The number was 312 percent. For a town marketing report, this was the sort of number that arrives wearing a cape. Stewart Communications had helped Franklin, North Carolina replace a tourism website that had served for 12 years, and engagement had apparently leapt. Then the arithmetic was checked. The number was not 312 percent. It was 83 percent.
This is normally where a marketing case study becomes foggy. The decimal points disappear. The anecdote changes subject. But the correction was published, the original claim was retired, and 83 percent remained what it had been all along: a very good result. That small act of numerical housekeeping says something useful about Stewart Communications. The firm sells stories, but its most revealing story contains an edit.
The little agency with the long memory
Stewart Communications is a small, privately held marketing and public-relations firm in Franklin. The website presents a list broad enough to sound like several agencies accidentally sharing a business card: marketing strategy, social media, websites, events, reputation management, graphic design, advocacy, PR, consulting, copywriting, data and advertising. The organizing idea is less “we do everything” than “these things work better when they know one another.”
Founder Morgan Stewart started the firm in 2013. Before that came journalism, Virginia economic development, national media relations for Circuit City, 13 years of communications and external affairs at Entergy, and post-Katrina work for Entergy New Orleans. His team adds Devon Dupuis in digital strategy, advertising and fundraising; Aaron McKeon in web development and business systems; and David Oakes, a designer whose résumé includes Pepsi, AAA, Toyota, Holiday Inn and Dairy Queen.
That range matters to customers who do not want to referee five vendors. A nonprofit can need an event, a donor page, local press and a crisis plan in the same month. A restaurant may need design and social posts until the morning a reporter calls. A tourism board needs everything at once, every season, with public minutes waiting afterward.
“We manage issues, and see around corners and into the future to avoid problems.”Stewart Communications
The bid that changed the storefront
In 2024, Franklin's Tourism Development Authority reconsidered a marketing relationship that had lasted more than a decade. Three proposals arrived. The incumbent, Drake Enterprises Limited, proposed $172,462, with staffing provided without charge. Kudzu Brands proposed $180,000. Stewart proposed $150,000, including staffing, media and advertising content.
The least expensive proposal won. But thrift alone does not explain the following year. Stewart began with stakeholder conversations and research into who visited Franklin and why. The team built the “Experience Franklin” identity, launched a new destination website, organized email outreach, worked on press tours, placed social ads and billboards, developed event promotion and coordinated with regional tourism partner Visit Smokies.
By March 2025, the board had a choice: reopen the competition or continue. Its consensus was to stay. In April, it unanimously approved another one-year agreement and a $180,000 allocation. The price had risen to the ceiling of the original field, but now the town had seen the machinery work.
The contract allocations are public marketing budgets, not Stewart Communications revenue. They include media and content costs as described in town records.
A website is a theory about a visitor
An old tourism site usually fails quietly. Nothing bursts into flame. It merely treats the visitor like someone willing to rummage. Franklin's replacement was described as a digital storefront, an important phrase because storefronts have an obligation that archives do not: they must tempt a person to enter.
The new site accumulated more than 2,000 images of attractions and events. It added search and fresh categories. The campaign fed it with social posts, emails, guides, media relations and paid placements. At the three-quarter mark, a town report listed 3,500 active users. By mid-2025, that figure was 32,000. The reported engagement improvement settled at 83 percent after the correction.
The useful part was not a magic channel. It was the sequence: ask why people come, rebuild the place they land, then make every channel point toward it.
This is what another business can copy. Not the mountain photographs or the billboard on Highway 441, but the order of operations. Discovery before distribution. A useful owned destination before paid attention. One source of campaign truth, translated for different channels. Metrics close enough to the work that a board can interrogate them.
It works best when the underlying place or product gives the agency something honest to reveal, when a client can grant one team access across channels, and when the buying cycle rewards repeated exposure. It travels poorly when the offer itself is weak, internal owners protect their separate fiefdoms, or nobody can connect attention to a meaningful action. Integration magnifies coherence. It also magnifies confusion.
Where Stewart sits
Stewart is not a software platform, a global network or a boutique devoted to one medium. It occupies the useful middle between hiring a communications department and assembling freelancers one by one. Its customers include small businesses, nonprofits, public agencies, economic-development groups and consumer brands. Named work ranges from PosiGen Energy and Another Broken Egg Cafe to Special Liberty Project, a farmers market and Florida education organizations.
Crisis experience is the unusual ingredient. Plenty of small agencies can schedule a post or redesign a home page. Fewer have a founder who handled national media across more than 150 markets and communications after Katrina. That experience changes the product even on calm days: messages are considered not only for the audience they seek, but for the audience that might misunderstand them.
The firm is also conspicuously local. In 2024 it signed NIL agreements with three former Franklin High School softball players - McKenzie Redoutey, Taylor Ensley and Tori Ensley - then coached them on communications. It is the sort of partnership a giant agency would diagram as community activation. In Franklin, it was three hometown athletes, a baseball field and people who knew their parents.
The corrected number belongs here. A local agency cannot float above its claims for long. Its clients sit at the next meeting. Its work becomes the website everyone uses and the billboard everyone drives past. The proximity can be uncomfortable. It is also a competitive advantage. Stewart Communications sells reputation in a place where reputation still has an address.
Keep exploring