You’re in the business of generating home improvement leads, and that means marketing. But small business owners with a million other things on their mind will often outsource their advertising and social media management to a digital marketing service. While these services can be invaluable, it’s important to remember that these services are also in the lead generating business. And unfortunately, they’ll often say questionable things to get customers to sign on the dotted line.
As pointed out by Net News Check, the digital marketing industry doesn’t have the greatest reputation. You don’t have to look hard to find a business owner who feels they spent far more money than they got back in leads or sales. Marketers are happy to promise you the moon, but there’s often a gap between what they say and what they’ll actually deliver. After all, saying they’ll launch a vibrant new marketing campaign is easy, but they don’t necessarily know how many leads that will generate.
It doesn’t help that the industry suffers from a lack of transparency. There’s a lack of standards and consistency within the industry, meaning that two different companies can toss around two wildly different sets of terminology that essentially mean the same thing. It’s easy for clients to get the impression that marketing services are deliberately trying to obscure the facts of the services they offer.
Keeping along those lines, here are a couple of things that we hear consistently from our clients, as they come from their media sales people.
“You’re going to get so many clicks!”
That’s great. But clicks are just that. No one ever checked their 401K for clicks and were satisfied. Intent is the key to any click. Just driving eyeballs doesn’t do you any good. But high quality leads come from interested visitors online, not random clicks generated in random and often circumspect ways.
“These interactions are amazing!”
We hear this consistently when it comes to social media. Terms like “engagement” “actions” and “events” are all liberally thrown around, as if they’re currency. And if you’re getting all of these things, congratulations. But you can’t take them to the bank. Yet sales folks tend to beat the drum for these and command premium prices for these results…that probably don’t generate real returns for your business. If you hear this, your antennae should go off.
“My other clients are doing great with this!”
Of course they are. But the obvious distinction is that it’s an unqualified comparison. Apples and oranges look nice in a fruit basket, but don’t help your business. It’s worth trying to pin down specific results, but I understand how difficult it is to get that information from sales reps.
Look, I don’t expect every digital media sales rep to be an expert…but they should have a strong idea about your metrics, and what they can deliver for your business. Is that too much to ask?
