If there’s one thing no business has enough of, it’s time. There isn’t enough time in the day for all the tasks you want to accomplish, all the leads you want to follow, all the initiatives you want to launch. Every minute spent answering emails or sitting in another status meeting is a minute stolen from some other part of your business. Time, as they say, is money.
Thousands of marketing agencies across the United States can help you fill the holes in your marketing plan. Many are effective at filling those gaps, but because they are built around a single channel, they tend not to consider the broader picture of your business as a brand. A full-service marketing agency works differently. Agencies like L&P Marketing partner with clients through every stage of their business journey — from inception until final closings — which is why builders, developers, and communities trust us with their marketing efforts. A wide variety of services under one roof means we gain actionable insight across the entire marketing landscape, not just one slice of it.
So what is a full-service marketing agency, exactly? How does it differ from any other marketing partner? And how can it help your business save time and money while building your brand and growing your customer base? Those are the questions we’re here to answer.
How Do You Define a Full-Service Marketing Agency?
The full-service agency definition typically reads something like this: a marketing agency capable of handling all of the marketing and advertising needs for a business, including strategic planning, branding, web development, digital production, social media, public relations, reporting, and analytics.
By comparison, a specialized marketing agency typically offers only one specific service, or a few services that are traditionally related. An SEO (search engine optimization) company — also known as a paid search company or content marketing company — is one example. Agencies like these boast a particular set of skills, but they don’t typically offer much outside their core competencies. That means businesses have to partner with multiple agencies to cover the many avenues of modern marketing.
The Benefits of Working With a Full-Service Marketing Agency
As you might imagine, the benefits of a full-service marketing agency are as many and varied as the talents it can bring to bear. Here are the biggest ones.
All the Experts Are Under One Roof
More than anything, a full-service marketing agency brings a wide range of marketing services, resources, and expertise to the table. Marketing channels don’t actually work in isolation, especially when you’re executing a strategy across an entire business. They work together to build your brand, drive new customers, and do all the things marketing is meant to do. It simply makes sense to have all of those experts under one roof, working with account managers who bring it together into a winning strategy for your business.
It Saves You Time — and Money
Because all the experts are under one roof, you don’t have to shop around for half a dozen specialized agencies to meet your various marketing needs. And because one agency handles everything from print ads to social media, there’s no need to explain your business goals or brand identity over and over again. No more spending hours in meetings every month collecting reports on separate marketing activities. Everything happens in one place, so everything is coordinated — which saves you time and money while keeping your messaging cohesive.
That isn’t all. Because a full-service marketing agency handles every aspect of your marketing, its team stays current across all areas of marketing expertise. Digital marketing is always changing, and it takes real time to stay on top of those changes. What worked last year may not work next year, and keeping up with it isn’t something the average business owner has time to pursue — but it’s exactly what marketing specialists are for.
A Consistent Brand Identity
If you want an idea of what a full-service marketing agency can do for you, get six friends together, describe the same thing to each of them, then ask them all to draw it. Odds are you’ll get six very different pictures. That’s what it’s like explaining your brand to half a dozen specialty agencies. At a full-service agency, you work with one team to identify and define your brand and your needs, and that team works together to make it happen. No more playing telephone. Everyone is on the same page, from the graphic designers to the content writers, which makes your brand’s voice, tone, perspective, and personality far more consistent — and far more effective.
Fresh Perspectives and Innovative Ideas
An agency that only works in one kind of marketing can become stuck in its ways, recycling the same strategies for different clients. Because a full-service agency employs a wide range of specialists, team members are always learning from one another — picking up an idea from social media and applying it to print, pulling a concept from an infographic and bringing it to a brochure. That cross-pollination lets the team build custom strategies for each client and brainstorm entirely new ideas that would never have surfaced in a siloed environment. As they say, one size does not fit all.
One Point of Contact
One of the biggest benefits of working with a full-service marketing agency is that you have a single point of contact. That cuts down on confusion, saves you time, simplifies your processes, and reduces your stress, freeing you up to focus on the parts of the business only you can handle. It has never been more valuable than in an era when marketing changes at the speed of the web.
Scalability
Because the resources of a full-service marketing agency are all focused in one place, you can expand your marketing efforts in any direction you choose. If you’ve been investing in content marketing and social media but you want to move into video production, you don’t have to go find a new specialized agency to take it on. Your full-service agency is ready to help you grow your campaign into whatever new territory is needed.
A Strategic Partner You Can Rely On
The consistency of a full-service marketing agency isn’t only good for the cohesion of your campaign and your brand identity. It also means the agency is a partner you can rely on as your business grows and changes, one with your success foremost in mind. A full-service agency can do more than implement your marketing ideas; it can help you build new ones as you work together to define, develop, execute, and refine a strategy tailored to your goals. And because that agency touches every aspect of your marketing, its team develops an understanding of your business that no single-channel partner could match.
What a Full-Service Marketing Agency Actually Does
Benefits are easy to claim, so here is what “full service” looks like in practice. L&P’s work sits on four pillars, and every client engagement draws on some combination of all of them.
Digital Marketing Services
For many of our clients, the first interaction with a new customer happens online. Whether it’s visiting a website, viewing an ad, or finding our clients organically on social media, established brands tend to become familiar to a customer through digital exposure. Through digital marketing, L&P strives to leave a great online first impression on every new user.
SEO: Optimizing websites for organic search is a crucial way to help potential customers find you online. Targeting specific organic keywords on your website can improve your rankings on search engines like Google and drive new users to your site. And the best part? It’s free traffic.
Digital Paid Advertising: Paid advertising on search engines and social media is a strong way to reach potential customers based on preferences, demographics, and interests. Through these channels we can target users unfamiliar with a brand and drive them to the site — and, maybe more importantly, retarget users who already know your brand to entice engagement across channels.
Organic Social Media: Social media has become increasingly important over the past 10 years. Keeping the people who already know your brand engaged builds credibility and trust. Organic posts covering community updates, resident events, and new developments show social users your dedication to keeping residents happy, and help potential customers think of your brand more fondly.
Email Marketing: Email is a great way to bring users who already know your brand back to highly targeted areas of your website. Sending the correct audience segments to the correctly targeted landing pages is what makes email effective at driving meaningful conversions.
Website Development: In today’s marketing landscape, first impressions are often made online. Your website is more than a digital storefront — it’s one of the most powerful ways for users to get to know your brand. That’s why we have a team dedicated to designing, building, and optimizing your website to make that first impression count.
Conversion Rate Optimization: Many companies in real estate depend on their websites to gather interest and generate leads they can nurture throughout the buying cycle. With conversion rate optimization, L&P uses heatmap technology, A/B testing, and design best practices to ensure website users are drawn toward converting actions on the page.
Creative & Branding Services
As a full-service marketing agency, L&P offers creative services including branding, graphic design, website design, and placemaking — each essential to the marketing process. We believe building a strong brand aligned with the business is the crucial first step and is of the highest importance when beginning development of your marketing strategy.
Branding: Branding services are the first step in a critical marketing journey. Branding can shape a potential customer’s sentiment toward your brand before they know anything about your product. Ensuring you have a brand identity aligned with your company’s vision is the first step to making a lasting impression on potential clients.
Graphic Design: Graphic design across social media matters in portraying your brand in the desired light. Being authentic and genuine in your digital graphics is crucial to maintaining a consistent brand both online and offline. Using those graphics to draw out positive emotion with homebuyers online is what keeps a brand both noticeable and respectable.
Website Design: Having a creative team that is deeply familiar with your brand and knowledgeable about UX/UI best practices is critical to a seamless transition of your brand from offline to online. That, along with providing critical information and relevant calls to action on the site, is what makes our creative team so trusted with our clients’ brands.
Photo/Video Production: We are finding that real photography and videography consistently outperform stock imagery. Our photo and video production team has over a decade of experience working with videographers and photographers to ensure every shot, scene, and script reflects the brand and is usable across all platforms.
Placemaking: Placemaking is a crucial part of L&P’s marketing process. Ensuring your location is aligned with your brand’s value is crucial to the homebuyer journey. Carrying online interactions and impressions through into the development itself ensures your brand communicates its message both online and in person.
Traditional Marketing Services
While not as prevalent today as digital marketing, traditional marketing lets an agency like L&P reach a wider variety of potential customers. Through event marketing, print, TV and radio, and PR, we can send specific messaging to specific audiences and better tailor our marketing to prospects at every stage of the funnel.
Event Marketing: Event marketing at master-planned communities is one of the specialties of a full-service marketing agency like L&P. Our experienced team and reliable event partners make sure we drive on-site traffic on event day and deliver information, activations, and community details to on-site prospects.
Traditional Advertising & Print: Although social advertising has become more commonplace, traditional and print advertising still have their place in the marketing mix. From billboards to brochures via direct mail, L&P has found that no single platform suits every audience segment, so we adjust to the most effective strategy for each market.
Broadcast Advertising (TV & Radio): While not the most prevalent tactic these days, TV and radio advertising let us reach broader customer bases in the areas closest to our communities. They also let us deliver specific messaging that may not be optimal for other marketing avenues.
Public Relations: Public relations is an important part of communicating with the public. L&P provides valuable PR pieces to the media to spread the word about new community developments and updates. Just as importantly, we keep a pulse on community sentiment toward a brand and make sure that brand is reflected in a positive light, because we know word of mouth is an important driving factor in reputation and can hinder future sales.
Strategic Planning Services
Often overlooked, strategic planning sits at the heart of every decision we make. Action without planning can produce positive results, but without thinking the strategy through it can also create unaccounted-for challenges, skewed data, and inconclusive results. That’s why L&P puts strategic planning first when beginning work with any client.
Market Research: No matter the industry, keeping up with market trends is crucial to determining the next steps in a marketing strategy. That’s especially true in real estate, where a variety of external factors can alter the supply of homes and the demand from homebuyers. Staying in tune with those corrections is critical to L&P and to the success of our clients.
Competitor Analysis: Analyzing competitors in the same industry and location is an essential part of the strategy. Knowing your brand’s value proposition and positioning determines which audience segments are worth targeting and which are not. Knowing your competitors is the first step to knowing how to out-market them.
Builder and Realtor Relations: In real estate, a master-planned community relies on many partners for success. Working with only the development team leaves out crucial information from partners like realtors and builders, who offer great insight into the back end of the funnel from their boots-on-the-ground experience.
Sales Tracking & Analysis: The variety of our services and expertise can only be so impactful without results. L&P takes pride in its ability to dig into the bottom-line numbers and shift our strategies toward the tactics that not only boost leads and foot traffic, but most importantly boost sales for our clients.
L&P Marketing: Your One-Stop Full-Service Marketing Agency
So, what is a full-service marketing agency? It’s the partner you need to help make your business dreams come true. While other agencies can fill in the gaps left by your marketing team, L&P works as a partner — it’s in our name — for your business throughout its entire lifecycle. Whether it’s creative, digital, traditional, or strategic, you can be sure you’re in the best hands with Lewis & Partners.
Get in touch with L&P today, let us know what you’re hoping to accomplish, and together we can make it a reality.
