Category: Pay Per Click

Marketing Agency

5 Reasons To Hire A Marketing Agency VS An In-House Team

Posted on | by The AD Leaf Studio West Palm Beach
Content Writing, Email Marketing, Graphic Design, IT Services, Marketing, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Website Design

Should you hire a Marketing Agency or build an in-house team?

In today’s digital landscape, there is no shortage of marketing options for businesses. From freelancers and marketing agencies to hiring your own in-house team, companies have more choices than ever before, specifically when it comes to online marketing. As your business grows, you will need to consider how your marketing will be handled, including whether to hire new employees and build an internal marketing team or empower your brand through a Marketing Agency.

While each has its own advantages, a full-service Marketing Agency provides substantial value to large, medium, and even small businesses. They strive to build cohesive and effective brands, put organizations in front of their customers and audience, and drive sales through awareness.

5 Reasons to Hire A Marketing Agency

1. Unparalleled Experience

Why piece together individual talents when you can hire an experienced Marketing Agency to handle everything for you? One of the major advantages of hiring a Marketing Agency is a professional experience. In fact, a good agency will have specific knowledge in a wide range of industries and markets, along with experience facing a diverse range of scenarios and challenges never encountered by many newer business owners. Having a knowledgeable and experienced staff at your side can produce immediate results for owners, helping to quickly get your marketing efforts off the ground.

2. Broader Skillsets

It can be difficult to locate suitable in-house employees with branding and marketing skills such as SEO and graphic design. By hiring a Marketing Agency, you’ll not only have the necessary tools to achieve your vision for success but a suite of creative services at your fingertips.

For example, a full-service Marketing Agency can assist clients in everything from rebranding their company image and website, developing their print and direct mail campaigns, and creating a social strategy to boost SEO and PPC campaigns. With a Marketing Agency, a client may choose to utilize one service or all them–whereas, with an in-house team, businesses are limited in what they can achieve.

3. Fresh Perspective & Inspiration

Another major advantage of hiring a Marketing Agency is a new perspective. A marketing team can help inject new life into marketing efforts, helping to identify unseen opportunities and enhance current campaigns. One example is social media marketing. With more companies looking to broaden their social reach through sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, a Marketing Agency can significantly enhance a brand’s approach to social media, including how they’re perceived by their audience.

4. Speed, Efficiency, and Consistency

As an up-and-coming business owner, you’ll be forced to wear several hats when getting your business off the ground. Generally speaking, this will almost include tackling aspects of the business you’re unfamiliar with, such as branding and digital marketing. With only so much time in the day, it’s important your marketing approach doesn’t suffer from time restraints or inexperience. Hiring a Marketing Agency can easily solve this dilemma.

5. More Affordable Than Hiring In-House

The cost of hiring and maintaining a team of in-house marketers can be very expensive. For smaller businesses, this expense may be too much to afford.
One of the more surprising benefits of hiring a Marketing Agency is cost-effectiveness. Along with providing a plethora of knowledge, experience, and skillset, a Marketing Agency is almost always more affordable compared to hiring a full-time marketing team. For example, after hiring a marketing manager, web designer, graphic designer, content writer, and social media manager, the total cost can reach upwards of multiple six figures a year! And that’s not even including the cost of employee benefits.

Marketing is the heart and soul of any business. At The AD Leaf ®, we’ve spent the last 25 years working with a diverse range of clients — from healthcare and technology to governmental, law enforcement and consumer goods — to perfect our approach to marketing, advertising, and branding. From strategic creative direction to engaging digital marketing, our extensive marketing team is here to handle every aspect of your business.

Want to enhance your content marketing? Looking to take your social media to the next step? Contact the team at The AD Leaf ® Marketing Firm and learn how you can grow with us today!

“Loretta”: Kicking Ads & Taking Names

Posted on | by The AD Leaf Studio West Palm Beach
Content Writing, Marketing, Pay Per Click, Social Media

We’ve all seen it.

The tear-jerker ad released by Google during this year’s Super Bowl commercial ad space.

This ad by Google depicts the voice of an elderly gentleman using Google to remind himself about his late wife, Loretta. This ad was also inspired by a real person, a Google employee’s grandfather. As the commercial begins, it avoids much of what Super Bowl ads are known for. Comedic humor. Celebrity faces. Nostalgic flashbacks. With so many of these pop-culture references and heavy emphasis on humor, each company and advertising agency has one of the most competitive niche ad spaces to fight over. And with a 5 million dollar price tag for a 30-second commercial space, the competition and drive to stand out becomes even more daunting.

To be fair, there were so many ads that were incredibly well-done and clear in their communication. From the Cheetos commercial with MC Hammer dancing in those…pants, to the dog that was the survivor of heart cancer, to the loveable Ellen ad showcasing life before Alexa, the lineup was chock-full of heavy hitters in the marketing space. Then there’s this Loretta ad that had us holding back tears and smiling without even trying.

The commercial opens with slow typing on a familiar Google search browser. The typing was the immediate initial stand-out element. It was slow, more intentional. Before a male voice could be heard I knew this was going to be potentially an elderly person behind the keyboard. Then the words “How to not forget” are seen, typed into the search bar. The stringed music begins to play, creating a somber ambiance. As the commercial continues, you can feel both sadness, but not mourning; a relatable “human-ess” but also a hope for one’s own life.

Then we hear an elderly man asking Google Assistant to help him remember different aspects of his wife, Loretta. It takes a moment to realize, but the more you watch you begin to realize that Loretta is the man’s wife, and she is unfortunately no longer with him. The commercial is of an obviously kind and warm widower who is using Google to help him remember things of a woman he loves but is no longer there with him.

As you continue to watch you see slideshow and videos that are obviously taken from a real individual from a real marriage and a real life. This is so important because if this was done any other way, an ad like this (which is already a big risk due to the nature of the ad) could be seen as insensitive, manipulative, and morbidly crass. But as you watch you see over and over pictures and videos of a real couple, happy and in love. Google is right there, helping this man remember Loretta’s favorite foods, how she liked going to Alaska, and how she hated his mustache he grew one time. Heart-warming doesn’t even begin to describe all the feels we feel watching this!

“Remember, don’t miss me too much, and get out of the dang house.”

Here we see that she truly is gone, but we also see a beautiful snippet of her relationship towards him, not just his towards her. It alludes to a moment he had with his wife, probably one of the last. Google helps with the heart-string tugging here by including the last little note from Loretta that said, “…and get out of the dang house’ helping the viewers navigate this sad topic with life and humor. The commercial ends with us hearing a human voice, the voice of the widower, and a door opening as he leaves the house with his dog, ending on a beautiful, real note.

Google’s “Loretta” ad embarks on a risky balancing act of sadness and joy, life and loss…and does it beautifully. Check out these stats from the data-driven video marketing agency, Unruly:

“Loretta” earned an EQ score of 6.5 thanks in large part to its large emotional impact. Nearly half (49%) of viewers had an intense emotional reaction to the ad. It was a 58% more intense reaction than the average U.S. ad and the highest of any of the 40 Super Bowl ads tested by Unruly. According to the company, “Loretta” was nearly twice as likely to make viewers smile, almost four times more heart-warming and 12 times more sad than the average U.S. ad.
The emotional reaction also seemed to translate to brand impact, leading to the highest brand favorability of any of the Super Bowl ads Unruly. Nearly half (49%) of all viewers reported a favorable view of the brand, compared to a U.S. average of 37%. What’s more—46% of viewers also reported purchase intent, with 47% saying they were willing to find out more about the brand.

“The Super Bowl is traditionally the chance for advertisers to bring home the laughs, yet two of the top three ads leaned heavily on more serious emotions. Google’s ‘Loretta’ ad had the highest score for sadness in the top 10 and both Google and New York Life Insurance had some of the highest scores for warmth at 32% and 26%, respectively,”
The data and the results shine a burning spotlight on one (there are obviously many more) glaringly important fact when it comes to marketing: In order to win big, you must risk big.

When I say risk, I mean to dare to take the road that others aren’t taking. Google did it perfectly in this ad because they counted on seeing the same trend of humor and nostalgic ads, all clamoring for a spot as top dog (Speaking of the dog, the other ad in the top 3 tier was about the dog who had heart surgery!). Google specifically and deliberately swam against the proverbial current by taking not the humorous and nostalgic road which is always a safe choice that “works”, but by daring to forge a new path by sewing themselves into your lives through appealing to something that binds every person together: Love. Google was making a simple and yet incredibly effective claim that we need Google for the most important things in our lives.

In order to win big, you must risk big. Sure, you can spend too much money on a 30-second ad space to create something brilliant, funny, and feel-good. Most of the ads we viewed and analyzed were indeed incredibly well thought out. But what about making something memorable? By appealing to different emotions than the typical niche space of the Super Bowl ad space, Google dared to be an outlier.

This is why Google’s Loretta is brilliant marketing. It perfectly goes against the trend by taking big risks in appealing to unusual emotions, while implying that we need Google for life’s most beautiful things.

And won.

Is your business ready to take the road less traveled and make something not only great but memorable? Consider partnering with us at The AD Leaf ® and let’s start kicking ads and taking names together. Call 321-255-0900 today.