Some industries have marketing companies specific to that business vertical. Among the industries that commonly have these singularly focused marketing advisors are dental, hearing, automotive, and legal. What are the pros and cons of hiring a digital advertising agency or marketing company that works in only one business category? Here are a few pros and cons, based on our 15 years of experience in digital campaigns and 40 years of experience.
As a business owner, it’s easy to think that a company that offers a full slate of services from web development to digital advertising to the software that collects patient data is a better option than finding individual specialists. It does alleviate the time needed to research but it also means all your eggs are in one basket. Many industry-specific companies also have proprietary software, so you may lose company information if you change providers in the future.
Related specifically to websites, we’ve seen many instances where the content of a website is duplicated, nearly identical to dozens or hundreds of other companies in that same industry. Just replace the company name, city, and logo, and you can launch a website within a day. However, that duplicate content will cost you greatly in the long run.
Google and other search engines say they reward unique website content, which also means they penalize duplicate content. We’ve built custom sites for companies who’ve previously had a “templated” site from an industry-specific company and seen organic traffic increase by 20 to 30 percent.
Digital campaigns for pay-per-click advertising are another common factor in industry-specific marketing companies. It’s easy to have premade lists of keywords, search terms, and ad content that’s uploaded to the Google Ads platform. The issue is the person running the digital campaigns doesn’t know what sets your company apart from your competition, or how “locals” search. The ad manager will likely set a geography around your company that’s far too wide for your actual trade area, resulting in irrelevant clicks that eat up ad dollars. And in today’s digital advertising, if campaigns are not individually managed and negative keywords routinely entered, those ad dollars will not produce what they should.
Another issue we’ve seen is that an industry-specific marketing company will have one Google Analytics account, adding each client business under that. It makes logging in much easier for their staff, but much harder to separate out your website’s data should you ever part company with the provider.
At Ad House Advertising, we’re happy to provide case studies of our work and compare results. Our belief is that each client has unique opportunities that we work to share with their potential marketplace. Whether your company is here in our home state of New Mexico or across the country, we focus on ROI-based advertising, web development, programmatic display, CTV/OTT, and video production. Let us know If you’d like to talk.