What Are Marketing Services?

Marketing is the key to revenue growth and success for any brand. It’s the strategic foundation upon which to build your sales tactics, PR campaigns, brand partnerships, and social media activities. It’s the business function that directly yields sales conversions and customer engagement. In short, marketing is essential to your success.

What is Marketing?

In an ever changing landscape, one truth remains: Marketing exists to connect your brand with your target audience, by generating awareness and interest in your product or service. It’s how your brand can demonstrate that your offering solves customers’ pain points and is worth their time, money and effort. 

Marketing campaigns can include a range of activities, from advertising and social media to consumer research. Marketing is also the language that fills your website and the imagery that adds color to your sales deck. It’s the driving force behind search engine optimization, content development, website services, and email outreach. 

Ultimately, marketing is how your brand communicates its value to your target audience.

Why Do You Need Marketing Services?

Businesses need marketing services to reach new customers, build brand awareness, improve engagement, and establish loyalty among existing customers. Without it, potential customers might never learn your name or purchase your product. 

Ideally, a strong marketing campaign will help your business reach new markets. It’s essential that the messaging you distribute on behalf of your brand also demonstrates how your product or service offering can actively solve your target market’s pain points — that’s how you’ll make an impact with potential buyers.

Whether you’re launching a new brand, designing a website, or developing content, marketing is a complex strategic process. It takes time and expertise to go beyond surface-level tactics like posting a few images to Instagram or having the office intern churn out some trendy TikTok videos. Marketing requires in-depth content strategies that work to address points of pain in a meaningful way.

In today’s highly competitive business environment, marketing is more important than ever before. Whether you are selling a product or a service, the key to success lies in differentiating your brand from its competitors and connecting with customers on an emotional level. To achieve this, it is crucial to employ effective marketing tactics that engage and excite your target audience. Different messages and different platforms will engage audiences, well, differently. 

For example, targeted content marketing can build rapport with customers, as well as boost your search engine rankings by making use of relevant keywords in user-focused content. Social media platforms serve a different purpose, and can be a great way to add a personal touch to your brand. Both marketing methods can enable you to connect directly with your customers and build relationships that last.

If you want your brand to make an impact — whether you’re in a tight local market or competing with companies on the global stage — then you need marketing services.

What Do Marketing Services Entail?

Your marketing campaigns should always be customized to meet your business needs and should change over time as your brand evolves. Be wary of marketing agencies that advertise a one-size fits all approach, or offer out-of-the-box solutions that claim to guarantee page one rankings in Google.  

There are several tactics that should serve as the baseline for most marketing campaigns. Here, we’ll explore those elements in more detail. 

1. A brand analysis: While not every agency takes this approach right from the start, it’s a critical step in the life of your brand. A thorough analysis helps to solidify your brand identity and how you want to be represented in the media. (If you want to learn how we do this, specifically, you can read about it on our PR services page.)
2. Marketing strategy: A proper marketing strategy should be a high-level, long-term roadmap. Your agency team should work closely with you to understand your unique business needs and develop recommendations to help you reach your goals.
3. Ongoing management: An experienced marketing team should provide long-term support. Your marketing agency should manage the development and execution of branding strategies to build, control, and maintain your brand image.
4. Copywriting: The copywriters working on your marketing assets should have expertise in your specific industry—from niche tech solutions, to B2B services, to consumer-lifestyle brands and more. They should also be aware of the proper tone to use with your customer base, so that the assets they’re writing on your behalf will resonate with your customer base. Those assets might include your website, newsletters, press releases, company blog posts, case studies, contributed articles, corporate communications, executive speeches, and other communications needs.
5. Affiliate marketing: As affiliate marketing programs increase in popularity, your marketing team should offer the right expertise to set up and oversee your affiliate campaigns. This step will help your brand to secure media and partnership opportunities that are profitable and maintain high conversion rates.
6. Search marketing: Search marketing, especially organic search optimization (or SEO) ensures your on-page factors and your off-page factors are properly aligned to improve your performance on major search engines, like Google. Proper website optimization will make it as easy as possible for people to find your website when they search for certain topics on major search engines and social media platforms.
7. Paid media campaigns: Where your budget allows, a paid campaign can bolster your marketing efforts. By generating even greater brand awareness, paid media campaigns can support your other marketing activities — such as PR, organic search optimization, speaking events, or in-store promotion — to reach broader audiences.
8. Social media advertising: Digital marketers offer the expertise to conceptualize, create, and place ads on top social media channels in your industry. At Trust Relations, your account team can work across LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram to curate strategic posts and campaigns that reach your target audiences—complete with detailed monthly reports.
9. Sponsored content: Some marketing agencies will also pitch and place sponsored content on behalf of your brand. This step can help secure valuable paid placements in respected blogs, news outlets, business publications, and trade media.
10. Content marketing: A content marketing campaign can amplify your ongoing PR efforts. A skilled marketing team will leverage integrated marketing strategies to help you generate leads with clear calls to action, lead capture, and organized follow-up.
11. Email marketing: To leverage your existing client base and prospective list, your marketing agency should also activate ongoing email campaigns to grow your business. Backed by your existing PR wins and marketing strategies, they can develop yet another channel to help your brand communicate directly with key stakeholders. 

How Does Trust Play Into Marketing?

Trust is a core component of successful marketing. If potential customers don’t trust your business, they’re not likely to buy from you. That’s why it’s important to create a strong, positive relationship with your target audience.

Building trust begins with providing quality products and services. It also involves being transparent and honest in your marketing messages. When you focus on building trust, you’ll be more likely to create lasting customer relationships and expand your market reach.

“Trust Relations” is a term coined by the agency’s President and Founder April White to describe a new approach to strategic communications. We focus on conveying clients’ authentic actions, value and goodwill. 

To do this, we have a golden rule: As a brand, you must do what you say before you can say what you do. Trust relations is about earning the trust of your audience and stakeholders, based on who you are—not who you pretend to be. It’s how we make sure that your storytelling and storydoing are one and the same.

Trust is essential to forging lasting customer relationships. With our unique approach, we’re here to disrupt the traditional agency model and reinvent the way you think about marketing. Success at the end of the sales funnel requires that customers and clients have faith in your products, your services, your brand spokespeople, and the longevity of your business. 

Brand loyalty is rooted in brand trust. We’re here to help you achieve both with your next marketing campaign.