Longevity in the agency world is rarer than it should be. Agencies open with a bold logo and an even bolder pitch, land a handful of clients, and disappear within a few years when the founder moves on or the business model doesn’t hold up. It is part of why so many marketing leaders are guarded when a new agency comes calling. They have been burned by turnover before.
Marketing Works has been doing this since 1987. That kind of history is not a nostalgia point; it is a genuine differentiator, and it is worth explaining why.
Stability You Can Actually Verify
Our About page tells the fuller story: founder Brenda Stier-Anstine started the firm at 22 after her previous employer closed, brought on industry veteran Bill Kiefaber as a partner in 2014, and completed a deliberate, multi-year ownership transition to Bill by 2018. That is not an agency that got lucky for a couple of years. That is an agency that has planned for continuity in the same way it asks clients to plan their marketing.
For a business considering a marketing partner, this matters more than it might seem. Continuity means the people managing your account today are likely to still be there next year. It means institutional knowledge about your brand does not walk out the door with a single departure. And it means the strategic thinking behind your marketing has been refined over decades rather than assembled for a pitch meeting.
Specialization Over Being Everything to Everyone
The other side of this story is who we choose to work with. Rather than positioning ourselves as a generalist shop that will take on any client in any category, we have built deep expertise in a specific set of B2B industries: workers’ compensation, professional services, manufacturing, higher education, financial services, healthcare, and technology.
These are not simple industries to market for. Workers’ compensation management involves layers of regulation and complex buyer relationships. Higher education marketing has to speak to prospective students, parents, and faculty at once. Manufacturing companies often need to explain highly technical products to buyers who evaluate more than price. A generalist agency can produce serviceable content across all these fields. An agency that has spent years inside them understands the nuance that makes content actually land.
What This Combination Actually Delivers
Put longevity and specialization together, and you get something a younger, broader agency cannot easily replicate: a team that has seen how these specific industries evolve over multiple economic cycles and that has stuck around long enough to apply those lessons the next time around. When we sit down with a new client in one of these sectors, we are not starting from zero. We already understand the regulatory pressures, the buying committees, and the language that resonates.
You can see this expertise reflected in the range of clients featured on our work page and in the specific approach we take to go-to-market planning across these industries.
Why It Is Worth Asking About
When you are evaluating agencies, it is fair to ask how long they have been in business and whether they have real depth in your industry, not just a case study or two. Those two questions tend to reveal more about what your experience will actually be like than any pitch deck can.
If you work in one of the industries we specialize in and want a partner who already speaks the language, let’s talk.