There’s a reason why marketing and advertising are specialized trades practiced by business professionals – marketing and advertising works!

What could be more important for a business than a steady customer flow, efficient methods for ensuring customer satisfaction and a retention plan focused on creating brand loyalty? When utilized correctly, marketing and advertising can empower your business, communicate messages, educate customers, open up your services and products to the world, and most importantly, generate new, consistent and ongoing revenue.

According to a study conducted by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), most businesses do more than half of their marketing in-house, but 90% of businesses still work with external agencies even though they have their own marketing team. The benefit of conducting your own marketing is that no one knows your brand better than you, but the downside is that you may lack the experience, not know how to use the marketing tools effectively to produce results or need to hire extra staff, which may outweigh the cost of hiring a marketing company.

Many businesses think if they get followers, visitors or track their analytics, they are going to be successful in marketing. This is not necessarily the case. You can draw thousands of people to your website but if a visitor doesn’t understand what you sell, it will never transform into a sale. On average, you have 5 seconds to catch a person’s interest and 30 seconds for them to decide if it’s worth it for them to spend money with you. So, if your website is convoluted and hard to understand, customers aren’t going to stick around to see what you do. Knowing what you do and how you sell to a customer is the key starting point to any marketing strategy.

When looking for a marketing company, make sure to weigh the costs vs. the experience. Too often businesses go with the cheapest quote and then wonder why it’s taking so long to achieve the results they were promised. Before you hire someone, whether it’s internally or a marketing company, make sure who you are hiring has the experience you’re looking for and that they will be able to provide the results and quality of content you’re looking for. The benefit of hiring a marketing company is that they may know modern marketing techniques and strategies that involve a wide complexity of platforms, which if tried to manage in-house could cost more time and money.

The first step for customers is to better understand what exactly you do. Are they visually impacted by your business, its process and how you present yourself? Every alignment of your brand, from simple marketing material to how you represent yourself online, all the way through to how you execute for your customers and the material they see matters. Empower your business with FFM-trained brand specialists who ensure you’re getting the most out of every way your business can be viewed. FFM marketing strategists work with your business, evaluating current success and failures, understanding how your business works and planning with you how we can best position your business for success. Our services and custom marketing solutions are specifically tailored to each customer we work with.