Marketing Agency
Choosing a marketing agency can be a daunting prospect for any business, let alone when you don’t have a background in the fine art of selling. Maybe you’ve tried Googling Marketing agency near me or Marketing company near me in the hope that you’ll find someone who is local and hopefully has a good reputation.
The challenge for most businesses is that they need specific marketing skills that may not be provided by simply the closest to you. Imagine if you had a long term health challenge that needed fixing. Would you want the closest person or the best person? Well it’s time to start applying that critical thinking to your business.
If you are reading this on Snowflake Media there is a good chance that you either don’t have the time to take your business to the next level or don’t feel like you have the marketing skills required to grow enough. If you are in Halifax then you are incredibly lucky as that is where our offices are based!
More than 75% of our business though comes from International clients or those looking for a UK marketing agency.
When you work with Snowflake Media Group you can pick and choose what marketing solution you need.
We can teach you how to market your business
If you are a start up business or one that has lots of time to implement, you can simply choose our Marketing Strategy Sessions. Here our experts will help you decide on exactly what marketing steps you need to take, then you are responsible for execution.
Done for you marketing
If you don’t have enough time to market the business, then working with our Digital Jumpsuit team allows you to maximise marketing results on whichever marketing channel is best for you. Our team have expertise in Advertising on Facebook, Google and other platforms. We also help create content and manage social media strategy for companies looking for a creative solution.
Why choose Snowflake Media for marketing?
Every “Snowflake” is unique. That is why Snowflake Media was created. In a world of “Me-too” or lazily cobbled together marketing plans, we realised that no two businesses need exactly the same solution.
Unlike most marketing agencies, we maintain a roster of our own websites that act as a marketing laboratory. Making mistakes and learning with our own money. We have retail, e-commerce, blog, news style and subscription based websites that we are constantly refining and testing. This gives us real-time data that we can share and use with our client base.
In our past lives, we hired marketing agencies to help grow our business and were constantly frustrated with either the vague promises, lack of transparency or lack of coherence between the agency departments. Marketing strategy requires a multi-channel approach and when you work with Snowflake Media you will have the web development, SEO, Advertising, print, graphic design and copywriting teams all in one place. All pulling in the same direction.
Contact us today to discuss: Email / Facebook / Twitter / Phone: 01422 375 034
What Is Marketing?
If someone were to stop you on the street and ask you: “what’s the first cell phone brand that comes to mind?” whatever your answer may be, the reason that the company is so ingrained in your mind is because of marketing. Marketing might be how you found out about your favorite local restaurant. It might be why you got a new boiler installed. It’s why reading the phrase: “just do it” conjures up the image of the iconic swoop in your mind. We don’t even have to say the brand, and you already know.
Marketing is, at its bare bones, the process of communicating messages to a target audience for the purpose of inciting an action from them. This action may be buying something, or signing up to something, or an assortment of many other possible objectives. Marketing pinpoints unfulfilled gaps in people’s wants and interests, and finds ways to fill those gaps with corresponding products and services.
Really, if you want your business to be successful, it’s not enough to simply sell something. If you decide you want to sell coffee on a deserted street, no one will come if they don’t know about it. That’s why you put up a sign saying “Coffee this way.” That’s why you utilise marketing.
In many ways marketing is also storytelling. It’s crafting a brand identity and building a connection over time with customers. The situations we mentioned before, in which some brands just stick in your mind, are examples of the results of iconic marketing campaigns. Even if you are a small business looking to cater to the needs of your specific community, any business can utilise the techniques that made those names so recognisable and those businesses so successful. Whatever your goals are, marketing can be an essential tool in your journey to reach them.
There are numerous ways of integrating a marketing plan into your business. We understand no two businesses are the same, much like a snowflake. This means no two marketing plans are the same. At Snowflake Media, we want to create an individualised plan of action that is catered to your specific needs.
The way that we accomplish this is by using many different techniques. There are a large number of strategies available for different situations and kinds of businesses. So now that we have established what marketing is, how does a marketing agency use these tools? What do we actually do?
What Does A Marketing Agency Do?
Overall, the job of a marketing agency is to develop and implement the marketing strategy that will benefit your business the most.
The services that we provide fall under a few umbrella categories. Each of these is customisable. Different combinations provide different results, and depending on your goals, some might be more beneficial than others. Regardless, as we move forward in developing your marketing plan of action, we keep these different aspects in mind.
Brand development
Brand identity is an essential component of a successful business. Knowing who you are at your core; what your mission is and what you want to communicate, makes it easier to identify exactly who your target audience is. If you know who they are, you know how better to reach them.
Graphic design is a large part of brand development. Delivering engaging marketing materials to your customer base, like an eye-catching logo for example, are what set you apart from the crowd. Compelling graphic design is incredibly impactful when it comes to telling your visual brand story. Without having to say anything, the personality of your business is conveyed to your audience. Design assets are the first impression, and are often what are most instantly recognisable about a brand the long run.
We are excited to now be providing graphic design services to our clients.
Please visit our Graphic Design Agency service page to learn more.
Sales and marketing strategy training
Sometimes as a business owner you want to take a more proactive role by learning to implement marketing principles into your strategy yourself. A face-to face crash course means a session in which you can discuss, learn, and receive feedback from a marketing specialist.
We provide this service in the form of training courses, (both full and half day sessions.) We are able to offer these in-person as well as online. During these days, we will point you in the right direction and teach you the tools you need for success. With our decades of expertise in marketing behind us, we are uniquely positioned to teach you the essential skills that will make the biggest impact.
SEO, Google Adwords, and Facebook Advertising
We’ll go into a lot more detail about the definition of these services down below, but this component of marketing involves a long term strategy to increase performance on online platforms. It is developing a profitable and sustainable marketing solution that is measurable and therefore has the ability to be repeated in the long run. Keep reading to learn more.
Social media Marketing
Over the past decade, social media has completely transformed the internet landscape, boasting an astounding 3.8 billion users worldwide. Social media platforms are becoming their own distinct digital meeting spaces, where people spend a lot of their time. This has presented some incredible opportunities for marketing.
Social media marketing uses platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, to get your marketing materials on there. It is also a great opportunity to interact with your audience in a more direct way, creating more positive associations with your brand.
Print Advertising
Although digital spaces are certainly indispensable tools to use in your marketing strategy, it’s important to remember the power of good old fashioned print media. Print media includes things like magazines, newspapers, directories and more. A major benefit of print publications is that they tend to carry a level of trust and loyalty within their readership that is not true of online platforms. If you are looking to target a specific readership group, print advertising can be incredibly effective. Although we believe online marketing is a great strategy, as so many businesses focus on it more and more, using traditional print advertising can actually help you to stand out.
We here at Snowflake Media Group work with 2 publications, which are printed monthly in the Halifax Area: Skircoat Green Directory & The Halifax Directory. They regularly reach over 35,000 readers.
If you would like further information about any of our services please contact us today.
How Can A Marketing Agency Help Your Business?
Marketing Agencies like us here at Snowflake Media Group, are a group of trained specialists in the field of marketing. It is difficult and time consuming to get the same level of professional results without the help of people who truly know what they’re doing. New opportunities are arising every day in the world of marketing, and the savviest entrepreneurs are the ones who reap the biggest rewards. Investing in a marketing strategy, marketing consulting or any other service that an agency provides, is an investment in the future of your business.
The experience we have with working with different clients allows us to market across a diverse range of fields with a team that understands which one would work best for you.
If you are looking for comprehensive services, a marketing agency can also help you receive the most benefits at the lowest cost. The cost of one specialised service in-house can match or even exceed the cost of a full strategy from us.
An agency can also provide a marketing mix, pushing your business out across more than one advertising avenue. The more avenues you have a strong presence in, the more potential eyes are on you. This can scale up your return on investment.
Some Marketing Vocabulary
When entering a marketing agency space, there is often a lot of lingo you hear being thrown around. SEO! Direct Marketing! Call to action! You may or may not fully grasp what these concepts mean, and how they can be used to the advantage of your business. This is understandable, considering the fact that it takes most professional marketers years to learn their craft inside and out. Here at Snowflake Media Group, we are confident in our ability to practically apply these concepts to our client’s individual needs. For the sake of clarity, let’s dive a bit deeper into what they mean.
What Is Online Or Digital Marketing?
With the invention of the internet came a resulting increase in ways of connecting with people. This opened up a whole new landscape of marketing possibilities. The internet has completely altered our way of life and our world, and marketing strategies had to follow suit.
Online or Digital marketing uses the same basic principles of traditional marketing, but in a completely digital space. This could mean social media advertising, Google, email marketing, and much more. If it exists on the internet, it is online marketing.
One of the advantages of digital marketing is the wealth of opportunity for data collection on target audiences, which allows you to take a more direct and cost effective approach. One of the reasons why it has become so popular as of late, besides the ubiquity of the internet in our lives as a whole, is the fact that the average cost of a customer acquisition is typically lower. (Although it varies from industry to industry.)
What Is SEO?
Search engines are a massive wealth of information. People across the globe use them to answer all kinds of questions and find all sorts of services. There are reportedly 3.5 billion searches performed on Google.com every single day. From “what pubs are near me?” to “who is the inventor of the sandwich?” (to save you the search, it’s widely believed to be John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich.)
No other time in history have the answers to our queries been available to us so instantly. This provides an incredible opportunity when it comes to marketing, if you know how to use it. Whatever kind of business you are, there is someone out there looking for the services or products you provide. It’s just a matter of leading them to you. That’s where SEO comes in.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. At its base level, it is a system of methods for creating, fine-tuning, and adapting content for the purpose of boosting its performance within search engine platforms. This is a helpful aspect of digital marketing because it is a free way of organically stacking the cards in your favor when it comes to the quantity and quality of who sees your advertisements.
When you search something, Google does not give you results in a random list, it attempts to deliver the most relevant options by using a complex algorithm. It uses keywords and other data to figure out how best to give you the results you’re looking for. The algorithm isn’t completely understood by the public, but professional marketing agencies like us, have a good understanding of how to use it to a client’s benefit.
The aim with SEO is to target the customer base who are looking for what you have to offer, which means really knowing who your audience is and incorporating their searches and miscellaneous online tendencies into your website. This leads to more traffic, and ultimately more business. The 1st result on Google gets 28.5% of all clicks. People very rarely click to the second page at all, which shows how important it can be to have that boost.
If you have a website dedicated to giving advice on gardening, for example, you want to make it clear in your content that it is about gardening. This lets the Google algorithm know what you’re about, and pushes your website out to people who have searched for similar subjects.
You also want to find out the exact questions those people are asking, so that you can provide the answers as they relate to your business. If someone searches: “vegetable gardening tips” and you know some great DIY hacks on how to care for carrot plants, you can write an article surrounded on that topic. By also incorporating the exact words “vegetable gardening tips” into your copy, the original person who searched that term will be more likely to find your article.
But how do you find which keywords to use? How do you even begin to incorporate SEO concepts in your content? That’s where we here at The Snowflake Media Group come in. We have a wealth of real-time data and tools that we can use to boost your SEO performance!
What are Paid Ads?
If SEO is a strategy that improves your reach online while not requiring payment to online platforms, paid ads are the other side of the coin. These include Facebook Advertising, Google Adwords, and placement ads.
Using paid ads means paying to have your product or service appear to your target audience. It involves looking over the data, and either pushing your advertisements to a certain demographic, in response to a certain search term, or to a specific website.
Google Adwords
When using Google adwords, you are essentially targeting a group of potential customers based on what they are searching for on Google. This can be a very powerful strategy, because that audience is actively looking for your particular product or service and is therefore more likely to be an engaged viewer. To remind you, the first search result that appears on Google dominates the traffic, which is why something like Google adwords could be so useful in giving your content an extra push.
To think of an example, let’s say you’re a mortgage lender company and you wanted to appear at the top of search results for “mortgage for a new home owner.” You can pay Google to appear higher on the list than you would have otherwise.
Facebook Ads
This is a much more audience lead approach, using interests and demographics to narrow down a list of people who might engage with your content. This potential audience has not necessarily indicated they have interest in the product, but their online presence implies that they are the kind of customer who might be interested. There is less competition in this space as opposed to Google adwords, but they may need more coaxing. A lower percentage of people who see the ad will likely be customers, but in this case you’re reaching a larger audience and the amount of feedback you receive reflects that.
In the example used above, with the mortgage lending company, you might want to look at a few things to narrow your audience down. You might expect that new homeowners would be between the ages of 25 and 35. They might have interests like Rightmove. If you are based in Yorkshire, you might want to target people in the specific area you are located in. Taking all this information, Facebook can promote your ad to the corresponding intersecting groups for a fee.
Placement ads
Placement advertisements are ads that you pay to appear on one single website. Examples being: a company’s website, or a newspaper’s website. This kind of marketing is targeted to one specific readership, and might produce some impressive results if you suspect your audience overlaps with theirs.
In our mortgage lending example, you might want to research the clientele of particular magazines and identify where they match up with your target demographic. Maybe you find that “New Home Owners Digest” (our fabricated example,) have much the same core group of customers that you do. You would then reach out and pay that company to appear on their website.
What Is Direct Marketing?
Direct marketing is really all in the name. It’s communicating your message directly to the audience, rather than through any sort of media middleman. It’s the difference between seeing an advertisement on television for orange juice, and having an email in your inbox saying: “Do you like juice? Do you like oranges? Click here to buy the freshest OJ around!”
General marketing tends to be focused on more overall brand awareness, where direct marketing is much more focused on measurable sales and results. This is, of course, not always the case, but it generally goes this way.
This method of marketing can be incredibly effective because it speaks directly to a concentrated target audience, and asks them to participate in the conversation by completing a task or buying a product. In that way, it feels much more personal and the effectiveness of a campaign is much more measurable.
Calls to action are a vital technique used in direct marketing. Once you have engaged the potential customers with your captivating marketing materials, it is beneficial to urge the viewer to complete some sort of task. There are many ways of doing this, and there are different components you can bring together to get the optimal result.
Although a call to action can be as simple as a sentence in an article, elements of graphic design can be used to direct the eye or make the choice to click a link seem more enticing.
If you strike the correct balance with a call to action, by avoiding being forgettable while also not being disruptive, you have a great tool for converting leads and generating interest on your hands.
In summation, the immense power of marketing is something that you can harness to take your business to the next level. With the right experts by your side, there’s so much you can achieve. If you need some direction, get in touch with our friendly team of professionals. We want to help you reach your goals in any way we can, and we have the skills to do it!