RSM Marketing Services has acquired Unravel, a Kansas City-based data-driven digital marketing firm with five employees.

The partnership will enable RSM to more rapidly expand its popular Outsourced Marketing Department (OMD) subscription service to better support businesses in the Kansas City area and across the nation.

“Kansas City is a great expansion market for RSM. Its central location, relatively low costs and deep pool of experienced marketing talent make it perfect for us to support our rapidly growing OMD subscribers across the country,” said Bruce Rowley, RSM Managing Partner. “Plus, we’re looking forward to working with the many amazing businesses in Kansas City looking to reduce their marketing department expenses and improve their marketing activities to grow their businesses.”

This isn’t the first of Unravel’s experiences with mergers: The digital marketing agency expanded its services by joining forces with Grape Marketing in September 2018.

RSM will continue to operate Unravel as a division offering specific digital marketing services such as website design, SEO and content marketing. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. RSM expects to hire five new KC staff members in 2019 to support additional marketing services provided to local and national OMD subscribers.

“RSM is a perfect complement to what Unravel already offers here in KC,” said Unravel founder Scott Schaper, who now will serve as president of RSM in Kansas City. “We’ll be able to provide a much wider range of individual services to our existing clients right away, but the real attraction is the Outsourced Marketing Department service, which is a game-changer in the industry.”

The RSM OMD subscription enables a business to access a team of dozens of marketing experts and technologies all led by a marketing director. The subscription rate is determined by the client based on their budget or the expected scope of work and is often less than the cost of a single marketing full-time employee.

“Clients can set their subscription rate, based on what their business has budgeted or on the scope of work they want to accomplish over the span of six to 12 months,” said Mike Snyder, managing partner at RSM. “If their needs change we can adapt to that by working with the client to shift priorities or adjust their subscription rate for a month or more. The work is all done by our employees, so we don’t have to pass along marked-up, freelance costs or inflexible vendor timelines.”

RSM will also immediately expand its Hydraulic Studio video production business to Kansas City and operate its 360kc.com city directory from the Kansas City office.