About
Two people, thirty years, and one measure of success.
Royal Palm Marketing is Marcus and Christina Pitts. The measure of success is whether you're making more money — not whether the report looks impressive.
How this started
Royal Palm Marketing was founded in Ankeny in 2022, which makes it a young business run by someone who has been doing this work for thirty years. That gap is the whole story. Marcus spent three decades inside marketing — long enough to watch search engines arrive, watch social media get oversold, and watch a great many small businesses pay monthly retainers for reports full of impressions and reach that never turned into a phone call.
The agency exists because that pattern is fixable, and fixing it does not require a large team. It requires someone experienced enough to know what is likely to work, honest enough to say when something is not worth buying, and available enough that you can actually reach them. So the business was built small on purpose: no account managers, no layers, no twelve-month contracts, and a free website mockup up front so nobody has to take our word for anything.
BBB accredited with an A+ rating since December 2024. A 2026 Ankeny Area Chamber of Commerce member. A 2026 CommunityVotes Platinum Winner in four categories, including Web Design. Those are worth exactly as much as you think credentials are worth, which is why the free mockup exists too.
The team
Marcus Pitts
Owner
Marcus Pitts has three decades of experience in marketing — he was doing this before Google existed, which means he has watched every channel that now looks permanent arrive, get overhyped, and settle into its real usefulness. He has helped hundreds of clients create and execute campaigns that pay for themselves.
What distinguishes him from other marketing people in Iowa is his ability to quickly identify what a business actually needs and turn it into a strategy worth running. That often means telling a business owner that the thing they came in asking for is not the thing that will help them, which is a harder conversation and a more useful one.
He writes the monthly marketing column for the BBB of Greater Iowa and contributes to the Ankeny Business Journal. He also publishes on LinkedIn, Medium, and through local business organizations — not as a lead-generation tactic, but because explaining how this works in plain English is most of the job.
When you contact Royal Palm Marketing, Marcus is who answers. Not a sales rep, not an account manager.
- 30+ Years Experience
- Hundreds of Clients Served
- BBB of Greater Iowa Columnist
- Ankeny Business Journal Contributor
- Results-Driven Strategies
Christina Pitts
Lead Designer
Christina Pitts is the lead designer at Royal Palm Marketing, where she brings brands to life through smart, stylish visual design.
With a background in graphic arts and a degree in marketing, she specializes in logos, print materials, and digital assets. The marketing degree matters more than it sounds like it should: it is the difference between a logo that looks good in isolation and a brand identity that still works at 40 pixels tall in a Google result, on a truck door, and on a form your customer is filling in at 9:40 at night.
Christina works alongside her husband, Marcus, combining creativity and strategy for clients across Iowa and beyond. Two people who can finish a project without a handoff meeting is a genuine structural advantage, and it is most of why small projects move quickly here.
- Logo Design
- Print Materials
- Digital Assets
- Brand Identity
- Graphic Arts Background
When a project needs more than two people
Some projects call for expertise we do not keep in-house — specialised photography, video production, complex development work, or a technical integration outside our usual range. When that happens we bring in experienced specialists from a network we have built over the years, and we tell you we are doing it. What we do not do is quietly subcontract your project and present it as our own work, or pad the team with names on a page who will never touch your account.
Our approach
What Makes Us Different
Five things, and every one of them has a cost to us. That is roughly the test.
Quick Identification
We rapidly assess your business, your market position, and what is actually holding you back, then develop a strategy around that rather than around whatever we happen to sell.
We will tell you what we actually think
Even when the answer is not something we sell. Free advice here is genuinely free — a website review, a look at a competitor, an honest opinion about whether the thing you are considering is worth it.
No long-term contracts
Marketing services are month-to-month. We earn your business every month. If we stop being worth it, you should be able to leave without reading a cancellation clause.
Proven approaches, not experiments on your budget
We apply methods that have produced results for hundreds of clients. New tactics get tested carefully and at small scale, not rolled out across your account because they are interesting.
Meaningful results
Campaigns are designed to pay for themselves. Reporting is tied to calls and forms, in plain English, because you should understand what you are paying for.
Want to know what we would actually do for your business?
Show me what you're doing now and I'll tell you where I see opportunities — even when the answer isn't something we sell.
Credentials worth checking
Every one of these is verifiable somewhere other than this website. BBB accredited with an A+ rating since December 2024, a 2026 Ankeny Area Chamber of Commerce member, and a 2026 CommunityVotes Platinum Winner in four separate categories.
5.0 from 27 Google reviews
Case Study
One example, in detail.
Cosmetic dentist, Des Moines
The practice had a website that looked current and produced very little. The real problem was not the visual design. It was that the site gave equal weight to every service, so the treatments worth the most to the practice were buried alongside routine cleanings, and none of the surrounding suburbs had a page that spoke to them at all.
What we did
- Reorganised the site around high-value treatments — cosmetic dentistry, Invisalign, implants and veneers
- Rebuilt the service architecture so each treatment had a page that could rank on its own
- Built local pages for Clive, West Des Moines, Waukee and Urbandale
- Cleaned up the technical SEO holding the site back
- Improved internal linking so authority reached the pages that needed it
- Added ongoing content on a steady schedule rather than in bursts
Local pages built for Clive, West Des Moines, Waukee, Urbandale.
The result
The No. 1 Google result for an important local search.
The relationship did not end at launch. It expanded from a website project into ongoing SEO, content, and local pages, because the website was the starting point of a marketing strategy rather than the whole of one.
Who we work with
Local service businesses, contractors and home services, professional services, healthcare and dental practices, attorneys, consultants, B2B, nonprofits, and local retail — mostly across Ankeny, Des Moines, West Des Moines, Urbandale, and Waukee. We take work elsewhere in Iowa and out of state when it is a genuinely good fit, and we say so when it is not.
Ankeny, Iowa
Ready to work together?
Bring the problem. We'll tell you what we would do about it, and whether we are the right people to do it.
You'll hear from Marcus within 48 hours.