A New York Marketing Company That Plans in Ninety-Day Sequences

A New York marketing company should be judged on four things: whether it decides which customers are worth chasing, whether it puts the first dollars in the channel most likely to produce a call, whether it fixes the website and profile that receive those calls, and whether it reports in numbers you can check against your own phone. Digital marketing, online marketing and internet marketing are three common labels for that bundle across New York. The words differ, the work does not.

Everything else is a matter of order, in NYC as anywhere. A restaurant, a dental practice, a contractor and a law office all need to be found, but they are found differently, they sell at different speeds and they are slow in different months. Our job is to read the sector, the boroughs it serves and the calendar, and then to write a sequence that does not waste a month.

The Census survey counts 763,026 workers in health care and social assistance, 427,880 in professional, scientific and technical services, 397,118 in education, 360,339 in retail, 279,507 in accommodation and food services and 265,951 in finance and insurance. Wikipedia's articles on the city's economy and on NYC Health + Hospitals add a narrower picture of health care: about 565,000 people, more than 70 hospitals and 11 operated by NYC Health + Hospitals. The economy article also lists about 180,000 jobs in fashion, about 130,000 in film and television and more than 233,000 in manufacturing across over 10,000 industrial businesses.

For a marketing plan the lesson is breadth. A dental or urgent care practice reaches patients who search from home and from near work, a restaurant depends on visitors and office crowds, and a professional services firm sells to other businesses that compare several names before calling. We keep the plan for each in separate boxes, because the channel mix that suits an urgent care clinic in the Bronx will waste money for a design studio in Williamsburg.

Movers search hardest in August and July, at about 1.16 times an average month, and ease off in December and November. Landscaping peaks in September and April at about 1.26 times and drops to about 0.76 in July and August. Pest control runs from July and March, at about 1.2 times, down to about 0.77 in December and January. HVAC peaks in March and June, window replacement in September and August at about 1.44 times and real estate in August and July at about 1.68 times.

The ninety-day sequence turns that into a start date for a New York business. A window company aiming at the late summer peak begins the foundation work in spring. A mover plans for the warm months from April. A landscaping firm that wants April has to be publishing by January. When the call log differs from the curve, we trust the call log.

Broadway, the U.S. Open in Queens and baseball at Yankee Stadium and Citi Field all shape visitor traffic, though event dates change every year, so we plan around your own call log. A visitor searches for what is near the venue and open now, and often on a phone with a map open. A resident searches for a trade by borough and compares reviews.

For a restaurant, a shop or a service near a venue, that means a profile with accurate hours and photos, a page that names the nearest subway stop or ferry, and a small paid search budget raised in heavy weeks. For a plumber in Riverdale or an electrician in Jamaica, event weeks barely matter, and the effort goes to the borough pages instead. The subway has 472 stations and 25 services, and does not serve Staten Island, so a transit note is a real piece of copy in four boroughs and a mistake in the fifth.

With 205,592 employer firms counted in 2017, a New York owner has plenty of agencies to interview, so ask six things. First, who decides which phrases and boroughs get the budget, and on what evidence? Second, what happens in the first thirty days, in writing? Third, who owns the Google Business Profile, the website and the ad account when the work ends? It should be you. Fourth, how will calls be tracked, and will you see the numbers yourself? Fifth, what does the agency do when something is not working? Sixth, what does it cost, with ad spend separate and clearly labeled?

Any digital marketing agency in New York that cannot answer those six without a long pause is guessing. We put the answers on the page: the plan list below, no setup fee, no contract, and the ad budget paid directly to the platform. We never promise rankings, leads or mentions, and a vendor who does is selling something it cannot control.