Marketing Services in North America
We help local businesses across North America get found, generate leads, and dominate their market.
North America is the market most agencies assume needs no explaining, which is exactly why so much money is wasted here. Canada, the United States and Mexico share a continent, a time-zone grid and most of the same platforms — and then diverge on the three things that decide whether a campaign is legal, findable and worth running: consent law, language obligation and competitive density. The clearest example is email. A message that is entirely lawful in the United States under CAN-SPAM, which works on an opt-out basis, can breach Canada's anti-spam legislation, which requires consent before you send. Same list, same copy, same button — different jurisdiction, different answer. The same pattern repeats in privacy law, in French-language obligations in Quebec, and in how winnable a search term actually is depending on which side of a border the searcher is standing. We work across all three countries, with 178 markets covered from Fort McMurray to Mexico City. What follows is the part that does not appear in a North American marketing playbook written in one country.
Three countries, three legal regimes, one campaign that cannot be copy-pasted
Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation has been in force since July 2014 and is one of the stricter consent regimes anywhere. Commercial electronic messages generally require express or implied consent before sending, must identify the sender, and must carry a working unsubscribe mechanism. The United States takes the opposite starting position: CAN-SPAM, in force since 2003, permits sending to a cold list provided the message is honest about who sent it, is not deceptive in its header or subject line, and honours opt-out requests promptly. Mexico regulates personal data under its federal law covering private parties, with its own consent and notice requirements. So the honest summary is this: a cold outbound email programme built for a US audience is a normal, legal growth channel. Run the identical programme at a Canadian list and you may be breaching CASL. We have seen businesses expand north assuming the rules travel, and they do not. Privacy sits the same way. The United States has no single federal privacy statute, so compliance is assembled state by state — California's regime is the one most businesses meet first, and more states have since added their own. Canada layers federal privacy law with Quebec's Law 25, phased in between 2022 and 2024, which brought consent, transparency and privacy-by-default obligations that bite on ordinary marketing tooling — cookie banners, analytics, CRM retention. None of this is a reason to avoid a market. It is a reason to build the consent and tracking layer once, correctly, for the strictest jurisdiction you operate in, and then run everywhere from it. That is cheaper than discovering the gap later, and it is the approach we take by default.
Three markets that behave differently
Canada — 104 markets
A small number of large metros and a very long tail of small ones spread across enormous distances, which changes both the search strategy and the service-area setup. National search volumes are a fraction of American ones, and that is an advantage rather than a problem: terms that are permanently unwinnable in the US are genuinely rankable nationally in Canada. Quebec is a distinct market rather than a translated one — French-language obligations apply to commercial communications, and the Office québécois de la langue française is the authority to confirm current requirements with before you publish. Bilingual work is not a nice-to-have there.
Canada markets → →United States — 67 markets
The most competitive commercial search market in the world, where the generic head term in almost any category has been fought over for twenty years. Winning is almost never a matter of outspending on the broad keyword; it is vertical and neighbourhood specificity, review velocity, and being the source an AI assistant can actually cite. Privacy compliance is assembled state by state rather than nationally, so a business selling across state lines carries more obligations than one that does not. The upside is scale: a single well-built page can serve a metro larger than most European countries.
United States markets → →Mexico — 7 markets
Spanish-first, and genuinely Spanish-first — not an English site with a translation layer bolted on. Search behaviour, phrasing and the trust signals buyers look for are their own, and the businesses that win are the ones whose content was written in Spanish rather than converted into it. Data protection sits under the federal law covering private parties, with its own notice and consent requirements worth confirming for your specific processing. Pricing presented in pesos, contact routes that match local habit, and a build that performs on mobile networks matter more here than another blog post.
Mexico markets → →What crosses the borders, and what stops at them
Build once, works continent-wide
Changes at the border
What a cross-border North American programme needs
The asymmetry worth planning around
The most useful strategic fact about this region is that difficulty is distributed very unevenly across it, and most businesses plan as though it were not. In the United States, the broad commercial term in your category is effectively closed. Twenty years of competition, national brands with real budgets, and aggregators occupying the top of the results mean that the generic head term is not a realistic target for most businesses. What is realistic is depth — the specific service in the specific neighbourhood for the specific buyer, repeated across enough of them that it adds up. That is slower to build and much harder to dislodge once built. In Canada, the arithmetic is different. Query volumes are smaller, but so is the field, and the aggregators are thinner on the ground. Terms that no business could win nationally in the United States are genuinely winnable nationally in Canada — which means a Canadian business frequently gets better returns from a national play than a hyper-local one, the exact opposite of the American advice it will read online. In Mexico, the deciding factor is usually neither volume nor competition but fit: whether the content was built in Spanish for Spanish-speaking buyers or converted from an English original. The difference is visible to readers immediately and to search engines fairly quickly. The practical consequence is that a single North American strategy is usually three strategies sharing one technical foundation. That is more work to plan and considerably less work to run than three disconnected programmes, which is what most businesses end up with by accident.
North America marketing questions
We market in the US. Can we run the same campaigns in Canada?
The website, the SEO work and the paid search structure, yes. The email and SMS programme, not without changes. The United States operates on an opt-out basis under CAN-SPAM while Canada requires consent before you send under CASL, so a cold list that is fine in the US can be a problem in Canada. Before expanding north we separate the Canadian contacts, establish the consent basis for each, and run the Canadian programme from that — and we would encourage you to have your own counsel confirm it rather than relying on a marketing agency for a legal conclusion.
Do we need a French version of our site for Canada?
If you sell in Quebec, French is a legal obligation for commercial communications rather than a matter of preference, and the requirements have been tightened in recent years. Confirm what applies to your specific business with the Office québécois de la langue française. If you sell elsewhere in Canada, French is a commercial decision rather than a legal one — and a reasonable one in bilingual markets like Moncton or Ottawa. What we will not do is machine-translate an English site and call it a French one; it reads as what it is, and it does not rank.
Is Canadian SEO easier than American SEO?
Different rather than easier, and in one specific way genuinely more favourable. Search volumes are smaller, but the competitive field is thinner, so national ranking for a term is achievable in Canada where the equivalent American term is closed to all but the largest players. The trap is applying American advice unmodified: a Canadian business is often better served going national on a term than pursuing the hyper-local strategy the US content marketing industry recommends.
How do the US state privacy laws affect a small business?
It depends on where your customers are rather than where you are, which catches people out. The United States has no single federal privacy statute, so obligations accumulate state by state as you sell across lines, with California the one most businesses encounter first. In practice the sane approach is to build the consent and tracking layer once to a high standard and run everywhere from it, rather than maintaining separate behaviour per state. A lawyer should confirm what applies to you; we build to whatever standard you are held to.
Do you work in Spanish for Mexico?
Yes, and written in Spanish rather than translated into it. The keyword research is done in Spanish, the copy is written by native speakers, and the pricing and contact routes are built for how Mexican buyers actually transact. A translated English page is identifiable as one, and it competes badly against businesses whose content was built for the market.
We are a Canadian business wanting US customers. Where do we start?
With the honest question of which American market, because 'the US' is not a market — it is fifty of them with very different competitive conditions. Usually the answer is one metro or one vertical, built properly, before anything broader. We would also look hard at whether your existing Canadian position is fully exploited first, because the returns there are often better than a difficult first year in a large American metro.
Selling across the Canada, US or Mexico border?
Tell us which countries you actually sell in and who buys from you, and we will map what changes at each border — including the parts of your current programme that should not be run across one.
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