If you’re in business, chances are you’ve been ripped off by convincing salesmen peddling marketing schemes that sounded great, from companies that seem and should be trustworthy.
We hear the horror stories every day:
1. The health care practitioner who spent $30,000 over a one year period on TV advertising. He was sold the program by one of the major local cable companies, who also produced the ad for him. It should have been good, right? That $30,000 bought him exactly one new patient.
2. The friend of a friend who provided a “search engine friendly” website which not only didn’t get him high rankings…. it was almost impossible to find his website with a search.
3. The website developer who took the client’s payment, then six weeks later delivered a website without ever consulting with the client as to whether they liked the look being developed. Then refused to make any changes without being paid more.
4. The hosting service that suddenly went out of business, taking the company’s website down and with no copy of the site to put it back up elsewhere.
It goes on and on.
Of course, it is not only the small businesses that are often served badly by marketing companies. Just look at some of the junk marketing campaigns put on for Fortune 500 companies at a cost of millions of dollars. Don’t tell me you haven’t laughed at the stupidity of some of these ads!
So what’s a person to do? Surely it should be possible to buy good honest marketing at a reasonable price!
Of course it is. But, in my view, MOST marketing companies are incompetent. So you are going to have to wade through a fair amount of BS to find what you are looking for.
It helps to have endorsements, proof of results and samples of the company’s work in a similar situation to yours.
Ultimately, your own familiarity with marketing principles and a good healthy skepticism are the best guarantees of getting what you pay for in marketing.
As a marketing agency, we get calls every week from people peddling the latest get-rich-quick marketing scheme. Most of them never make it out of the starting block with us. They don’t pass the smell test.