How To Be A Terrible Marketing Company
I went to see my accountant last week to catch up with her and see how her business was going. Things seemed to be great until I asked her how her marketing was going. Her happy face slowly dropped and it became clear that I’d asked a little bit of an uncomfortable question for her. However, since I’m a helpful guy and we’ve always had a good relationship, I thought I’d take a look at the problem and see if I could put together a solution to whatever was bothering her.
The Problem
Looking into her marketing efforts more deeply, it soon became very clear where the problem lay. She had employed five different companies to help her with her marketing including a UK Telecom’s giant, a company offering a google places (map) listing, two SEO companies and a PPC-related business. As you can imagine this is overkill but it is unfortunately typical of the ‘spray and pray’ marketing trap that many small business owners fall into.
Looking at what she had spent with these companies, I was staggered to see the amounts, given that she had very little to show for it and certainly none of the business that they had all promised to her. Unfortunately the problem with these companies is that they have very aggressive telemarketing teams. They will make all sorts of lavish promises to get the client on board with them. The client then spends a big chunk of money as a setup fee and a monthly residual fee for continued services. Of course, this is not a problem if the promised services are actually delivered.
The Facts
Luckily for my accountant, she had installed Google Analytics on her website (a service that was supposed to be carried out by one of the SEO companies last year. This enabled us to look at the statistics and visitors to her website and really assess what each company was doing, where her visitors came from and what (if anything) they typed into their search engine to find her.
We established the following simple facts:
- Between April-September, she had on average 21 unique visitors to her website.
- Out of these visitors, one came from a web directory.
- 55% of her unique visitors came directly to her website by typing the URL into their web browser
- 5 visitors per month reached her website via PPC.
- The rest of the visitors found her via search engines.
In addition to the Google Analytics data, we were also able to establish that no-one had logged into her website via FTP and edited any of the pages or even uploaded any new data.
The Companies
I’m going to preface this with the fact that I will not name any of the companies as I am well aware that at least one of them trawls the Internet looking for any negative comments about them and will then get their legal team to issue threatening letters to get the content removed. I have no interest in creating paperwork that I will have to shred, so they can have their anonymity. However their practices and poor service will be discussed, as a warning to others and also as a case study.
I’m going to talk about the three main offenders here:
1) Telecom’s Giant - The large Telecom giant has a well established marketing team. My accountant was sold a brand new website created by them for £650, along with a hosting fee of £150 and a monthly residual fee of £40. The monthly fee was to cover listing in four UK business directories – in which she was to be a featured listing at the top of her category.
In this company’s defence, the website that they created her has a great layout – however, it was not designed to be marketed and some of the back-end coding is sub-standard. In addition, she told me that they ignored some of the requests she made with regards to the contact details they put on the website. The domain name itself is a keyworded domain name which targets Accounting clients in our local area.
The £40 per month fee for the directory listings sounded interesting. If it was providing a lot of clickthroughs, it would be reasonably worthwhile to have, but let’s remember that this is a post about how not to market – so clearly there is going to be a problem with it. The marketing team for the Telecom company put her business in an incorrect category. She is an accountant and her main type of work is accountancy and the various accounting reports and services related to this. They managed to list her in bookkeeping, where she wasn’t even top of the directory listings as promised.
So what was the return on investment for the website and the residual fee? She mentioned that she received a couple of new clients over the last year from the website itself – so that’s ok. However the directories that she was listed in, delivered a total of 1 (ONE!) clickthrough in 5 months. This is ridiculous and over those 5 months that one click cost her £200. Worth it? No.
2) SEO Company - In August she was contacted by an SEO company who promised to go through her website, optimise her content, perform on-page and off-page SEO, edit the page titles, keywords, meta tags, description etc. Essentially all of the basic things that an SEO company would perform on a website. They also promised to create a Google Places account with her, so that she could get a map listing for relevant keywords. They charged £360+VAT for this service, which they took up-front before any work was carried out.
The problem with this company, is that they didn’t actually do any of what they said. The one thing they carried out a Google Places listing setup with her, asking her to confirm the account over the telephone and give them the pin number that Google’s robot voice reads out to you. She did this, the Google Places listing was setup – but it was clearly rushed and missing any useful content that would help visitors to choose her as their accountant.
We were able to confirm that none of the work was carried out on her website and that the FTP details sent over were never used and no files were ever amended. I was shocked by this as quite clearly the SEO company had failed to honour their contract based on their performance of the promised and agreed terms.
3) PPC Company - This is the company that angers me the most when I look at what has been paid and what has been received. They charged an upfront fee of £600+VAT over 6 months, which was then to renew at a monthly rate of £100+VAT. It is worth noting that when she started this service last year, the company had a different name and they were subsequently brought out by another marketing company in the North West.
The service was to run PPC advertising campaigns for her, targeting local keywords that were to generate her clients. The service was sold as being guaranteed top of Google’s sponsored links (Adwords). I can tell you now that when we researched this, she was not top of the sponsored links, nowhere near in fact.
This is where the story got more interesting. There was an advert for her at the top of Adwords and after further questioning she told me that she had her own Adwords account. So we logged into the account and confirmed that the sponsored links at the top of Google (that she assumed were the PPC Company), were actually her own PPC ads running from her Adwords account. She was shocked and certainly wasn’t the only one. We looked through the campaign stats and we could see she was getting an average of 300 impressions per week, but often only 2 clickthroughs to her website, sometimes only 1. For her to be paying another company to attempt to achieve better results than this, when they weren’t even visible for some of the other keywords seemed absolutely crazy.
The PPC Company even sent her over a report that I was able to look at, where they stated their advert was on average in position 1.7 of Google for her keywords and that they were sending her over 80 visitors per month. Remember those stats in the facts section? Yeah, it’s quite obvious that the data had been manipulated.
Whilst I was in her office, this PPC Company actually phoned up in an attempt to renew the Monthly service as it was due at the end of this week. I witnessed one of the most amazing phone calls I’ve ever heard between a frustrated business owner and a salesman who would not accept no for an answer. When questioned about any of the stats we had in front of us and the ones they had sent over, he dodged every question and kept saying that this information had “no relevance to the situation”. Exasperated, she handed me the phone and I had a very frank discussion with him, explaining that I was a marketing consultant so he could speak freely and in-depth if required. He was still unable to answer the most basic of questions but did quite clearly admit that his company had not performed as it should. Finally, we’re getting somewhere we thought….
But then came the absolute killer, that had both myself and the accountant laughing in amazement. The salesman explained that he was “unable” to cancel the account, because of the terms and conditions. Fair enough, but he might want to look up and learn the two words – “goodwill gesture”. He actually offered a goodwill gesture and guess what it was… Instead of paying £100+VAT per month, the accountant could instead pay £69+VAT per month for two months. The PPC Company would allegedly re-do the campaign and they promised that they would get better results. It was an absolutely amazing offer, if not for the fact that it had been clearly expressed to him already on half a dozen occasions that in no way was the service wanted for another second.
So where did they go so wrong?
It was quite clear from the communication (or lack of it) from all five companies, that their main motivation was the money in the deal. They did not express any genuine concern for the lack of results achieved from their services, nor were they interested in discussing anything that might have helped the account decide where to go from here.
Four out of the five companies had promised monthly reports with their services. The only report that we had available, either via email or via post was the one from the PPC Company with the manipulated statistics. Is it really that hard to create a genuine report these days and send it to a client?
The SEO Company only reacted after the accountant said she wished to cancel the service and requested a refund under non-performance. The SEO Company’s reaction to this was brilliant. As of yesterday, their one and only effort into marketing on the accountant’s website, was to log into the site and put a link to their site at the bottom of the page saying “Site optimised by [companyname]“. Wow… They’ve got some balls to do that.
The Solution
After reviewing all of the services that were offered and all of the services that were not delivered, I immediately advised my account to cancel any and all existing services, including requesting refunds for non-performance where applicable. It’s funny how when you cancel something, a company suddenly springs into life and starts tempting you to stay. Very much like if you were to cancel a mobile phone contract or your cable/satellite TV package.
The PPC Company actually emailed her this morning (same guy as on the phone last week), claiming that he had called her all morning and hadn’t been able to get through. Another lie, he hadn’t called at all. In his email he also stated that “the account will remain live until they have spoken together”. Bear in mind that the renewal date for this service is 7th October and guess who is “not available” when she calls back to tell him she is still cancelling and doesn’t care what he has to say.
Our simple solution was as follows – we looked at her current business and assessed her current on-line assets (two websites). Neither of these websites has ever been marketed to the search engines, although one has a reasonable ranking in Google, thanks to a keyworded domain name. We looked at where the traffic was currently coming from and ran some competitor research for her. We concluded with a simple but effective marketing plan which would allow her to move forward and to actually gain some genuine results through her website. She also let us re-design her old website to bring it in-line with the new website and give her another marketing opportunity to gain new local clients.
Because I was able to give her personal advice and keep her calm through the discovery of this terrible situation, she is now a lot happier with her business marketing and able to concentrate on running her business, carrying out the services that she provides to her clients.
Conclusion
There are a lot of good marketing companies out there, but unfortunately there are also a lot of bad ones too. As a business owner you absolutely must exercise extreme caution, especially when someone cold calls you offering marketing services. Remember that these telemarketers are trained to turn a “no” into a “yes” and they won’t back down easily. It is my opinion that you should never say yes when they phone you up and if you are interested, request that they send you details in writing. By doing this, you can read the information at your own leisure and make up your mind in a non-pressurised environment.
It’s a sad truth that many business owners will continue to fall for these tricks and will get stung repeatedly for money when they don’t realise that nothing is being achieved for the money that has been paid. Please be wary of what you spend and what you agree to if you choose to say yes to a company like the above. Always ensure that you are aware of how to cancel a contract and don’t tie yourself into something for 12 months unless you are sure it is going to bring around a great positive influence to your business.
Have any of you had similar experiences? Please feel free to share them with me – I’d be interested to hear what happened to you.
Contact Me
If you want to talk to a marketing expert who takes a no b*llshit approach to marketing, ensuring that you always get the honest facts and allowing you to make a good purchasing decision, please give me a call or an email. I’m available on weekdays between 9am-5pm and I am happy to call you back or visit you at your local office. We can talk about your current strategies and put together a plan to help your business grow.
My telephone number is 01243 783080 and my email is on my contact page.