I believe in honesty. One thing I noticed about the online marketing and SEO world is that a lot of companies that offer similar services use their own marketing language to market themselves. They guarantee things they cannot guarantee. They claim things they can’t reasonably claim. They pretend that some of the work they do is more valuable than it is.
The other day I took over the marketing for a company that had long worked with this other SEO firm and been unable to achieve any results. I asked for a list of what they did, and the list they sent over was largely marketing gibberish. They were charging for “monitoring SERPs.” They were charging for “ensuring integrity between company addresses across social media channels.” These are not things that require work – and certainly not things that deserve the hefty price tag that they were charging each month.
Everything we do here, we explain, track, and justify. Everything has a tangible benefit. It’s one of the reasons we are content focused, because you can see content – it belongs to you, like a product. All of what we create – our content, social media posts, social media advertising, graphic design, etc. has a specific product that belongs to you upon completion.
But part of being honest is also being clear when we simply do not have an answer. This is what happened recently when contacted by an answering service that desperately wanted to increase their lead count.
Now, normally this is never a problem, and certainly with an unlimited amount of time available we’d be able to guarantee more leads. But in this case we were faced with two challenges:
- Increase lead count by 1000%
- Increase that lead count in 5 months.
- Increase that lead count on a limited budget.
We never lie and claim we can meet a goal that we’re not sure if we can meet. That goes against our values. But the truth is we also might be able to meet it. We just do not know. So what we decided to do, which is different from what other marketing companies offer, is we decided to just do a one month service. We’ll do whatever we can for a month, and then come back around and see what’s working, what isn’t, and whether we think we can meet the goal with additional months of labor.
And at the moment, we still don’t have an answer. We are only 1.5 weeks in, and what we have created so far is thriving in Yahoo and Bing but still struggling in Google – which of course accounts for 95% of the potential leads. Will we make the deadline? We do not know. But that’s why we believe in being honest. We’ll see what we can do, be honest about the results, and decide whether to move forward.
We’ll keep you updated with progress as time goes on. But above all else, we wanted to share this story because it represents our imperfections. As a marketing company that believes in honesty, sometimes we’ll succeed, sometimes we won’t, but we’ll always be honest with you throughout the process.
