Article · Digital marketing
Finding The Best Advertising Agencies
The best advertising agencies help you attract new customers and grow fast. Here’s how to find the best fit for your business.
01 / OPENING
Is finding the best advertising agencies for a specific business realistic? To begin with, many businesses can feel overwhelmed by the modern advertising landscape. There are so many tangible and digital marketing options. That is why advertising agencies exist. They are the one-stop shop for modern businesses to grow. Below, we’ll review what the best advertising agencies do, how they operate, and how they can help business scale their growth.
What Is an Advertising Agency?
To understand what constitutes the best advertising agencies, let’s break down the phrase. An agency is a business that provides services to other companies, advertising refers to information communicated about a product, and best means the one that can help a specific business the most.. Traditionally, ad agencies offered only one type of service, but over time, many have evolved into full-service digital marketing firms.
Advertising can be done through many different methods: traditional, digital, creative, and full-service. Regardless of the specific services an advertising agency provides, most typically offer advertising, marketing, and design services.
Core Services Offered by The Best Advertising Agencies
For an advertising agency to truly help business owners in need of its services, it must offer a core set of solutions to serve as a one-stop shop.
Given the many responsibilities involved in running a company, owners often prefer working with just one or two contacts rather than juggling multiple vendors who each handle only a small part of their advertising needs. So, look for an agency that offers at least most of the following:
Marketing Strategy Development
Before starting any major or important endeavor, a plan is needed. Without one, all the time and effort may be invested into something that leads nowhere meaningful. The same principle applies to creating a marketing strategy. To clarify: marketing is about delivering value to the customer, while advertising communicates information about the product or service.
To create an effective strategy, agencies must conduct thorough research for the client. This includes identifying the client’s strengths and weaknesses. From there, competitive research uncovers potential opportunities and threats. Once the competitive landscape and the client are well understood, the next step is to analyze the client’s customers and their behaviors.
All the best advertising agencies do this. If they don’t, they’re not the right one for you.
Advertising Campaign Management
The best advertising agencies offer advertising campaign management. Campaigns typically include elements such as the goal, the client’s budget, and the channel through which the campaign will run. The first two, objectives and budget, are largely determined by the client with guidance from the agency. However, the agency and client decide where the advertising will appear. Some options include:
Paid Social Media
- Google Search Ads
- Meta Ads – Facebook and Instagram
- YouTube
- Bing
- Twitter (X)
Traditional Advertising
- Newspapers
- Periodicals
- Billboards
- Mail Circulars
- Radio
- Television
- Signs
Once the marketing mix and ad placements are determined, it’s crucial to prioritize continuous testing, analysis, and performance optimization. If innovation stops after the first round of ads is launched, the client is unlikely to experience sustained success.
Creative Design and Branding
It may seem obvious, but not all advertising agencies offer creative design and branding services. It’s common for companies to hire an agency after they’ve already developed their branding and need help promoting their offerings, or right after registering the business, when they need help with everything from the ground up.
The best advertising agencies will help you with the creative design of your ads. Given how ads have evolved from being text-based to becoming heavily visually based, having great imagery is a must. Thus, eye-catching design in the ads will help them pop out, grab more attention, and set the client’s ads apart from the rest.
Additionally, to ensure standardization and cohesion, ads are to be consistent with the brand. The agency should ensure that colors, logos, messaging, and overall feeling are reflected in all aspects of the ads. After all, it’d be unusual for a steel manufacturer to have a unicorn in their ads.
Social Media Advertising
Most companies utilize social media to stay in contact with clients, maintain awareness, and, for advertising agencies, to post ads. The great thing for a client who wants to get more customers is that people voluntarily post a lot of information about themselves on social media. Those platforms then gather that information into segments. However, there are a lot of pros and cons of social media for businesses.
The best advertising agencies prevent the “cons” and utilize the “pros” to target the right people. With that information, the agency can work with the client to determine which social media platforms are best suited for reaching the desired customers. The agency can then manage ads across multiple platforms. Within these platforms, agencies can schedule when ads appear, measure engagement and response to the ads, and modify ads on specific platforms to improve their performance.
Additionally, the agency can create the ads for you, including all visuals. They understand the correct sizing, formats, and layouts for each platform. If they truly offer full-service support, their social media marketing services should include reel and video creation for various platforms, including YouTube.
PPC and Paid Search
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, known as paid search, is a powerful tool for attracting more clients. Since Google is the most widely used search engine — and also owns YouTube — many potential customers regularly use search engines. As a result, search activity tends to show higher intent, making PPC an excellent opportunity for a stronger return on investment (ROI).
Unlike social media, where the audience is targeted based on personas and platform usage, paid search focuses on targeting through keyword research. This process identifies relevant search terms for advertising and appears when those terms are searched. A good agency will create variations of these keywords, write compelling ad copy, and perform A/B testing to optimize results.
Google is just one player in the search market. Other platforms used for search include Bing, Yahoo, Facebook in some countries, and more. Additionally, the best advertising agencies will use retargeting to display ads to people who visited a client’s site but didn’t take a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a contact form.
eCommerce Marketing & Optimization
If your company sells goods, the best advertising agencies will help you with your eCommerce advertising. Just like the paid ads above, the advertising agency will be able to craft advertisements to bring excitement and attention to the goods that you are selling. The idea is to drive traffic and conversions to your online stores.
Beyond just the initial ads that customers see, advertisers help you improve your conversion optimization rate, or the percentage of people who visit your eCommerce store and then make a purchase. To improve that conversion rate, they can also help clients with their product page design and ad campaigns.
After the initial ads, conversion rate tracking, and landing pages are set up, more advanced ads can be created to guide customers toward making a purchase. Additionally, remarketing helps bring back customers who left items in their shopping cart, encouraging them to complete their purchases. This approach tracks users as they move through the sales and purchasing funnels, allowing them to be targeted with future ads, including promotions for new products the client offers.
02 / KEY IDEAS
The Best Advertising Agencies Help Businesses Grow
Just like any service purchased, the best advertising agencies help in a few ways. To start, they are a great time saver. Being able to give over a responsibility to someone else, who is knowledgeable and efficient at what they do, saves businesses time and from guesswork.
Second, when an advertising agency offers a range of services, it allows business owners to offload significant responsibilities and focus on other areas of their business. If the agency is part of a larger marketing firm that also offers services like search engine optimization, content creation, and Spanish translations, it creates additional value. Business owners then have even less to manage in their overall marketing efforts.
The best advertising agencies are also valuable because of their ability to manage multiple services simultaneously. Without their support, a business owner would have to worry about:
- Each social media platform
- Ways to purchase ads
- How to create the ads
- When to schedule them
- How much is too much or too little for a paid ad bid
- Ensure that the landing pages and ads are aligned
- What keywords to target
- And more
The Hidden Costs of Advertising
In addition to saving the client time in managing advertising, the best advertising agencies help avoid costly mistakes. Every advertising error can result in lost leads and missed business opportunities. However, when an ad agency is in charge, they are accountable for any major mistakes or errors in the advertising process.
Business owners often try to create ads on their own, believing their firsthand knowledge of the company gives them an advantage. However, more often than not, the campaigns are poorly optimized, lack proper performance tracking, receive low-quality ratings from advertising platforms, and feature designs that demonstrate a limited understanding of what drives conversions.
The most significant cost a client faces when managing their advertising is the time it takes. Time is money. Time is precious. Time is not a commodity a business owner can ever get back, regardless of how hard they try. Hiring someone else to take care of advertising, being experts at making them look good, and removing stress from an owner’s plate are of great worth.
03 / TAKEAWAY
What to Look For In The Best Advertising Agencies
Now that the services offered and the benefits of hiring an agency are stated, how does a client find the right advertising agency? Unless they know someone personally, what information is needed to be comfortable knowing that the agency they have in mind is the right one?
- Look at their case studies. Read through the success stories of the clients they’ve had and what types of results their clients have had.
- If the agency states that they have clear communication and transparent reporting. This ensures potential clients will always have updates and understand the results of their advertising investment.
- If they are also a marketing agency. Advertising agencies primarily focus on paid ads, but if they are part of a full-service marketing agency, they also develop short- and long-term marketing programs to deliver ongoing results
- Do they speak and translate into Spanish? As Spanish is the fourth most spoken language in the world and the second most spoken in the United States, getting your information in two languages increases the potential of new customers exponentially.
- Online reviews. Review feedback from prior clients, and determine if they would recommend the agency. Google reviews, Yelp, Facebook, and others are great sources of information.
Why Business Owners Need An Advertising Agency
Companies have a lot on their plates. There’s so much to do and not enough time. Aside from worrying about compliance, paperwork, clients, government regulations, fulfillment, reporting, balance sheets, investors, payroll, and advertising, it can feel like the last straw. As businesses only have a finite amount of time, it’s wise to hire an agency.
At Burning Ox Marketing, we are both an advertising and bilingual digital marketing agency. We specialize in both paid and organic digital marketing to help business owners save time, eliminate guesswork, and add expert support to their teams. If your company needs STRONG, BRIGHT MARKETING, we’re here to help with a wide range of services.