Full Service Agency.

A full-service engagement normally covers six blocks: strategy, brand, digital product, content, channels and measurement. How deep each block runs differs enormously between agencies. The label says only that all six sit under one contract. It says nothing about the standard of any of them.

• Strategy and positioning. Audiences, offering, demand, competition, message. The block that gets skipped most often, because it produces no visible output. Its absence is what later turns every design discussion into a matter of taste.
• Brand and visual identity. Logo, colour, typography, image language, application across every channel. The main part of the work in a fresh start; often only a refresh for an established company.
• Digital product. Website, online shop or web application: structure, design, development, editing system, operation. The centre that every other block pays into.
• Content. Copy, images, video, translation, ongoing editing. The block with the widest gap between what is offered and what happens, because content needs subject knowledge out of your own company.
• Channels. Search visibility, paid advertising, visibility in AI answers, social media, email. This is where reach is either created or not.
• Measurement. Analytics, conversion tracking, reporting, conclusions. Without this block, everything else is a matter of opinion.

In practice this means one thing: have those six blocks itemised in the quote, each with effort and ownership. A full-service offer that carries only a monthly figure and a list of buzzwords can be interpreted freely later on. It will be.

This is the honest centre of the page: no team is equally strong at strategy, design, development, editing, advertising and measurement — and agencies that claim otherwise are selling breadth as depth. Depth comes from repetition. Someone who builds ten online shops a year is better at it than someone who builds one and designs posters alongside. That is not a criticism of full service. It is a description of how skill forms.

Every agency therefore has a core and an edge. The core is the discipline it came from and where it spends most of its hours. The edge is what got added because clients asked for it. At the edge, work is either done by less experienced people, bought in, or delivered at a smaller scale than in the core. All three are defensible. It only becomes a problem when nobody says where the core stops.

That has a very practical consequence for you. Do not ask whether an agency offers a service — they all do. Ask what share of last year's working hours went into it. An agency that puts 70 per cent of its hours into websites and 5 per cent into social media will give you a solid baseline on social media and no more than that. If social media is your main channel, you are in the wrong place, whatever the quote says.

The second point is capacity. Full service means the same people move between your disciplines. In the weeks when the website goes into acceptance testing, less happens on the advertising side. That is not neglect, it is arithmetic. So do not ask for simultaneity. Ask for a sequence: what comes first, what comes after, and how we will know the first step is finished.

With a single question, asked for every advertised discipline: show me a project from the last twelve months where you did exactly this, and tell me who worked on it. That question cannot be answered with marketing. Either there is a recent example and a name, or the discipline is a label.

Four additions make the test hold up:

• Ask about the core. "Where does most of your revenue come from?" An agency that dodges that question either has no core or would rather not name it. Both are information.
• Have buy-in disclosed. Which disciplines run through partners or subcontractors, at what mark-up, and who is liable for the result? Buying in is fine. Buying in quietly is not.
• Agree one figure per discipline. What does not appear in the monthly report does not get done. One line per block is enough; the point is visibility, not report volume.
• Ask what they would decline. "Which part of this engagement would you hand back if I asked you to be honest?" An agency that gives away a part of a full-service brief is thinking about your interests. One that keeps all of it is thinking about its utilisation.

The commercial checks — included hours, data ownership, notice periods, handling of access credentials — are deliberately not repeated here. They are set out in full in our guide to choosing a digital agency and apply whether or not an engagement is called full service.

In house: concept, design and branding, front-end and back-end development, websites, online shops and web applications, content for the web, technical SEO, GEO, plus Google Ads and conversion tracking. That is the core, and it is evidenced by projects. For JUCAN Tailored Suits we built the website, the Shopify store and the branding. For Steuererklärung Zürich a web application with login, document upload and appointment booking. For Rohrsanova a site with its own online calculator for instant quotes. For Edelweiss Räumungen a multi-step configurator. Alongside those: Leo Ristorante, Nolte Küchen Zürich, Basilica Zürich, Racher Papeterie, Kanal One and Don Leone Delivery. The starting point and scope of every project are listed under Work.

Outside our core: classic media planning for print, radio and television; public relations and press work; native apps for iOS and Android; film production with a crew and a set; specialist translation into French and Italian; legal texts such as privacy policies, terms of business and contracts. When a project sits in one of those fields, we bring in specialists and say openly that they are doing the work — or we decline, when the centre of gravity of an engagement sits there and we would only be a middleman.

That is the more awkward route and the more honest one. An agency that passes a service through without commanding it can neither judge it nor answer for it. You will not notice that at the start. You will notice it at the first problem, when nobody can tell you whether an invoice is reasonable or an implementation is any good.

How deep the individual building blocks go is set out on their own pages: Web design for design, build and price ranges, Custom software for anything that goes beyond a website, Ongoing SEO for continuous visibility work, GEO for being named in AI answers, and Google Ads for paid reach.

A full-service engagement almost always arrives as two bills: a one-off build and ongoing support — and you should see both separately before you sign. At DLM Digital a website build runs between CHF 3,000 and CHF 25,000 depending on scope; a prototype or MVP starts at CHF 10,000. On the ongoing side, local SEO starts at CHF 300 a month, full-service SEO at CHF 800 a month and GEO at CHF 2,500 a month. A one-off SEO audit costs from CHF 1,500.

Three things move that sum, and none of them normally appears in a quote:

• Media budget is not a fee. With Google or Meta, part of the money goes straight to the platform. Have both items shown separately, and be careful with models billed as a percentage of media spend: they reward higher spending, not better results.
• Content costs your time. Subject copy, image material, approvals and answers cannot be replaced by any agency. Budget two to four hours a month on your side. Otherwise the engagement stalls without anyone noticing.
• The build-up is not linear. The first two or three months carry considerably more work than the months after. A retainer sized to cover exactly the build-up phase and then left unchanged is too small in the first quarter and too large in the second year.

The detailed breakdowns sit on Web design Switzerland and SEO costs in Switzerland. For a first order of magnitude for your own project, the website cost calculator takes a few minutes and needs no sign-up.

At a small agency, full service means short paths and limited simultaneity. The upside is real: whoever sits in the first meeting works on the project afterwards, decisions need no internal alignment rounds, and nobody translates between sales and delivery. The downside is equally real. There is no deep bench to step in when two engagements hit their intense phase in the same week.

Three things follow that you should raise before signing. First, the sequence: what happens in which month, and what rests meanwhile? Second, cover: who takes over if the main contact is out for two weeks, and does that person have access to everything they need? Third, the ceiling: at what scale would the agency itself say it is no longer the right address?

A provider with a concrete answer to the third question has thought about its own capacity. At DLM Digital that limit sits where a project would fully occupy several roles at once over months, where formal tender procedures with certification evidence are required, or where a channel is needed that is not part of our core. In those cases we say so in the first conversation. It is cheaper for both sides than an engagement that falls apart in month four.

Full service is the wrong choice when you need depth in a single discipline, when the capability already exists internally, or when the budget only stretches to serving every discipline a little. This section sits on an agency page on purpose, because a badly cut engagement helps nobody.

• One channel decides your business. If 80 per cent of your enquiries come through Google Ads, you need specialist depth there, not breadth. Book a specialist agency for that channel and leave the rest where it is.
• Marketing already exists in house. A full-service contract covering disciplines your own team already handles creates duplication and friction. Buy in exactly what is missing.
• The budget is too tight for all the blocks. Spread across six disciplines, a small monthly budget is enough for none of them. One channel done properly beats six channels gestured at. Which one is decided by your demand, not by the agency's offering.
• You already have a good partner for one discipline. Breaking up a working relationship so that everything comes from one source is rarely a gain. The lead agency plus specialists model exists for exactly this.
• The project is one-off and finite. For a relaunch with no ongoing support afterwards you need a project brief, not a full-service retainer. What our individual services cover, and where each of them stops, is set out under Services.

If you are unsure, do not start with a contract. Start with an inventory. A free visibility check or a paid audit with a prioritised action list costs a fraction of an annual engagement and answers the question of which discipline is actually the bottleneck.