. But just at the top of digital marketing is social media content creation, running ads. Someone that's, you know, in high school can create Facebook posts and post them. It's not rocket science. There is more that goes into it on the back end. But just creating it, top layer, easy. The next layer, which is what usually people get into, is search engine optimization and website design. Search engine optimization. A lot of people say that they do this. There's two different Types, there's your off site SEO, which is if you're a small local service business, you have like Google business profile, you have your Yelp, you have Bing, you have your Facebook profile. This has nothing to do with your website search engine optimization, this is your off site SEO, which is a whole different strategy. And then the second one is your on site search engine optimization, which is like getting your keywords right, your headers, your title tags, your meta descriptions, everything clean on your website. So, so that in the search engine results page on Google you do show up two different strategies. A lot of people, they don't really articulate which ones do they that they do. They just say we do search engine optimization. And then the next one is website design. And there's a whole gamut of website design, right? You could spend $500 on a website, you could spend $50,000 on a website plus. And so in that spectrum, right, there's different platforms that can be built on WordPress, Shopify, Wix, GoDaddy, I mean there's a million different places. And then inside of your website design, is it custom design, is it theme based, is it built on elementor? There's a lot of different nuances inside of this, but all digital marketing companies do some variation of these. They have some type of web design component, they do some type of SEO, they do some type of social media content creation, they do that side of things. And a lot of times you as a business owner will be looking for someone to do digital marketing. And so you're going to go and find someone that does these and you might think this person does it better or this person does it just for these types of companies. So they probably do it better. These people charge this amount, right? It's all pretty much the same service. The next layer to this, which in my opinion is more the consultative side, which it's not necessarily just us that does this, there's a lot of digital marketing companies that do this. But this is the side that I think really distinguishes digital marketing companies against each other. The real comparative advantage between digital marketing is that taking it down to step further, which is your analytics, reporting and strategy, what this means is yes, anyone can create this stuff, anyone can put this on the Internet, but does it actually generate money for your business? Is there a return on investment? Are there actual analytics to show that what they are doing is working? More importantly, is there a strategy? Is there a method behind all of this? Or are they just doing whatever they think of that day, that week, that month, and so what A good digital marketing company should do is take this stuff that they're doing and use analytics and reporting to develop a strategy. And one of my big heartburns when I was at a duckling company was that this reporting tab is pretty much irrelevant to most digital marketing companies. They are never looking inside of your company's reports. They're not looking at your P and L or your revenue or your, or where your channels are coming from, or your lead conversion to jobs revenue. They might say, okay, well, what is your average transaction value? Which is good, But a company that could actually get into your CRM and pull reports and strategize on like, hey, these leads are coming in over here. It looks like this is working over here. And they're really getting into the nitty gritty. A lot of companies are missing the point and missing the ball on that. So that's the next layer. There are companies that do this and then the last one is, is what we are doing all this actually growing your business and showing a positive return on investment. And I will say that there are digital marketing companies that will emphasize this, but a lot of times they'll say like, what's your average transaction value? And then they'll try to just say like, okay, well, and we do this too for some clients that don't have the visibility. But when we might say like, hey, you got 20 leads. And so that should result in X amount of dollars if your transaction value is this. Ideally we want to get into your reporting and we want to look at all your data and we want to see like, are we actually growing and what's growing? One of the other big parts of this growth in ROI that a lot of people miss is year over year. So a really simple one that any digital marketing company do, but they don't is they can look at last November versus this November. How many, how many keywords do we have on position one? How many leads did we get last November versus this November from the website? What was our, what was our revenue number from. From our digital marketing campaigns from last November? This November is looking at your growth year over year because as business owners, we look at that, right, our year over year numbers. But as digital marketing companies, they don't necessarily care because they're just doing the work that you're requesting them to do. They, yeah, they want you to grow and they want this, but at the end of the day, they're just doing this stuff. And so that's really the layers of digital marketing and how the landscape works by all means for a lot of companies and you're just getting started, it's a lot less expensive. Just get someone to post on your Facebook, get someone to do some SEO for you and have like a basic website built. It's good to just start out, but if you're really trying to scale and grow your business and build a professional company, then you're going to want companies that are actually looking at the analytics, the reporting or strategizing with you about your business are actually focusing on growth and return on investment. Because if you have an emphasis on this stuff, anyone can really do this stuff and especially if they're using the analytics reporting strategy, they can take this data and put it back into this and it just keeps snowballing, getting better and better and better. So that's what we do for our clients. We do all this stuff. We have a team of people that works with companies and business, builds these systems and processes inside their business to ultimately generate a true return on investment. If you are interested in setting up a call with us, we'll put a link down below. If not, it's all good. 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