How to Avoid a Halt in Growth – The Argument for Marketing Retainers

Marketing retainers are a valuable thing to have, and they offer a great deal to businesses interested in upping their game. A retainer is basically an agreement that establishes an ongoing business relationship between you and a partner agency, guaranteeing that marketing work gets done on a regular basis at a pre-determined monthly fee. 

While the services may include everything from social media management to content creation, what it really provides is the ability to think about the future.

When Hudson Fusion was founded, we focused on single-project jobs. Clients would hire us to develop a website or oversee an email campaign, and we’d work hard to deliver high-quality results. But no matter how happy our client was with our work, there was no way for them to develop a long-term plan to better reach and engage potential clients. We could see the opportunities our clients were losing, knowing that they weren’t able to get the maximum impact out of their marketing investment due to the ad hoc nature of project-based agreements. That’s why we introduced retainer agreements: to help your business grow.

Project-based agreements are limited; they aren’t built on a firm foundation of substantial market research and creative brainstorming, and they only pursue short-term goals rather than pursuing the big picture. They don’t offer the ability to develop a plan to kick-start your company’s growth.

Being able to think about the future is a freedom lots of businesses would give anything to have, but who has the time or the resources to devote to thinking about anything but today? It can be hard to do when your month-to-month cash flow is always a little uncertain, with struggles to pay your bills or meet payroll always keeping you up at night. While ad hoc marketing might give you an attractive level of flexibility in spending, it’s going to be less effective at finding and nurturing qualified leads. It’s simply not built for long-term benefits; there’s no way to use it to grow your brand, consistently drive traffic to your website, and transform that traffic into stable, paying customers.

Truly effective inbound marketing requires a real commitment. That’s how you get to the future.

Retainer-based agencies like Hudson Fusion are uniquely situated to empower your company to grow over time. So you get to focus on what you do best – running your business – while the talented folks at the agency handle creative, copywriting, social media, and more, with reliable and quality work at a stable cost that you can safely nestle in your overhead.

Everything – from curating quality content for your Facebook page to building and maintaining engaging, relevant blogs – is handled by people with real expertise and a real interest in growing your business. The right agency will work with you to make sure they understand both your business and your customers as well as you do. That’s how an agency is able to focus on locating and reaching potential customers effectively rather than wasting energy on tactics that won’t engage them – and which your customers won’t pursue!

In other words, with per-project jobs, you get one job with one goal. But with a retainer, you’re paying for a year of proactive thinking by skilled creatives whose focus is on making your brand shine, and who, thanks to their ongoing, deepening relationship with your brand, will only get better and better at it as time goes on. You get the benefit of a long-term strategy built for growth

That’s the power of a retainer: the ability to leverage your relationship with your marketing agency for long-term planning so that you can not only reach your customers where they are, but bring them straight to you.

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