Learn What Agencies Should Offer Your Business This Year
When shopping for a marketing agency in Cleveland, you might be intimidated by all the different services you see online. Some marketing agencies offer select services, while others are a completely full-service firm. If you are already acquainted with general marketing strategies, this guide may not be anything new, but for companies in Cleveland thinking that 2025 is the year they want to budget out a marketing strategy with an agency, this will help guide you on what services you may be interested in and what services are essential.These are the things a marketing agency in Cleveland should be offering your business in 2025.
It’s important to note that the landscape of social media and trending video ideas are constantly changing. Younger audiences dictate what’s popular, and they jump from one fad to the next multiple times a year. It’s important for a marketing agency to have a handle on the social media landscape and to use modern tactics to navigate it. Some of the points on this list will be future-proof, some ideas will be malleable throughout the year. Make sure the agency you’re talking to has a grip on the trends and can change strategies to guide your marketing efforts in the right direction.
Why do you Need Cutting-Edge Marketing Services?
Social media trends aside, it’s important for a marketing agency to keep up with changes in functionality of services like Meta Business Suite, Google Business, Google Ads, and Customer Relationship Management systems like HubSpot and Constant Contact. These services are constantly changing with the advent of artificial intelligence, and the developers are continuously updating and adding features to them. Think of this like a marketing agency’s “research and development” where managing partners take time every day to read up on updates, trends, and new tools at their disposal.
The Cleveland market is extremely competitive for small businesses, so any leg up you can get from a marketing agency will help you stand out. Having a firm do research on keywords that are popular, rising in popularity, and applying the proper tags and hashtags is mildly monotonous, but it is a step for search engine optimization that cannot be skipped. A Cleveland agency should be putting resources towards gauging your position on social media sites and Google, and then adjusting strategies slightly week by week to try and win the game of cat and mouse that search engines have set up with their algorithms.
The 10 Services Every Company Needs
Everything on this list is important, but we have ordered this list in a way to put the biggest returns on investments first. A website will cost you a lot of money once, but running articles and blogs will take up a longer stretch of time and get more customers to see the website. Take the order of these services with a grain of salt but remember to make a checklist of what you have done and what your priorities are when looking to work with a marketing agency.
Local SEO
“Search Engine Optimization” or “SEO” is the name of the game these days. Ranking higher on Google, and to some extent Bing, is single-handedly the most important way to get new customers and clients. Cleveland marketing agencies should be putting a good amount of effort into SEO once the groundwork has been laid for your business (like website development, branding, and designing logos/icons). Local SEO is difficult in Cleveland because of the rich culture and deep environment we have in our city. Managing Google Business pages, Bing Places for Business, and creating high end content that registers in search queries is the way to do this. You can check out our blog all about SEO here.
Social Media Management and Advertising
Whether you like social media or not is irrelevant. Social media has become one of the main forces in advertising, and companies all over the world spend billions of dollars annually to become popular on social media. If you choose to have a marketing agency handle your search engine optimization and social media, those would be the two most important facets to get your business in front of potential customers. From crafting posts and newsletters to taking pictures and videos you, or they, have taken and posting them with effective tags and hashtags is the name of the game. Video is king on social media, and there will be a lot of uncertainty in the market since the US government is deciding to bad social media apps left and right if they aren’t American owned, so keep an eye out on that changing landscape. Social media requires a balance of quantity AND quality, so do not get concerned when some posts or videos do well or some posts do not, social media is very fickle.
Content Marketing and Blogging
Now after your search engine optimization and social media management are taken care of it’s time to look at marketing your website and those posts. High quality content will always be marketable, and if it is evergreen it’s even more valuable. Evergreen content is something that never goes out of style. Focusing on Cleveland will help you out immensely, and crafting blogs and posts to include the name “Cleveland” will get you to rank higher in search engines, and native search results in social media platforms. Sharing and tagging people on social media is a great way to pop up in users’ feeds, and reaching out to newspapers, journalists, or magazines and offering them your blog content as a free piece for them to run is another way to get eyes on your business, especially if those publishers are Cleveland based. Talk with your marketing agency about their strategies for content marketing and flush out topics for blogs and articles with them.
Website Design and Development
The reason website development isn’t higher up on the list is because the bulk of work for it will be done maybe once every two years in a redesign. SEO and blogging will become the largest players in your website’s updates. Of course, you will have pages and services updated as you will offer more services in the future, but the body of work will be done once, and then content marketing takes over. Website development and design is critical for a business, it’s usually the first thing people see after you rank high enough to pop up on Google after the SEO work. This is usually one of the first things an agency will develop for you, but if you already have your website designed and launched, they may gently refresh it and then focus their efforts on local Cleveland SEO.
Paid Media Advertising
The two big players in paid media advertising are Google Ads and Meta Business Suite. Every social media site and search engine will have the ability to run ads, but Google is the number one search engine by many orders of magnitude and Meta is the largest social media company on the planet. Focusing on these two should be the topic of conversation when talking about paid ads with your marketing agency. Gearing these paid ads towards Cleveland demographics and regions will be worth more of your time. Your agency should be recommending boosting posts, videos, and newsletters on Meta services like Facebook and Instagram, and they should be discussing topics and keywords you want to advertise on Google. Cleveland has so many businesses and organizations clamoring for the top sponsored position on Google, so you must approach these strategically.
Email Marketing Campaigns
The hardest part about building an email marketing campaign is getting the emails. There are many routes a marketing agency can use to gather them, but the most common is having a form for potential customers to fill out on your website to inquire about products or services. Services like Constant Contact can monitor who opens the emails, who clicks on the links, and who unsubscribed to your emails. A good Cleveland Marketing agency will use tools on social media to gather email addresses like offering a monthly prize in exchange for a like, share, and message with a user’s email. Talk to your local marketing firm and establish a good strategy for gathering emails, as crafting and sending the emails can be whittled down to a formulaic process.
Video Production and Marketing
Videos are king on the internet as of December 2024. Every social media site, website, and application on every smart phone has some kind of video function, video tutorial, or plethora of links to videos from all over the internet. Having a marketing agency that produces high quality videos with decent editing and fast turnaround time will put more eyes on your business than you can imagine. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even Reddit have all started showcasing video hosting, vertical short-form video services, and some even have their own in-app video editors with effects and tools. Some marketing agencies do not have this capability, but all of them will have contractors or know another agency to work with to supply high quality videos. Shameless plug, but you should check out our video production page here if you’re interested in video services a firm should provide.
Branding and Graphic Design
Almost every single Cleveland marketing agency will have an in-house graphic designer on their team. This is one of the more basic functions of a marketing agency, and Cleveland has so many unique and creative logos that it’s a must for any business looking to market themselves. Graphic design also works hand in hand with print advertisement and social media graphics. Your business may have programs, brochures, even business cards that you’d like to pass out to the public, and a graphic designer is the best avenue for an aesthetically pleasing print. Social media graphics are mostly done by graphic designers as well, as they are trained to match the branding guidelines, colors, fonts, and everything else to your company’s standards.
Analytics and Reporting
Pulling data from your campaigns, website traffic, and ROI is a very basic function of a marketing agency. There are some aspects to advertising and marketing that cannot be quantified, such as how many people saw your social media post and then went over to your YouTube channel and watched your videos, or how many people who saw your website and decided to follow you on Instagram. However, you should be getting reports on conversions from your Google Ad campaigns and Meta ad campaigns. These have a very straightforward ability to establish how much a conversion is worth, and how many potential customers saw an ad, clicked on the ad, and went to your website to learn more information.
Influencer and Community Marketing
Cleveland has a large influencer marketing community. Not surprisingly, many creators have obtained virality in Cleveland and have large audiences that they can advertise to. A local Cleveland marketing firm should have the capability to set up connections and deal with these influencers if their content is in the same industry as your own business. If you run a restaurant, it might be fruitful to start an ongoing contract with an influencer or content creator who reviews food regularly. Now, this bleeds into the other topic here, community marketing. In-person community building is harder to do, but the people who become interested in your business’ goals will stick around longer. Online community building will involve making a Facebook Group, building a Discord server for enthusiasts, and LinkedIn newsletters to reach all over Cleveland. Building connections with local communities can take some time, but you will ultimately have a cascade of loyal customers on the other end of that process.
Conclusion
Ultimately, you want a marketing firm that has experience marketing to Cleveland specifically. Look for a firm that has been established for some time in the greater Cleveland area and look at their portfolio. In the initial discovery meetings, make sure to have collected your thoughts and needs on what you desire out of working with a local agency. Transparent pricing is usually preferred, but some agencies will charge more for services outside their capability. If an agency must hire an outside company to film and edit videos they are going to charge for the overhead.
These 10 things are nearly essential for all marketing agencies to provide, but not every single agency around Cleveland will have video production equipment, website developers, graphic designers, and all the other necessary marketing experts needed so make sure to ask if these services will be in-house developers. We encourage you to reach out to your marketing agency and inquire about these services with your current marketing agency, or to mention them during the initial phases of speaking with a Cleveland marketing agency.
If you ever have any questions on Cleveland marketing, you can always reach out to us here at Acclaim with any questions. You can also visit our services page as we are a local full-service marketing agency in the heart of Cleveland itself.