Montana marketing agency

A Montana marketing and advertising agency that starts with strategy

We’re a brand-led marketing agency in downtown Billings, working with companies across Montana. The brand strategy gets set first, and the web, SEO, content marketing, advertising, and video get built on top of it, by one senior team from strategy through production.

Book a free fit call
Brian Murnion, founder of Let's Canoe, leading a marketing strategy session at a whiteboard
Brand strategy first, marketing second. Every engagement runs in that order, because the order is what makes the marketing work.

1st

Brand strategy first on every engagement

100%

Senior-led delivery, no juniors on your account

35+

Years of combined strategic and marketing work

MT

Based in downtown Billings, working statewide

Forbes

Featured in Forbes

What we do

Marketing services for Montana businesses

Every service below runs on the brand strategy we set first. Run one piece or the whole funnel.

Brand strategy

Positioning, audience, message, and offer, decided before a dollar goes to media. The foundation every other service stands on.

Brand strategy →

Brand identity & design

Logo, type, color, and the design language that carries the strategy into everything a buyer sees.

Brand identity →

Web design & development

Custom WordPress and Shopify builds designed to sell, from the first wireframe through launch and hosting.

Web design →

SEO and AI search

Local and statewide SEO, plus the answer-engine work that gets Montana businesses cited by ChatGPT and Google’s AI results.

SEO services →

Content marketing

Researched, structured content that ranks in Google and gets quoted by AI engines, built to move a reader toward a sale.

Content marketing →

PPC and paid advertising

Google and Meta campaigns priced at 13 to 15% of spend, run by the same senior person who set the strategy.

PPC management →

Conversion optimization

Testing and funnel work that turns the traffic you already have into customers, measured in revenue.

CRO →

Email & SMS marketing

Lifecycle campaigns and automations that keep the customers your marketing already paid to win.

Email & SMS →

Video production

Brand films, commercials, and social video from LC Studios, our in-house production arm.

Montana video production →

The difference

Why strategy comes first at this advertising agency

Most Montana advertising agencies sell execution. You bring the assignment, they produce the ads, the website, or the campaign, and the work is judged on whether it shipped. That model breaks down when the results don’t match the spend, because the problem usually sits underneath the marketing, in a brand position that was never actually decided.

We work in the opposite order. Every engagement starts with brand strategy: where you sit against competitors, who you serve, what makes you the obvious choice, and what the market left open. Then the marketing gets built on those decisions, which is why it holds together across every channel instead of sounding like three different companies. The method behind it is the Let’s Canoe Framework, and it runs on every engagement we take.

The other difference is who does the work. The senior person who scopes your engagement is the senior person who runs it, start to finish. No handoff to a junior team after the pitch. That’s also why the advertising, the content marketing, and the website all sound like the same company: they came from the same strategy and the same people.

Large digital billboards running brand advertising on a busy city corner

Advertising is one layer of the work here, and it performs when the position underneath it was decided first.

Selected work

Montana work you’ve probably seen

Brand strategy, campaigns, content marketing, and film for organizations Montanans already know.

Northern Hotel brand campaign photography by Let's Canoe

Hospitality

The Northern Hotel

Brand strategy, campaign creative, website, SEO, and ongoing marketing for downtown Billings’ century-old anchor hotel.
Billings Symphony season identity cover designed by Let's Canoe

Arts & culture

Billings Symphony

Season identity and brand communication for one of Montana’s most established cultural organizations.
Yellowstone Art Museum 60th anniversary brand spread designed by Let's Canoe

Museums

Yellowstone Art Museum

60th anniversary brand work and campaign video for the region’s contemporary art museum.

See the case studies →

Content marketing

Content marketing in Montana

Content marketing is where most Montana businesses quietly lose. The blog gets started, five posts go up, nothing ranks, and the whole channel gets written off. The problem is rarely effort. It’s that the content was never aimed at anything: no keyword research, no connection to what buyers actually search, and no path from the article to a sale.

Our content marketing work starts the way everything here starts, with strategy. We research what your buyers in Montana and beyond actually type into Google and ask AI engines, build content that answers those questions better than anyone else in the market, and structure every page so it can rank, get cited, and move a reader toward a decision. That includes the technical layer most content shops skip: schema markup, answer-first structure, and internal linking that pushes authority where it pays. If you want to see where your site stands before that work starts, the free SEO audit checks it in about a minute.

The same content marketing work now feeds two audiences. Google sends the traffic, and AI engines like ChatGPT quote the answers. Our SEO services and content marketing run as one discipline because they’ve become one discipline. If you want to see how your current content reads to the machines, our free AI readiness grader will show you in about a minute.

Close-up of website code on a dark screen, the technical layer behind content marketing that ranks

The technical layer under our content marketing includes schema, page structure, and markup that machines can read.

Statewide

One agency, all of Montana

Our office is in downtown Billings, two blocks from the Northern Hotel, and the work runs statewide. We run brand strategy, content marketing, advertising, and production for clients across Montana, Wyoming, and the Mountain West. Montana clients get in-person working sessions when the work calls for it, and everyone gets the same senior team either way.

Billings Bozeman Missoula Helena Great Falls Wyoming

The local roster says more than we could: the Northern Hotel, the Billings Symphony, the Yellowstone Art Museum, Kibler & Kirch, and Altana Federal Credit Union, alongside national work for Fox Sports and Tanqueray. If you’re specifically looking for help in the Billings market, our Billings marketing page and Billings SEO services go deeper on the local work.

What an engagement looks like

Four steps, in the order they run.

Step 1

Fit call

A free 30-minute call with our founder. He’ll listen, ask questions, and tell you plainly whether we’re the right team for the problem. If we’re not, he’ll say so and point you somewhere useful.

Step 2

Discovery and audit

We dig into your market, your competitors, your customers, and your current marketing. The audit ends with a clear read on what’s working, what’s broken, and what to fix first.

Step 3

Strategy

Positioning, audience, message, and plan, decided and written down. This is the document the rest of the work answers to, and it’s yours to keep either way.

Step 4

Marketing that compounds

The channels get built in priority order: web, SEO, content marketing, paid, email, video. Monthly reporting ties the work to revenue, and each quarter builds on the last.

Black-and-white photograph of runners mid-race with motion blur

Ready to start?

Three ways to start the conversation, depending on where you are.

Researching

Self-assessment

Fifteen questions, about three minutes, and a score that shows where your brand stands and where the gaps are.

Take the free brand audit

Evaluating

20-minute fit call

A short call to see whether we’re the right fit for your situation.

Book a call

Specific project

Send a message

Tell us what you’re working on. We’ll reply within a day.

Send a message
Anna and Brian Murnion, co-founders of Let's Canoe, a Montana marketing agency in Billings

Let’s Canoe founders Anna and Brian Murnion.

Who you’d work with

Founder-led, from the first call to the last deliverable

Let’s Canoe was founded in 2021 by Anna and Brian Murnion, a husband-and-wife team with more than thirty-five years of combined experience across brand strategy, design, content, and digital marketing. Brian leads every strategy engagement personally. There’s no account layer between you and the person making the decisions on your work.

We’re an intentionally small senior team, and we take a limited number of engagements each quarter to keep it that way. That’s a constraint we chose, because the alternative is the agency model where the people who won your business hand it to the people who didn’t.

Questions

Montana marketing agency questions

Answers from a brand agency in Billings that leads with strategy. If yours isn’t here, the fastest way to get it answered is to book a free fit call.

Choosing a Montana agency

How do I choose a marketing agency in Montana?
Look at three things before the portfolio: whether strategy comes before execution in their process, whether senior people do the actual work or hand it down after the pitch, and whether their case studies name real clients with real outcomes. Montana’s agency market is small enough that reputations are checkable, so call a client or two. Then have the direct conversation about budget and scope early, because the honest agencies will tell you quickly whether the fit is right.
What’s the difference between a marketing agency and an advertising agency?
An advertising agency traditionally creates and places ads: the campaign, the media buy, the creative. A marketing agency covers the wider system around it, including strategy, web, SEO, content, email, and analytics. The line has mostly dissolved, and today the useful distinction is between agencies that start with strategy and agencies that start with deliverables. We’re built as the first kind: the brand position gets decided first, and the advertising is one of the things built on it.
Do I need a local Montana agency, or can I hire anywhere?
You can hire anywhere, and for some work location barely matters. Local earns its premium in three places: market knowledge (what actually works in Billings differs from what works in Denver), in-person working sessions when strategy decisions need the right people in a room, and production, since video shoots and photography in Montana are much easier to run from Montana. We work remote-first with clients across the country, and our Montana clients get all three of those advantages.
What should a Montana business expect to pay an agency?
Project work in Montana generally runs from a few thousand dollars for a focused engagement to $20,000 to $40,000 for full brand strategy work. Monthly retainers for ongoing marketing usually land between $2,000 and $10,000 depending on scope and channels. Beware of both ends of the spectrum: $500-a-month retainers can’t fund real work, and national-agency pricing doesn’t guarantee national-agency thinking. We publish pricing on our service pages because we’d rather filter early than surprise late.
How is Let’s Canoe different from other Montana marketing agencies?
Two ways. First, order of operations: every engagement starts with brand strategy, and the marketing gets built on it, which is the reverse of the execution-first model most agencies run. Second, seniority: the person who scopes your work is the person who does it, with no junior team behind the curtain. We’re also one of the few Montana agencies with a full in-house production arm, LC Studios, so strategy through film happens under one roof.

Services and scope

What services does Let’s Canoe offer?
Brand strategy, brand identity and design, web design and development, SEO and AI search visibility, PPC and paid advertising, conversion rate optimization, email and SMS marketing, content marketing, and video production through our in-house arm, LC Studios. Every service runs on the brand strategy set at the start of the engagement, and you can run one channel or the whole system.
Do you do content marketing in Billings and across Montana?
Yes. Content marketing is one of our core services, run together with SEO as one discipline. The work covers keyword and audience research, editorial strategy, writing, the technical structure that makes content rank (schema, answer-first formatting, internal linking), and the measurement that ties content to revenue. We build content to earn two audiences at once: Google rankings and citations in AI answers.
What does content marketing cost in Montana?
Real content marketing in Montana generally runs $1,500 to $5,000 per month depending on volume and how much strategy, design, and technical work rides along with the writing. One well-researched, well-structured article that ranks is worth more than eight fast ones that don’t, which is why we scope content programs around targets rather than word counts. Ask us for a real number on a fit call.
Do you handle advertising and media buying?
Yes. We run paid search and paid social through our PPC management service, priced at 13 to 15% of ad spend with a one-time setup fee. For traditional placements like billboards, radio, and TV in Montana markets, we handle creative and strategy and coordinate placement with local media partners.
Can you produce video in Montana?
Yes, and it’s one of our strongest capabilities. LC Studios is our in-house film and video production arm: brand films, commercials, documentaries, and social video, with senior crews based in Billings and experience shooting across the state. Work from our team has run nationally, including projects for Fox Sports and Tanqueray.
Do you work with B2B companies in Montana?
Yes. B2B marketing in Montana has its own shape: longer sales cycles, buying groups instead of single buyers, and markets where reputation moves faster than advertising. Our strategy-first model fits it well, because B2B wins on a clear position and consistent message more than on volume. We work with B2B service and product companies across the state and beyond.

Working together

What size companies do you work with?
Mostly established small and mid-sized companies, typically five or more years in, 25 to 300 employees, past the startup stage and into the phase where the brand has to carry the next stage of growth. That includes businesses, credit unions, healthcare organizations, hospitality, and nonprofits. Stage matters more to us than size: the work pays off when there’s real revenue to protect and a real decision to make.
How do engagements start?
With a free 30-minute fit call with Brian Murnion, our co-founder and chief strategist. He’ll listen, ask questions, and tell you honestly whether the problem is one we solve well. From there, most clients start with either a fixed-scope brand strategy audit or a defined project, and ongoing marketing follows once the strategy is set.
Do you require long-term contracts?
No. Strategy engagements are fixed-scope projects. Ongoing marketing runs month to month after an initial minimum that varies by service, because channels like SEO and CRO need a realistic runway to produce measurable results. We’ll tell you upfront what’s achievable in 90 days versus a year, and then you judge us on it.
How do you report on marketing performance?
Monthly reports built around revenue and the metrics that lead to it: qualified leads, conversion rates, cost per acquisition, organic visibility, and channel-level results. You’ll never get a report that hides behind impressions. If a channel isn’t paying, the report says so, along with what we’re changing.
Where are you located?
Downtown Billings, Montana, at 119 N 29th St, two blocks from the Northern Hotel. We work in person with clients across the Billings area, travel throughout Montana for strategy sessions and production, and run remote-first engagements with clients across the country.

Getting started

Is the fit call really free, and what happens on it?
Yes, it’s free, and it’s 30 minutes with our founder rather than a salesperson. He’ll ask about your business, your growth, and what’s prompting the search. If we’re a fit, you’ll get a recommended starting point and a real number. If we’re not, he’ll say so directly and point you toward something useful, which happens regularly and costs you nothing.
I’m not sure what my business needs yet. Where do I start?
Start with one of the free tools. The brand audit scores your brand in about three minutes and shows where the gaps are. The growth gap calculator is built for companies whose growth has flattened and shows the cost of the plateau in dollars. Both are free, neither requires an email to see results, and both make the first conversation sharper.
Do you take on every client who wants to work with you?
No. We take a limited number of engagements each quarter so the senior team stays on every account, and we pass when the fit is wrong: when the budget can’t fund the work honestly, when the timeline demands promises nobody can keep, or when the business needs something we don’t do best. The fit call exists to figure that out quickly, in both directions.

Ready to work with a Montana agency that starts with strategy?

A free 30-minute fit call with our founder. He’ll listen, ask questions, and tell you plainly whether we’re the right team.

Book a free fit call

A brand agency in Billings, Montana. We set the brand strategy, then build the marketing on top of it, with one senior team from strategy through production.

406-998-7901
team@letscanoe.com
119 N 29th St, Billings, MT 59101

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