You've got the questions, we've got the answers

Culture fit is key.

It's important that the agency you choose is a good cultural fit for your organization. If you work in a fast-paced industry where you require quick turnaround times, you need an agency who is equally nimble and prepared to meet the demands of your business environment. If your organization is highly data-driven, you need an agency partner who can provide detailed analytics and help you evaluate those analytics on an ongoing basis to optimize performance. If you work in a creative field, you need an agency whose creativity is at the center of everything they do, who can come up with new and exciting ideas that help you stand out.

At Trekk, we value long-term client relationships. We want to understand your business, your sales goals, and your marketing objectives so that we can create meaningful success for you and your organization. We believe that problems are identified by the curious and solved by the courageous, so expect us to ask a lot of questions. Expect us to explore new possibilities. And expect us all to have some fun along the way!

We price on either a project or a retainer basis. Which model is right for you depends on the type of work we’re doing with you and your team.

If you are looking for a website redesign and rebuild, we start by defining the specific requirements and scoping the amount of time that will go into it from start to finish. If you are looking for a trade show traffic-driving campaign with a set number of print and digital deliverables, we can easily scope and price out each of those deliverables. These types of engagements lend themselves well to pricing and billing on a project basis, where you can expect to pay 50% upon approval of the estimate and 50% upon completion.

Other types of work are ongoing and inherently more organic — we embark upon them together, then test and tweak along the way to achieve your desired results. Think social media, SEO and SEM, and content marketing. For these types of work, a retainer can make a lot of sense. We work with you to define and agree upon a monthly retainer fee and manage our time to that every month. Under the retainer model, you can expect to be invoiced once a month for the agreed upon amount. If ever an instance arises where the time and cost associated with an element of your marketing program may put us over our monthly allotted budget, we’ll notify you in advance of any costs above and beyond the agreement so that you can approve the work. 

To determine how well your content marketing is working, you need to start with a baseline. To start, take a look at your current website analytics. Document how much traffic you have gotten over the last 3, 6, or 12 months. Document which content has received the most views and longest engagements. Document how many leads you have generated from your website and what has happened to those leads since they came in. From there, you can start to set your goals for the next 3, 6, and 12 months accordingly.

After you launch your content marketing program, track your performance each month. Key metrics to examine include:

• Number of visitors

• Number of contacts

• Number of leads

• Lead qualification scores

• Lead activity

• Lead-to-customer conversions

• Value of conversions

The number of leads you generate is an important metric, but not the only metric to monitor. It’s important to track lead activity through the buying journey and to start scoring your leads based on repeat engagement. That way, you can evaluate not only the number of leads you’re getting but also the quality of the leads you’re getting. Using content marketing and lead nurturing campaigns helps you qualify your leads over time so that by the time they are ready to talk to sales, they are primed for conversion.

Content marketing is a long game. Clients often experience incremental growth at the beginning and then see the results grow exponentially as more valuable content is added each month. Tracking the number, quality, and value of leads will help you evaluate how well your content marketing efforts are working — and if you aren’t getting the results you want, you’ll have useful insights that help you quickly and efficiently course correct. 

“I need a new website. Can you tell me how much it will cost?”

This is a question we get a lot, and the answer is: it depends. Website design and development costs vary greatly based on the platform upon which you build, the amount of content your site contains, and the types of functionality you need to offer visitors. So when someone comes to us for a new website or a website redesign, we start with discovery.

Through our discovery process, we work with you and the key stakeholders in your organization to define your website objectives and technical requirements. Once we have fully aligned on requirements, we sit down and put together a project plan that outlines the tasks required by our creative, technical, and content teams to complete the website design and implementation to your specifications. From that project plan, we can scope out the amount of time each task will take and, based on that time, the costs associated with each phase of the project, including wireframing, concept development, design and layout, programming, content development and entry, testing, and deployment. We will then present those costs and timelines to you, and if they don’t meet your expectations, we’ll work together to identify where there may be opportunities to reduce time and/or costs or phase the project out so that we can align with your budgetary goals long term.

That said, there are often “quick wins” we can implement right away if your current website is not meeting your needs. From adding a simple live chat feature to help you easily capture interested leads to performing an SEO audit to see how you can increase your organic traffic from search engines, there are short-term changes we can help you implement during the discovery process to help you get results from the start.

The Trekk team has four main departments: client services, content, creative, and technical. Our content team is led by our director of content strategy and includes content developers who specialize in SEO, social media, digital advertising, and marketing automation. Our creative team is led by our creative director who supervises art directors and graphic designers on everything from concept development through design execution and production. Our technical team is led by our technical director who oversees a team of web and app developers. Projects are managed by our client services team. All of these folks are full-time, in-house resources who will be dedicated to your project.

On very rare occasions, we may work with outside contractors in cases where a specific area of expertise can add value to your program. These contractors are well vetted and work as an extension of the Trekk team. Any contractors we do engage are directly supervised by your account manager, along with the content, creative, and technical leads who are driving your program to ensure they have all of the background they need to deliver on your objectives. All communication will be managed by your account manager, who will always be your primary point of contact.

As a tech-driven creative services agency, we understand the benefits — and the drawbacks — of AI in an agency context. We believe in a human-first approach to AI tools. AI can be a powerful amplifier of human effort (creativity, efficiency, and ingenuity), but is not a replacement for what our people can do.

While we may leverage AI tools for tasks like analysis and research, which can increase efficiency for our clients, we will always deliver an original creative work product, the copyright of which can be transferred to the client. We will never put our clients at risk by representing AI-generated content (e.g. copy, images, video) as our own. 

Additionally, we will always protect our clients’ data. Just like all technology we use, we will vet the data security features of any AI tools we use and will not use tools that we determine pose risk to our clients or their data.