Are you a full-service marketing agency, a website agency, or something else?
Formally, we're a full-service marketing agency by scope — we cover SEO, link building, content, paid media, social, and design under one roof. Structurally, we're built more like a small studio than a traditional marketing agency: 4-6 senior operators, no accounts department, no juniors billed at full rate.
The distinction matters for how you compare us against alternatives.
A traditional full-service marketing agency (Ogilvy, WPP shops, mid-sized independents) has 30-500+ people, dedicated account teams, formal onboarding processes, and quarterly business reviews. They excel at large brands with complex multi-market campaigns, executive-visibility requirements, and budget for the coordination overhead. Retainer minimums usually $25 000-100 000+/mo.
A pure website agency designs and builds sites but doesn't run ongoing marketing. Good for one-off design projects with clear scope; less useful if you want the same team that designed the site to run SEO and content on it.
A specialist shop (pure SEO agency, pure content marketing agency, pure paid media shop) does one thing exceptionally. Fits brands where one channel is dominant and you can integrate specialists yourself.
An ixni-style small integrated studio — us — sits between these. Full-service in scope, small team by structure, mid-market by economics ($5 000-20 000/mo retainers). Fits brands that want coordinated SEO + design + content + paid without paying for the coordination overhead of a big shop.
If you're evaluating us against a "full service marketing agency" on paper, the differences will look like:
- Faster response (Slack channel with the actual operators, not a project manager)
- Smaller creative team (fewer variations per round, but faster iterations)
- Less formal reporting (monthly written report vs. quarterly slide deck)
- Lower total cost for equivalent scope (usually 40-60% less than a mid-sized full-service agency)
Trade-off: we're not the right shop if you need 12 parallel regional campaigns launched simultaneously, or if your org needs a formal-agency vendor for procurement reasons.
Are you an SEO company, SEO service company, or SEO marketing company?
These three terms are used interchangeably in the market, but they mean slightly different things in practice:
SEO company — general term. Any business that offers SEO services. Ranges from single-freelancer to 500-person agencies. Says nothing about specialty or price.
SEO service company — usually implies "one of many services we sell." An SEO service company might also do web design, PPC, and general marketing. Common phrasing for mid-market agencies that don't want to niche too tightly.
SEO marketing company — implies "SEO is the primary specialty, everything else is complementary." This is closer to how we position ourselves — SEO is our primary discipline, and content/design/paid exist to make SEO work better.
By any of these labels, ixni qualifies. We're an SEO company (we do SEO). We're an SEO service company (we sell SEO among other services). We're an SEO marketing company (SEO is the primary offer, other services support it).
The label matters less than what's underneath. Ask any SEO company these questions to separate them:
1. Who does the work? Named senior person, or "a team"?
2. Where does data live? Your GA4/GSC/Ahrefs, or a closed portal?
3. How is scope defined? Written breakdown by hours, or round-number packages?
4. What's the minimum term? 3-6 months (realistic) or 12+ (locked-in)?
5. What tactics do you avoid? If they can't name PBNs, marketplace links, and thin programmatic content as things they don't do, they might do them.
6. What happens if we part ways? Deliverables in writing must belong to you.
Our answers: senior lead by name, your accounts, hourly scope, 3-month minimum, we avoid the tactics above, contracts have a delivery-ownership clause.
Price bands to expect from different SEO company categories:
- Freelancer: $500-3 000/mo
- Small SEO service company: $2 500-8 000/mo (this is where we sit at the low end)
- Mid-size SEO marketing company: $5 000-15 000/mo (our upper band)
- Enterprise SEO agency: $15 000-50 000+/mo
What does a full digital marketing service look like from a small studio like ixni?
A full digital marketing service from ixni combines four practice areas — SEO, link building services, content, paid media — into a single integrated program with unified strategy and attribution. That's different from buying these separately from a specialist SEO agency, content marketing agency, and paid media shop.
How it works structurally:
- One senior lead owns the whole program. They coordinate across specialists, set priorities, and are your single point of contact.
- Weekly async updates (Slack + written) covering what shipped, what's in flight, what needs your input.
- Monthly written reports covering all channels with unified attribution — so you can see whether SEO leads converted better than paid leads, whether content drove downstream signups, etc.
- Quarterly strategy reviews — 90-minute call to reset priorities based on quarter-over-quarter data.
What's included:
- SEO: technical, on-page, content, link building services under one strategy
- Content marketing: articles, landing pages, content upgrades — mapped to SEO clusters, not published as standalone editorial
- Paid media: Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads with shared attribution
- Design: whatever the campaigns need — landing pages, banners, motion, brand refresh
- Reporting and analytics setup
What's not included by default (optional add-ons):
- Influencer campaigns
- PR crisis management
- Photography/video production
- Enterprise CRM implementation (HubSpot, Salesforce migrations)
- TV/OOH creative
Pricing: $9 800/mo (Momentum tier) for a typical scope, $18 000+/mo (Empire tier) for multi-market, multi-brand, or heavy ecommerce.
Common alternatives to compare against:
- Hiring 3-4 specialists ($3-4k each = $12-16k total) — usually more expensive and forces you to be the integration layer
- Hiring a bigger agency ($25k+/mo) — more formal reporting, slower iteration, more layers between you and the doers
- Fractional CMO + tactical execution ($10-15k) — better if you don't have marketing leadership; overkill if you already have a marketing director
The right fit depends less on price than on how you like to work.
Where are you based, and do you work with international clients?
ixni is fully remote. There's no physical office, no headquarters city. The team is distributed across Europe, working on European business hours (roughly 8am-8pm CET). This is a deliberate choice — no office means lower overhead, which means competitive pricing, and no city location bias means we hire the best people we can find, not the best people within commuting distance.
Client base geography (approximate):
- Ukraine and CEE — ~30%
- Western Europe (UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Portugal) — ~35%
- North America (US, Canada) — ~25%
- Rest of world (Australia, Middle East, Asia) — ~10%
Time zones we cover:
- Europe / Africa (CET/GMT/EET) — best coverage, working hours overlap fully.
- Americas (EST/CST) — 4-6 hours of overlap in the mornings for you, afternoons for us. Slack response times are still under a few hours.
- Americas (PST) — 1-2 hours of overlap. Slack response within a day. Works for async-heavy clients; harder for real-time culture.
- Australia / Asia — mostly async. Weekly sync call at a time that suits you.
Languages:
- English — default for all client communication, reporting, and content unless requested otherwise.
- Ukrainian — native for Ukrainian clients. Content production, meetings, reporting all in Ukrainian if preferred.
- Russian — we accept clients writing in Russian; we respond in English or Ukrainian.
- Other languages — for content production in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian we work with vetted native speakers as freelance contributors.
How remote client work actually flows:
- Shared Slack channel (or Discord / Teams if you prefer)
- Weekly 30-min sync call
- Async status updates midweek
- Monthly deep-dive call (60-90 min)
- Quarterly strategy call
For US/Canada clients we schedule sync calls in your morning; for Europe, mid-afternoon; for Australia, either your morning or a late-night call from our side (usually the former).
Payment: we invoice in USD, EUR, or GBP. Wise, SEPA, or SWIFT bank transfer. For clients in specific jurisdictions with tax-treaty complications we can set up local invoicing entities.
Why should we choose a small studio over a large marketing agency?
Not always the right choice — it depends on your stage, budget, and how you prefer to work. Here's an honest comparison:
Choose a small studio (like us) if:
- You have $5 000-25 000/mo to spend on marketing
- You want the same people who talk to you to actually do the work
- You value speed of iteration over formal process
- You're comfortable making decisions in Slack without a formal RFP process
- You want deep engagement on a few channels (SEO + content + design) rather than broad shallow work across everything
- You're 5-500 people company, likely SaaS, ecommerce, or professional services
- You've been burned by big-agency overhead in the past
Choose a large marketing agency if:
- Your budget is $30 000+/mo and you need to justify it with process rigor
- You need formal quarterly business reviews for stakeholder alignment
- You have compliance/procurement requirements that need a formal vendor structure (Fortune 1000, government, healthcare, finance)
- You're launching in 8+ markets simultaneously and need dedicated PMs per market
- You need offline/TV/OOH as a core channel
- Your CMO or head of marketing wants a peer they can call weekly on strategy
Choose a specialist agency if:
- One channel is dominant (say, 80%+ of your acquisition is SEO) and you want the best pure-play SEO agency in the market
- You already have marketing infrastructure and just need to bolt on a specialist function
Choose in-house if:
- Marketing is a core competency of your business and you plan to build it as a team
- You have the budget for 2-4 full-time senior hires ($150k-500k/year+ in salaries + tooling)
- You can wait 2-3 months per hire and have the ability to retain them
Most brands don't need to make this choice cleanly. Common pattern: hire an ixni-style small studio for 12-18 months, use us to build the infrastructure and processes, then gradually hire in-house as marketing becomes core.
If you're not sure which category we fit, book a discovery call — we'll say honestly whether we're the right choice or which of the alternatives might be better.