“You’re all dirtbags”. “Everyone in your industry is a crook and a liar”. “What you guys do doesn’t work”.
Sadly we’ve heard all of these things when prospecting for new clients. We’ve even heard these things from personal injury lawyers (true story)! None of these statements are true of course, but they usually come about because business owners have partnered with the wrong marketing agencies for their SEM and SEO campaigns. They were promised results (typically with unrealistic timeframes) and when they didn’t get them, it soured their take on the entire online advertising industry. They felt like they’d been taken for the proverbial ride.
As we approach our 23rd year in business this month (virtually unheard of for a digital advertising agency), I wanted to take a few minutes and dispel some of these rumors. Not everyone in the SEM and SEO industry is a dirtbag. We’re not all crooks and liars. And the services we offer do work (very well in fact), provided you partner with the right agency and you have realistic expectations.
The goal of any reputable marketing company is to place their clients in a position to be successful. That’s it. It’s not to quintuple a client’s ROI, or bring them tons of new business every month. Those goals are laudable, but they are not under the agency’s control. Think about it. No one can force a customer to do business with someone, even if they see a perfectly formatted and highly-relevant ad at the very top of the search engines. It just doesn’t work that way. But getting that perfectly formatted and highly-relevant ad at the very top of Google is precisely what we strive for.
Unfortunately anyone with a shingle and a dream can call themselves a digital marketing agency. You don’t have to graduate from advertising school or pass the marketing version of the Bar Exam. And because of that, there are a lot of people out there promising huge results from SEM and SEO campaigns, despite not really knowing what they’re doing. It’s why we always take time to educate our prospective clients on what it is that they can expect from us, what we control and what we do not control, and the realistic timeframes for success. None of that guarantees that a client will be happy with their digital marketing campaign, but it does guarantee that they will be well-informed and not misled.
If you’ve tried working with some of the less-than-scrupulous people in this industry, and you’re frustrated with their lack of transparency and lack of results, give us a try. After all, you don’t stay in a cutthroat industry like ours for 23 years if you don’t know what you’re doing.
