Daily, Danny Star and the team browse through so many different articles about online marketing, SEO, and so forth.
Many of these say the same things over and over again.
We recently came across a great article (from the excellent Search Engine Journal) which explains “how agencies can build trust” with a new SEO client in the first thirty days of their partnership.
When we looked at it, we realized that the “mirror image” of this article works, too. There are certain actions that an agency, marketer, freelancer, or anyone else you’re working with could take that would show you should move on to someone else.
They Make Unreasonable Promises and Aren’t Easy to Contact
When you start with a marketer or marketing agency, they could promise you the world, literally. Maybe they promise you thousands (if not more) new prospective customers or something similar.
Yet, when it comes time to actually get to work on this, they’re nowhere to be found. Emails, phone calls, and other forms of communication go unanswered.
Best case scenario: they’re hard at work, delivering what they said. Far more likely scenario: they aren’t working.
You Get Someone Else’s Work Paradigm and No One Gets to Know Your Company
Certain marketers have “niches.” They’ll say they emphasize one industry or aspect of online marketing. Often, this is a selling point. “Our specialty,” it could be introduced as, or something like that.
However, the flip side of this is that they might be fitting your company into a game plan that worked for another one.
Instead of sitting down to talk to you about how they could improve your company, they give you what (may have) worked for someone else.
That’s just one more factor that shows how important communication during all of this is.
Opaque Methods and Cloudy Metrics
Finally, many of their processes might be opaque. The opposite of transparent, they don’t really let you know exactly how they do business.
This is then reflected in the first report.
They might “fudge” the numbers a bit, so as to show you one part that may have improved (while gliding past all of those that did not).
Your company deserves so much better than this.
To talk to Danny about how to find the right marketing for your company or anything else, you can schedule a remote marketing consulting in Los Angeles session with him at (213) 457-3250.
