Why a Full-Service Marketing Agency is the Smartest Investment for Your Cleveland Business in 2025

Cleveland businesses face more competition than ever in 2025. With large sweeping economic legislation, new tariffs, and an ever-growing number of businesses to compete with, it can be hard to keep up with social media, your website, or your email campaigns. Juggling these responsibilities and keeping your business running at one hundred percent is a monumental task for any business, let alone in a large city like Cleveland. Working with a local marketing agency is the smartest investment you could make in 2025; you can lessen your responsibilities, earn rapport with the communities you serve, and focus on your customers before anything else.

A full-service marketing agency does exactly what it is called, it services a business fully. They usually offer a streamlined approach that is results-driven, and can offer things like video production, social media management, public relations, and graphic design. Saving you time by cutting out the search for, and paying, external contractors for each of these facets. A full-service marketing agency will have dedicated specialists that can all work together to create a tailor-made marketing campaign to promote your business. An investment in your marketing will be the smartest move you could make for your Cleveland business in 2025.

Exactly how it sounds, a full-service marketing agency handles everything in your marketing plan. Here is a brief list of the most common services offered:

• Branding
• Strategy
• Content Creation
• Ads
• Search Engine Optimization
• Website Development
• Video Production
• Graphic Design
• Public Relations

Usually, a full-service marketing agency will have dedicated people hired to handle specific jobs. They will have a dedicated videographer that comes out to film interviews, or a dedicated graphic artist who creates your logo, or a dedicated copywriter to write your blogs. That compartmentalization is a wonderful attribute of full-service agencies. Some Marketing firms in Cleveland will hire out those niche jobs for other companies and pass the cost onto you, but not a full-service marketing agency. They will put you on a retainer and allocate hours to whichever area of expertise you need, saving you money and allowing you to prioritize projects.

Some companies choose to hire and contract out to specialized studios. For example, a fully-fledged video production company is going to create much larger video projects, but it will be extremely expensive. A full-service marketing agency will have a few people assigned to only videography and video editing, they will be more flexible, and at the end of the day if the project you are looking to create is beyond their scope they will hire a few specialists to work with their dedicated team members at a fraction of the cost. Contracting separate studios is hard to manage because of the amount of oversight you will have to do. If you have a company for building your website, a company for creating your new logo, and yet another company who is writing your press releases. That is three different sets of companies, names, and projects to remember. With a full-service agency here in Cleveland, you can have one meeting a month and run through everything and the agency will remind you in subsequent emails throughout the month.

Lastly, a full-service marketing agency will have a consistent brand message across all its workers. The website developer has access to the graphic artist’s files and guidelines. The video Editor has access to the copywriter’s works for voiceovers or verbiage. Communicating between multiple contractors can get convoluted. They also have more efficient execution over private contractors, as internal communications and meetings happen between coworkers who see each other every day, versus you, the Cleveland business, coordinating email chains and zoom calls.

Having a single dedicated team to work on projects is a bigger benefactor than businesses realize. A single organization that can coordinate and collaborate has a much more cohesive strategy that is flushed out internally. They will all be working towards one vision and collectively discussing strategy and branding together as a unit. This also avoids disjointed messaging and will consolidate all the information under one roof.

Digital marketing has many different facets, and specialty agencies may be able to do one particularly well, but a full marketing agency working together will be able to ensure efficiency in a long-term project. A website development agency might not have a robust search engine optimization package, while a video production agency might not have the capabilities to run all your social media posts for those videos. These agencies will hire out contractors for a fee or, worse, your business will have to coordinate with multiple agencies to get the job done.

Full-service marketing agencies also tend to share current trends and give advice to each other that would be lacking in specialized agencies. A social media manager on the team might see trendy viral videos that the video team might have missed. The public relations person might catch something in a blog that could be overlooked by a copywriter. Close collaboration ensures less mistakes, this saves money and time for you, the client.

Lastly, the scalability of a full-service agency is flexible. If you start a marketing campaign to increase the search engine optimization of your website, but later you decide to pursue a social media campaign, a full-service marketing agency will have a dedicated person. Next month you might want to have some interviews with your CEO for an investor’s meeting, they have a guy for that. Next year you’re thinking of redoing your logo and want a new Google ad campaign, they have a guy for that. This is why working with a full-service marketing agency in 2025 will be the best investment you can make.

Taking the time to look at a marketing agency’s repertoire and their effect on the market in Cleveland. You want to see their portfolio and their proven track record of service to local Cleveland businesses. If you’re not seeing enough examples of their work, they may not be able to post everything due to an NDA, but you should ask them for more examples of their work if you are interested in their service, especially if you know they produce content and market for your competition.

Transparency about pricing should be next on your list to cover a potential marketing agency here in Cleveland. Most full-service marketing agencies use something called a “retainer” method, which can be beneficial to both the agency and you, the client. Retainers give you a set number of hours put into your marketing effort and have a maximum cost to you, but it also allows flexibility to go over the allotted time if you have an emergency or new project you want to start. Some agencies charge by the hour strictly and have different hourly rates depending on the specific type of service. A video editor may cost more, a copywriter may cost less, it’s just a matter of preference from the marketing agency.

Take note of marketing agencies in Cleveland that understand your industry. If you see their portfolio and notice they have services your competition in the past, make sure to ask them about their process for those previous, or current, clients. Talk to them about what they normally do in situations that are unique to your industry. Explore, ask questions, and probe into their process to find out if it’s right for your business here in Cleveland.

In the end, searching for a marketing agency can be daunting, but having a dedicated full-service marketing agency right here in Cleveland will help your local marketing thrive. Many business owners get flooded with too many things in a week to take the time to post on social media, write blogs, update the website, plan a video shoot, update your Google Business page, and many more items on your marketing list.

If you already have a marketing person dedicated to things like creating content, hiring a local Cleveland marketing agency will give them a support system, it will help create content for them that may be outside of their capabilities. If they’re great at SEO and hashtags but do not have proper video production equipment you could hire a full-service marketing agency to support them in making short videos for all of your Meta platforms and LinkedIn. Full-service means full-service; They will be far more malleable than a strict video production company or website development firm.

If you ever have any questions on what a full-service marketing agency can do for you, feel free to reach out to us here at Acclaim. We love talking about the industry and would be more than happy to give you an insight into the Cleveland marketing climate.