Why You Need Real, Live, Marketing Firm

You’ve probably seen the commercials advertising low cost, whole package online marketing for the price of several cups of terrible coffee a day. It looks good, they have designers and content creators and account managers and lots of other website people raring to help you create a marketing package better that Amazon’s. There are even actual statements from employees and they’re talking about how much they love creating content and logos and designing websites! They love it! They’re passionate about it! It’s $189 dollars a month and you basically get your own marketing department! So what’s the problem? You don’t actually get any of those things.

When something sounds too good (or cheap) to be true, that’s generally because it is, and that’s certainly the case when it comes to companies claiming to give you a marketing package for a fraction of what one is worth. What they’re promising might seem amazing, but what you can expect is far different.

First, you probably won’t own your domain name. That’s important because should you become dissatisfied with the service you’ve paid for, you can’t take your website and go to another firm. They own it, and they keep it. Same goes for the content they’ve created for you. You’ll be starting from scratch.

With us, you own it. Your site is your own from the moment it’s launched. If you’re unhappy with our service, you can take your site elsewhere with the knowledge that it was built to best practices.

Second, while you might be initially happy with what you’ve purchased, your needs will probably change over time. You might want to add ecommerce, different forms, change your logo, add or remove services, and in most cases, because  these places use poorly designed templates, those things are either going to be prohibitively expensive or impossible.

Conversely, we empower you to control your online presence. We will train you on how to utilize WordPress so that you can edit your own website as needed. We create your website in anticipation of your changing needs so that functionality can be added or removed easily and economically.

Finally, what happens if your website breaks? It goes down suddenly and you’re losing business, and you’re stuck in a phone tree. If you’re lucky, you’ll get an agent who has never met you, has never visited your site and doesn’t really care whether or not you’re back online in minutes or within the next week. That’s not a good position to be in, ever.

When you call us, you speak to us. You will never be placed on hold, you will never have to explain your problem to a stranger, and where possible, we will resolve your issue while you’re on the phone. We will call your hosting company on your behalf, and we’ll never leave you in a position where you’re losing money.

That said, we can’t give you an entire branding package for $189 a week.  We can’t because part of what you get is the ability to call us and actually speak with us. We know you, we value your business, and we work with you to create successful marketing strategies that are going to drive revenue. We’re experienced and we care about your success. We see each client’s business as yoked to ours, and we treat you as we’d like to be treated.

If you’d like to know more about our flexibly priced packages (we finance!) give a real marketing firm a call today!

So you’re in need of web marketing, and you don’t know where to begin. Maybe you reach out to a company, maybe they call you, and the conversation generally includes the following:

“We can improve your traffic by 50%!”

“You’ll be on the first page of Google!”

“We can get you thirty leads a month!”

“We can increase your revenue by twenty percent within a quarter!”

Sounds great, right? You pay a monthly fee or even a one time setup charge and they handle everything, and the service will pay for itself because you’ll soon have more business than you can handle! That all sounds wonderful, but there’s a huge problem; If your marketing company is making those types of claims, they’re lying to you.

It seems like a strident claim to make, but here are the facts: We can create a custom SEO strategy for your business, we can draw on our years of experience to do everything within our power to drive views to your website and to get you noticed on Google, but we can’t promise you anything, and we definitely can’t promise you specific results. Not because we don’t want to, and certainly not because we don’t have proven strategies, but because no one can.

To put it simply, Google has a secret sauce for how page results are ordered, and they don’t share it with anyone. A good marketing company looks at market trends and continually updates their strategy to keep up with what Google wants to see. It’s a lot of research and a little guesswork, and it takes experience. Because so many things are going to factor into how your site is indexed, it would be virtually impossible (and unethical) to promise you specific results. If you make hats, and you’re the only person within a hundred miles who makes hats, it’s going to be considerably easier to get you on the front page than if you’re a landscaper among two hundred other landscapers within the same twenty mile radius. We can get you to where you want to go, but it takes time, effort and a strategy specific to your business and market.

Another word of caution, do not count on an expensive SEO strategy that you might not be able to afford to both pay for itself and drive profits within the first month. It doesn’t happen. One of the main tenets of our moral philosophy is that we cannot ethically condone selling you a service that’s outsized for your business or that you don’t actually need. We’ve met with many clients who have payed hundreds, or even thousands per month for SEO strategies only to be nearly bankrupted by services that didn’t perform as promised. It’s heartbreaking to hear from small business owners who were sold on promises like those listed above only to learn a hard (and incredibly expensive) lesson.

If you want a free, no pressure consultation, give us a call!