When you hire a marketing firm, you are hiring them for their marketing expertise. I recently had a client who hired my firm to create a new landing page for their website. So, we wrote new copy and created a killer landing page. The problem was the client did not like it and made us make a million copy changes, which completely watered down their page and made it dull. DEAD DULL.
Now the client is blaming us because they are getting poor results from that page. They even talked to another marketing firm for their opinion of the page. That firm said the copy was dull, no calls to action, etc. The thing was, we had all those things and the client made us remove them.
How on earth can a client have the gall to blame us for their lack of results when they made so many changes to our work that they killed everything we put into their page to drive leads and sales?
So here is the lesson in this story. When you hire a marketing firm, TAKE THEIR ADVICE! You are hiring them to help you market correctly, so do not tell them how to do marketing and change the copy they write and the strategies they want to use. If you knew what the hell you were doing with marketing you would not have gone to the marketing firm for marketing help in the first place.
Peter Geisheker, CEO
The Geisheker Group marketing firm
http://www.geisheker.com
(920) 471-163
"We don't help you compete, we help you dominate!"
7 comments:
"So here is the lesson in this story. When you hire a marketing firm, TAKE THEIR ADVICE!" That's right. It's really hard to communicate with clients who want to take their lead, override the experts' input, and blatantly reject their plans. Marketing firms know how to handle marketing, because that's their main trade.
First off, congratulations for your blog. I love it!
Now, I think that in this case your marketing firm lacked some leadership, or at least some creativity to deal with this problem. This is what I would have done and what I recommend you do next time it happens:
1- Make all the changes the client asks you, but...
2- Keep your original website with all your copy and content, and...
3- Have those 2 sites running at the same time (it is very easy to do, 50% of visitors will land on the site with your client's ideas and 50% of visitors will go to the site that you originally developed).
4- Finally, simply monitor the metrics. The numbers will speak by themselves and the "winner" will show up in a matter of weeks.
p.s.: of course this cannot be applied to all websites, but it is worth giving it a try.
Assess the strengths of the company to see if it suits your needs.
A healthy brainstorming session between the marketer and the client could bear fruit and is required for the firm to better represent the company.
All of the above was done. Not our first day on the job. The problem is when a company hires a marketing firm or ad agency for their expertise and then decides to tell the marketing firm/ad agency how to do the job and then complain when it does not work. Read any book on the world of advertising and there are countless stories about this problem. Would you tell a brain surgeon how to operate on your brain? No. So don't tell your marketing firm how to create marketing that works.
They should listen to the advice of marketing firm because it is their expertise. At the first hand they seek for it.
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