Marketing is one of the processes necessary to achieving business success. When you own a small business, your target market is likely unaware of your existence. Effective marketing can solve this problem and help you survive an ever-competitive business landscape.
If you don’t have enough resources to have an in-house marketing team, don’t worry. There are plenty of boutique marketing agencies that can offer bespoke marketing services specifically for small businesses. These agencies are a good option for small companies that don’t have the bandwidth for an in-house marketing team.
Why Hire a Marketing Agency?
Marketing is a complex process that involves a plethora of steps. As a business owner who has to juggle multiple responsibilities at once, it will be a challenge to handle marketing alone. For small businesses, it is best to have at least two experts to focus on marketing and ensure data-driven marketing campaigns deliver results. But even with an in-house team, marketing can get stressful and challenging.
Small businesses, therefore, should consider hiring a marketing agency. There are many benefits to working with the best marketing companies for small business, including:
1. Less Stress
If you are running your business alone or with a few experts by your side, handling all marketing activities in-house can get pretty stressful. You must balance daily market research, metrics tracking, and other aspects of your business.
By hiring a digital marketing company that caters to small businesses, you have one less thing to worry about. They can take the weight off your shoulders and ensure you reach your marketing goals while you concentrate on activities that will drive business growth.
2. Save Money
Saving money when hiring the best marketing companies for small businesses may sound counterintuitive. But it’s possible if you consider the cost of recruiting and training talents to handle different aspects of your marketing strategy. You can skip the recruitment process and related expenses by outsourcing marketing tasks to an agency. You may also be able to put off investing in tools, like a CRM system for small businesses.
3. Stay Up-to-Date
Small businesses may find it challenging to keep up with the new trends and updates in marketing. For example, search engine optimization (SEO) constantly changes, as does the Google algorithm. You need to stay updated with all these factors to ensure your target customers can easily find your website.
By hiring a marketing agency, you don’t need to spend your valuable time finding out about any trends and changes in marketing. Marketing agencies have a team of experts who are expected to stay updated with everything that’s going on in their industry.
4. Access to Valuable Tools
Modern marketing involves the use of a variety of tools and platforms to make the process seamless and easier. For example, Podium Text allows you to send SMS marketing messages by batch. However, these tools require an investment, which may not be doable for small businesses with limited resources.
By hiring the best marketing companies for small businesses, you don’t have to wait until you have enough budget to buy tools like CRM for SMS marketing. These companies invest in these tools to ensure their clients get the results they’re looking for.
5. Make More Money
Agencies work with multiple companies, which allows them to get a good grasp of the best media rates across marketing platforms. Access to this valuable insider knowledge is one of the main benefits of working with a marketing agency. Reliable and experienced marketing firms can help you implement the best marketing strategies that drive revenue.
6. Gain a Growth Partner
Lastly, a dependable and reputable marketing team can help your small business grow. These professionals deeply understand the marketing landscape and have helped many brands across industries to succeed. They can offer unbiased opinions, occasionally challenge your ideas, and give advice every step of your growth.
Types of Marketing Agencies
When you’re ready to outsource your marketing to an agency, one of the first things you need to determine is the type of agency you need. Here are some of the different types of marketing companies to choose from:
1. Traditional Agencies
Traditional agencies can help you with offline marketing. They are experts in offline or traditional media, like TV, radio, and print advertising. However, their reach is limited to the local market, which means it’s only ideal if you want to reach a specific group of individuals near your service area.
2. Digital Ad Agencies
Digital ad agencies, as the name implies, focus on all things digital. It is the type of marketing agency you need to find if you want to venture into the online marketing realm, like if you want to build a website, advertise on social media, and work with influencers.
3. Creative Boutiques
Creative boutiques usually specialize in designing or writing copy for marketing campaigns. Whether you want to redesign your ads or plan a rebrand project, this type of agency can help. It’s a good option for small businesses with tools and resources to monitor results in-house but don’t have creative staff.
4. Media Buying Agencies
In marketing, it’s essential to put your advertising materials in the right place so they reach the target audience. You can hire media-buying agencies if you struggle to find the best place to put your creative ad materials. These agencies know the most optimal channels for your advertisements. They also often have connections with networks, allowing you to get the best deals.
5. Full-service Agency
Full-service agencies usually offer a wide array of services in both traditional and digital marketing and the advertising aspects of a campaign. They can handle every step of a marketing campaign, from ideating and planning to management and measurement of results.
The 10 Best Marketing Agencies for a Small Business
To help you save time on searching for “digital marketing near me,” here are some of the best marketing companies for small businesses:
1. WebFX
WebFX offers comprehensive digital marketing solutions, from website copywriting to content creation, social media management, and search engine optimization. In terms of SEO, they offer local SEO, which is ideal if you want to increase local website traffic and market to local customers. They also provide Shopify optimization, Walmart advertising, and Facebook Marketplace optimization. They also incorporate automation tools in their processes, allowing you to get AI-driven insights.
WebFX services are geared specifically for small and medium-sized businesses. They offer businesses a dedicated account manager to make collaboration easy and more seamless.
In terms of pricing, WebFx may not be the cheapest in the market but it’s considered to be one of the most cost-effective. You can find the pricing on their website, so you don’t have to reach out to discover whether the services fit your budget. This transparency is one of the great things about the agency. If their fixed plans don’t meet your needs, they offer custom plans so you can choose which services to pay for.
2. Lyfe Marketing
Lyfe Marketing focuses on social media marketing. They’re a good option for small business owners who want to grow their presence on social media channels and run campaigns. This award-winning social media agency can help with content creation, social media ads like Facebook ads and Google ads, and other digital marketing activities. Their pricing is also relatively affordable for what they offer compared to other agencies.
3. Blu Mint
Blu Mint is another full-service digital marketing firm that helps businesses boost online brand awareness, conversion, and revenue. They offer SEO, paid advertising, email marketing, web design, and social media marketing services.
Blu Mint Digital takes their client’s vision for their marketing and then takes care of the rest. They create custom strategies for their clients based on their needs and goals. This is especially valuable for businesses working on shoestring budgets or those without enough manpower to run a marketing campaign onsite.
Their team is comprised of local and remote talents from different parts of the world, which gives you access to global and local marketing expertise. There’s no fixed service cost so interested businesses have to reach out to the company to get bespoke pricing.
4. Thrive
As a full-service digital marketing agency, Thrive also offers a wide range of services to its clients. But what makes them different from other full-service agencies is that they also specialize in eCommerce and Amazon marketing. These services make the agency a good option for small online store owners. They are also results-driven.
Like Blu Mint, Thrive does not have fixed pricing plans. You’ll have to reach out directly to the company so they can build a strategy to address your small business marketing needs and determine the total cost of services.
5. Straight North
Straight North offers the most essential digital marketing strategies, including website design and development, SEO, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. But the agency’s bread and butter are its comprehensive SEO and PPC services that come with a free audit offer. These services are also reasonably priced, with a PPC rate starting at $500 monthly.
In addition, Straight North offers creative and branding services. The agency’s creative team produces a wide range of traditional advertising materials, such as brochures and sales collateral pieces. You can also hire graphic design artists to refresh your logo or create something new.
These services make Straight North a good choice for small businesses starting their digital marketing journey or finalizing their brand identity. You can even consider them the best digital marketing agency for small businesses.
6. Ironpaper
Ironpaper is a digital marketing agency that provides marketing and sales solutions for B2B businesses focused on growth. The agency works with businesses to develop and implement numerous different strategies to get the leads and sales they need to expand. Their services include but are not limited to website design, content marketing, and lead generation.
One of the things that make this agency a good option for small businesses is that it’s a HubSpot Diamond Certified agency partner, and they can help you with HubSpot implementation.
The agency doesn’t advertise any pricing plans on its website, so prospects have to get in touch for a custom proposal.
7. Ignite Visibility
If your small business has franchises or storefronts in multiple locations and needs digital marketing assistance, Ignite Visibility is a good option. This agency offers multi-location franchise marketing solutions to help small businesses build an online presence in different service areas.
Ignite Visibility’s digital marketing services include website design, on-page and off-page marketing, and conversion rate optimization. You don’t have to pay for everything, as the agency customizes strategies for their clients. They will give you quotes based on what your business needs.
8. SEO Discovery
SEO Discover is a marketing agency that offers one of the most affordable individual services for small businesses and startups. They have the lowest starting prices and provide a custom plan if you need more than one solution. With the custom plan, you can avoid paying for services your business does not need at the moment.
Despite the affordable pricing, the agency has a comprehensive list of services. On the search engine marketing side alone, you can get link building, content, and website optimization, among other services. The agency is a good option if you want your small business website to appear on the first pages of the search engine results page.
In addition to SEO services, the agency also has wide-ranging internet marketing services. Like other agencies on this list, they provide web design services, content writing and marketing, and PPC. Aside from that, they offer reputation management services, app store marketing, and influencer marketing.
9. NinjaPromo
NinjaPromo is also a full-service marketing agency that offers multi-channel marketing services for small businesses in various industries. Their services include video production, influencer marketing, and community management among others. The agency also customizes marketing packages to match their client’s requirements and budgets.
In addition to offering tailored, strategic marketing plans, their suite of social media advertising services is worth mentioning. They specialize in social media advertising and use their knowledge to help small businesses implement effective and targeted campaigns on popular social media platforms.
10. Fiverr Pro
While Fiverr Pro isn’t an agency, it is still a great place to go if you’re looking for help with online marketing. Fiverr Pro is a step up from a standard Fiverr, a freelance platform. Whether you are looking for services for landing page design, landing page development, infographics creation, local SEO, or digital advertising, you’ll likely find an expert on this platform. All freelancers on this platform are highly rated and verified.
Since the marketing experts you’ll find on this platform are not under a company, their rates vary. But with many freelancers in Fiverr Pro, there’s a high chance of finding a digital marketing professional that fits your small business budget.
