When a business needs help developing a new digital marketing plan or updating an existing plan, they often turn to a traditional advertising agency. Unfortunately, most traditional advertising agencies are tethered to outbound marketing practices and offer few inbound, digital marketing services. This may work for large, well-established brands, but for smaller companies and startups, this can be a recipe for disaster.

Before long, marketing managers discover holes in the strategy that can only be filled by interactive web design, social media experts, email workflows, content marketing, strategic SEO services, explainer videos, and other inbound marketing services. Pretty soon, businesses discover they’ve got one agency working on their website, another on their email campaign, and yet another developing content for their blog.

This fragmented approach to marketing can lead to disjointed messaging, fractured branding, mixed signals, and lost opportunities. There’s nothing more potentially damaging to your business than a scattered marketing plan that lacks cohesion. Choosing a full-service digital marketing agency, like Horton Group, a Nashville based inbound agency, can help your business develop a cohesive and wide-reaching digital marketing strategy and a robust online presence.

A full-service marketing agency can handle all the digital marketing, content creation, website development, and advertising aspects of your business. This typically includes strategic planning, branding, video production, content creation, web development, app development, inbound marketing services, and more.

What are the advantages of a full-service digital marketing agency?

Solutions-Focused Services

A truly full-service agency needs to be able to deliver a wide range of services. In an age where business are encouraged to find their niche and own it, it can be difficult to do everything and do everything well. But at the end of the day, a marketing agency needs to be focused on improving their partnered clients’ businesses by any means possible. For example, you wouldn’t want to work with an agency whose great an email marketing, but can’t help you design landing pages to promote in those emails. 

At Horton Group, our expertise breaks out into three main verticals: inbound marketing, website design, and custom development. For a complete list of our services, click here.

Teams With Varied Backgrounds and Experience

Knowing what to expect from your inbound agency is an important first step to finding the marketing partner your business needs. Look for an agency with a team of marketing professionals with varied backgrounds and years of experience in the advertising, marketing, and web development worlds.

The Horton Group team has members with experience in radio, public relations, teaching, video production, communications, marketing, graphic design, SEO, app development, coding, and journalism. Not to mention music (it is Nashville, after all), fashion design, nonprofit management, world travel, financial services, and real estate.

Open Collaboration and Communication Within the Team

With a full-service digital marketing agency, you’ll want a team that’s nimble and communicative. Let’s say you’ve approached Horton Group to develop a new website for your company and to create a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy. In this instance, you’ll want the person who’s developing your website to work collaboratively with the SEO expert, content writer, project manager, and designer to make sure that everything is in line with SEO best practices. This helps you achieve the best user experience (UX) possible. You’ll also want the social media manager to contribute to your long-range strategies and goals so your social is organically integrated into your overall marketing efforts. You’ll want the content team to understand your brand and audience and to work with the web developers, designers, and SEO experts to make sure that the content is easy to find, easy to read, informative, and engaging.

Together, these experts can collectively craft a digital marketing strategy that’s strong and seamless. At Horton, our entire team gathers regularly to discuss current projects, priorities and individual, daily strategy check-ins are the norm. We don’t work in silos. We work together.

The Ability to Keep it Local or Go Global

Most businesses don’t become a sensation overnight. It takes a lot of work and a lot of foresight. With that in mind, it’s important to find an agency that can focus on the areas where your business stands to gain the most traction and increase conversions. While traditional agencies are known for working with massive, global brands, working with a smaller, more agile full-service agency puts the focus on your local audience, so you can gain a following where it matters most: at home.

Here in Nashville, we’ve worked with Metro Nashville Public Schools to develop a website that Davidson county parents, teachers, and students can more readily access and get the content they need on a daily basis.

We’ve developed a website, conducted in-depth research, and created blog content and content offers for a new real estate development company, Canopy South Capital Management. All of this works together to help the business attract accredited investors from the Greater Nashville region.

We helped put a company headquartered in Nashville, Kenny Pipe & Supply, on the national map with a new, mobile-responsive website.

Because inbound agencies such as ours start at the local level and build up, we understand the importance of finding your target audience and marketing to them. The importance of services such as citations and listings, SEO, and Google AdWords can’t be overlooked. Each of these services helps our clients reach a local audience, paving the way for developing a larger, broader reach.

Fresh Perspectives

Full-services agencies like ours often manage a diverse and wide-ranging portfolio of clients. We have the background to gain insights, inspirations, and ideas from a variety of sources and experiences. The insights we’ve gained from our roster of clients can be used to help you grow your business. What we’ve learned from for-profit industries we’ve applied to fledgling nonprofits and what we’ve learned from nonprofits, we’ve applied to well-established for-profit clients. At Horton, we’re always growing and we’re always innovating. Unlike niche agencies, our scope is broad and flexible.

We’re greater than the sum of our parts. We take our varied perspectives and expertise and put them to use for you by brainstorming ideas and challenging the status quo. It’s our goal to achieve the best ROI on your marketing efforts as possible.

Comprehensive Analytics

When you work with a full-service agency, they’re seeing a bigger picture. They see the full scope of your business and your enterprise’s needs. A full-service agency can analyze your entire marketing picture from visitor to delighted customer and everything in between. Agencies that partner with HubSpot, for example, can offer a wide range of tools and analytics to their clients.

Whether you’re looking to develop a comprehensive marketing strategy, retool your existing plan, or add a few new digital services to your arsenal, Horton Group can help.

A version of this post first appeared on August 31st, 2017. It has been updated to reflect current trends and emerging strategies.