Most business owners who attend Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Marketing (SEM) seminars have similar questions related to promoting their business online. Related to their other online content, Social Media Marketing (SMM) also brings up many questions about what to expect, how it works, how much is needed, and so on. Complicating the topic, there is so much conflicting information “out there” in the public-at-large that business decision makers are often either intimidated, misguided, or both on the topics. Add common gimmicks, fraud, and hidden-agendas to the mix, and the stage is set for people to get duped in their attempts to modernize and promote their business on the web.
Many business owners over-expend with regards to market by signing into binding contracts with commissioned sales people who are more interested in money than relationships or performance. The telemarketing sales person can convincingly “talk the talk” from a scripted pitch standpoint, but they commonly portray a skewed and misrepresented perspective. Most guilty of this type of solicitations are the large, big-name phone book and phone service related companies which opted to get into the online marketing arena as a necessity in the wake of diminishing paper phone directory sales. Though these companies tend to be poor at delivering desired results and decent customer service, business owners tend to buy into the sales pitches because of legacy brand name recognition.
It’s not until later, after spending thousands (with little or nothing to show for it) that the business owner realizes that their money would have been better spent with a skilled marketing company that customizes campaigns rather than following one-size-fits-all, “cookie cutter” recipes. The big phone companies survive via this ongoing cycle of “disposable customers” simply by the law of gross tonnage: They own the phone book databases so they have an endless supply of prospects to approach, and they already have the staff of telemarketers on payroll to exploit the unsuspecting business owners. In other words, when the market changed from paper to paperless, the big phone companies didn’t have to retool as much as they had to retarget. Performance, however, still remains sub-par.
Time and money lost equates to business lost, so many of these business owners try to learn from their mistakes by following the old adage, “If you want it done right, do it yourself”. Unfortunately with SEO, SEM, and SMM, this is yet another compounding mistake with additional negative implications.
Business owners who try to take on SEO, SEM, and SMM themselves, attempting to save money, are later dismayed to realize that their further demise is likely a result of their own efforts. Too often, these folks go through the motions of blogging, article publication, press releases, etc., but they aren’t up-to-date on Google’s ever-changing “best practices” or how to perform effective market research on keywords and target audiences, so their efforts are almost entirely wasted by spinning their wheels doing “busy work”, or worse, even hindering/damaging their search engine placement. More time lost means more business lost. Most of these same folks attempt to use social media as a sales medium rather than a relationship builder, and consequently their Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, etc. efforts backfire on them.
Proper search engine marketing and social media marketing campaigns take consistent, ongoing time and effort, often dozens of hours per month. No one has that kind of time to waste, but it happens all the time. And the result of wasting the time by writing ineffective, non-optimized or improperly optimized content for the Web is that they yield to their competition while simultaneously creating a steep hill to recovery from the self-inflicted damage.
Then there is the “reputation management” crowd… smaller, but very distinct. These are business owners who really “torqued off” one or more customers, or who have a “problem customer” or two (we all know the customer who is unreasonable and demanding), and consequently have a highly visible-but very negative-internet presence from customer reviews and bad press. These folks have a really tough row to hoe, because they not only have to elevate their “good” face to the public, but they simultaneously have to bury the skeletons in their closet. (i.e., it doesn’t help XYZ Company to have their website found on Google’s page one for competitive keywords adjacent to an Angie’s List review that says “Avoid XYZ Company at all costs”. It becomes a multi-front war). Again, this scenario creates a sense of desperation for business owners who become low-hanging fruit to be exploited by unscrupulous companies and freelancers who take advantage of the situation by promising great results in unrealistically short-term (immediate) time periods at ridiculously low prices.
Keep in mind, the strategy and successful financial model of many profitable marketing companies is to undercut the competition with prices so low that a prospective customer’s judgment is clouded by the wishful thinking of massive cost savings, and the binding 12-month contract guarantees income to the marketing company by leveraging the threat of damage to the customer’s credit rating should the customer default. In this type of business model, volume of customers makes for high profits. Performance and producing a positive return on investment (ROI) for the customer becomes unimportant. Customers become “disposable” and have little to no recourse but to wait out the contract term and then try again with a different provider.
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