The online marketing arena, like the real world, is full of shysters, con artists, and wannabes. They have so many different angles, tactics, and maneuvers that they’re hard to keep track of. But that will not stop us from revealing who they are. We are nice like that… 🙂
We are going to paint a picture of the online marketing companies or people that you need to watch out for. They are costly, and have a negative impact on your business. This list comes from real life companies that we have visited and consulted with.
So here we go:
1. The Do Nothing Guy (most common)
Description: These marketers can charge a lot or a little for their services. It doesn’t really matter to them because they don’t do anything to earn it. They capitalize on your lack of knowledge and will talk over your head so they can keep you confused.
It’s an easy trap to fall into due to the fact that once everything is set up and running, an online marketer can just sit back and relax. At least for a little while. Eventually rankings, ads, and leads will die, but that could take some time.
I have talked with a few small businesses who are paying upwards of $10,000 to $18,000 a month and not getting anything in return. Let me phrase that another way: There’s online shysters who are taking in $2160,000 a year and not doing anything for it. The problem isn’t they money. Some companies are worth way more than that. The problem is in quality of work one is getting.
They might of set up a PPC campaign, they might have built your website, and you might be turning a nice profit. And the worse case scenario is your company is booming so you think they are doing a great job. This is where the opportunity costs come in. You could be making way more money, but the do nothing guy is holding you back.
Fix it: Online marketing is not a set it and forget it type of process. There’s always more that can be done. Any guy that thinks he can just sit back and relax is going to be trampled by professional online marketers who are doing the work. Online marketing is not easy and it can take months to see some results. But once the system is figured out and leads start to come in. It can be a huge revenues source for your company.
Below will show you how to protect yourself from these types of dudes.
2. No Brains
Description: These online marketers have zero education and do not know what they are doing. They can talk the lingo, but fall short when it comes to actual performance. They have never been successful nor do they take the time necessary to learn the trade.
You know you are working with a “No Brains Guy” when you have hired your uncle, your cousin, your friend, or a referral from a friend who has watched a few YouTube videos and is now in the business. You may be his first client. There are a lot of “No Brain Guys” out there and it would shock you to know who they are.
3. Over Promising Salesman
Description: “Page One of Google for Lawyers in 5 Days Guaranteed!”
These guys are amazing salesman and will promise you the world. Profits, immediate results, huge returns, page one, ranks of all your keywords, etc.
One of my first employees called me a while back to tell me about an internet company called 180fusion. They are well known and you can read about them on the web. I am not trying to pick on them or call them out, I just want to be very open about what is happening out there.
She had 99 clients under her and was getting paid a ridiculously low amount of money. There’s no way that one person can take care of 99 different clients. Her job…was to try and keep the clients as long as possible before they realize they are being ripped off.
This type of online marketing company will call you endlessly to get you to sign up for their service. Their sales force makes up the majority of their company. Their survival depends on it because they lose clients as fast as they bring them on.
4. Cheapest Guy In The Room ($299 a month service)
Description: This is extremely common and my guess is that most of you have signed up for one of these types of services. I myself have been guilty of taking on clients for a low $299 and end up giving them a bad service because my time has to be spent with clients who pay. Let me tell you how they work.
They undercut legit companies because their model is based on the numbers. They will ask you to pay whatever you can afford to pay. $299, $1500 or $5000 it doesn’t really matter because once you sign up they are off to get their next clients. These companies are all about adding accounts as quickly as possible. They are famous for saying, “It’s only $299, they won’t cancel.”
Sure they will have one or two success stories but it is based off of luck. Think about it…if they can sign up 100 companies, one or two of them will be successful not matter how bad they screw things up.
Ask yourself, how much time can a company really put into my business for $299 a month?
Doctors, Chiropractors, Dentists, and other local businesses are great victims of these services, so keep your eye open. I am guessing, most of you have 5 or 6 charges a month around that $200 dollar range. I would cancel them.
Oh wait, it is only $299 a month. What if it is working? lol
5. Do It All Guy (Owner)
Description: Nothing bad to say about these guys because they are usually the owner or manager of the company. They are making things happen, working long hours, stressing about growth, and taking all the risk. I have been there and still am some days. My heart goes out to these guys because they just can’t seem to let go and let the professionals grow their business.
For Example:
Three weeks ago I met with the owner of a growing business. They were bringing in a $150,000 a month in revenue, which is pretty good for a startup.
The catch…
That $150,000 was all going out, and the owner was broke. Couldn’t afford to spend money on online marketing even though that is where his revenue was coming from.
What is the problem?
The owner is trying to do everything and is losing money in the process. He has no idea where his conversions are coming from, his website is a disaster, no up sells, no email campaigns, no content creation plan, and no tracking. He has started a great company that has huge potential but he will not let go so he can grow.
Like the other fraudsters, the “Do It All Guy” is usually harming himself. His ego has taken over. This must be stopped.
How to protect yourself from bad online marketing companies.
Now for the good part! We have identified the shysters, so now it’s time to get educated on how online marketing really works. That way you can know when to run.
1. How to hit page one of Google.
If any SEO company promises you rankings on the first page of Google in a short amount of time…(6 months or less) it is time to run. Google makes the rules, and they are very strict on how the game is played. There are always exceptions and it is easy to rank for keywords that nobody is looking for. I am talking about real money keywords. Ones that will actually bring you business. These keywords are extremely hard to rank for and you are competing against companies with millions to spend.
The only way to rank for competitive keywords is to create amazing content consistently and get qualified backlinks. This takes a lot of money, time, and effort. 4 blogs, 500 words+ per week is a good place to start.
If you can not afford to pay someone to do a good job than you might as well forget about it, because the 5 fraudsters above are not going to take the time necessary to get you ranked. It’s too much work!
2. How does Pay Per Click (PPC) work?
PPC is one of my favorites avenues because you can get immediate results. Every company should be running some type of PPC campaign even if it’s for remarketing only.
A PPC campaign is easy set up and it is even easier to forget about it. Some companies may check your account once a month others may not check it at all. This is where a lot of businesses can get in trouble. If you make a mistake in PPC… Google, YouTube, and Facebook will take your money within minutes.
Make sure you are monitoring your accounts daily, build out multiple landing pages, and start slow. It takes strategic planning to set up a profitable campaign and it may take a couple of months. Track everything down to a conversion.
This should give you a good idea of what to expect. Once again, the 5 shysters above are not going to put in the time, effort, or work…especially if you are paying them $299 a month.
3. How do email marketing campaigns work?
This is an area that you can create once and receive the benefits for years to come. I usually like to build out a 12 email sequence. Email provides you with a way to nurture and educate your audience after they have chosen to interact with your company. They should be carefully crafted and, ideally, you will want to build out different campaigns according to the needs of the customer.
Emails campaigns are the glue that holds everything together and it’s a must for marketing campaigns.
You can use Aweber, Infusionsoft, MailChimp or Constant Contact to create your sequences. The cost and time will be spent on creating the right content to help the audience convert. It’s that simple!
Not all marketing companies are bad and most of them have good intentions.
So here are some questions to ask yourself:
How much time should a company spend on your online marketing? How much time does it take to be successful?
Can you pay $299 a month and get 40 hours of work?
In my opinion you need 40 hours for a small startup and it can go up from there. Some companies need 20 employees at 40 hours a week. It just depends on your size and growth.
So that leads you to the next set of questions:
Do you bring someone in-house or do you hire it out?
Both options are great but both have their problems. If you decide to bring someone in-house you will want to make sure they are educated and know what they are doing. If you hire it out, you will want to verify that they are working and progress is being made.
Now for the final question:
How much should you pay? $10,000 a month? $5000 a month?
A professional marketer is not going to work 40 hours a week for free. Some of them could be worth $100 an hour, others $25 an hour. It depends on their skills and the results they are able to achieve.
This is where you have to put in the time and research necessary to hire the right people. If they are good, you will end up keeping them forever. If they are bad, your ship may sink with theirs.
The goal is that your business will become their business, and your growth their growth. Over time all cylinders will be firing and your online marketing efforts will pay huge dividends.
Tread carefully when you are hiring an online marketing agency. You only want to do it once…
Thanks for reading
How To Protect Yourself From Hiring The Wrong Online Marketing Company
[Start of video Need more leads? This is The Best 10 Minute Online Marketing Webinar. Join Us!]
[Beginning of recorded material]
Jace: Hey guys Jace over here at Ymarketing. Today we’re going to do a ten-minute presentation to just kind a show you guys, what I like to call the 10 minute Webinar, we’re going to show you guys exactly what we do. I got Wes here, Wes say hi.
Wes: How are you doing?
Jace: Wes is kind of going to go over study we just did for a client. Mainly this webinar is to show you guys a little bit about what we do, how we do it, why it’s effective, and like I said I want this to be about 10 minutes. So, here is a slide.
I did this presentation a couple of weeks ago for a speaking gig. So first of, main thing about most businesses is they have a hard time getting their message out there, they struggle with getting leads, they struggle with getting traffic. And how it all started is basically, let me go to the next, next slide, I can kind of explain. How it all started… So I’m going to explain a little bit about myself. I am obviously a father of four. I started a company called Ydraw while back. Ydraw started the whiteboard animation field. Why from Ydraw we kind of broke Yinc? We noticed there was a lot of people struggling with video ads, video marketing, running traffic, and so we started Ymarketing.
It’s been around a couple of years now. Wes, he is the CMO. He does the kind of, the chief marketing officer, and I basically run the company. Okay, so that’s a little bit about myself. And we will jump right in, keeps coming up on the slides. Okay, so how does everything work? So when we come on board with a company we focus on four main things. Our job is to get your message in front of your audience. If you don’t have a message, that’s where Ydraw comes in place. They will go out there and create your message and tell your story. We like you to show up everywhere. We love YouTube. There is ways you guys could go out there and put your videos in front of your competitors videos, you can go out there and put your message in front of audience who is looking for your product and service. Let’s say they go on YouTube and they search how to change, like a plumber, how to do plumbing on my house? Well if you’re a plumber, if you create video you can run ads there. So we love YouTube marketing, we love Facebook marketing. What we do on Facebook marketing is, we do the same thing. We take your message, we find the target audience, you are going after it and then we will run them ads. Well with that comes PPC pay-per-click. Same idea once again, when people are searching for your product or service we want to pop up. Now a lot of times people aren’t doing YouTube ads. They aren’t doing Facebook ads. They aren’t doing PPC. We kind of have the philosophy that you need to be doing all of it. Now, you might not want to spend as much money on YouTube, as you do PPC or the other way around, it just depends all on your ROI. That’s what we focus on this return on investment. So those are our four core why gave you three, our last one is e-mail marketing. So, when we come on board we like to create e-mail campaigns. So, you want to communicate with your audience that suffers from ADHD. Whenever we create ads, videos, we realize you only have 5 seconds to hook somebody’s interest and 30 seconds till they decide if they’re going to do business with you. So everything we create is engaging, especially on YouTube, especially on Facebook. We want it to grab attention. And if you want you can jump over to our website. We do have our website. I put a link over on the side of this, hanging out where you guys are able to go and up along the top you are going to see a YouTube tab, you are going to see a Facebook tab, you are going to see our e-mail tab, then the PPC, and other things explained, exactly how we do it. There’s a few write-ups, we have blogs, we have, you know, the Yinc University, where you can educate yourself. If you don’t want us to do it, you guys can turn around and do it yourself with our education. Budget killers, I did want to do a word of warning. Most companies fail, because they don’t watch certain things. Budget killers, like I’ve had a lot of clients that come to us and say ‘Hey, we’ve already done YouTube ads. They didn’t work for us.’ Well, I can go through these and realize, hey they’ve messed up. They didn’t watch their budget. They let their ads run on the wrong videos. Same goes with PPC. Same goes with Facebook ads. The reason most people fail is because they don’t pay attention to it, or they don’t know what they’re doing. Okay, if you want to check your ads often, make sure you’re not playing on kids’ videos, make sure you’re shown up in the right spot. Don’t have too broad of an audience, especially on Facebook you can have 20,000,000 if you’d like. You need to be 2,000,000; 200,000; sometimes 15,000. That’s kind of the size you want to look at doing. That’s it. So, here is what I want to do. I want to have Wes, I’m going to bring up his slides. So, main reason for this is to show you a little case study we did for a client. Let me take this out.
Wes: So, as Jace has pulled that up, some of you if you read Jace’s e-mails in the past, some of you might recognize me from the proofreader that got fired. Actually, I am no longer proofreading Jace’s e-mails, but basically what I want to walk you guys through is our last experience with one of our clients. And it was a unique experience in a few ways. And Jace has pulled that up now, but I got a call from this client and they told me ‘Okay, we have a conference in Brazil and we have two weeks to get sign ups. We need help filling the seats.’ So, we said great, we hadn’t advertised in Brazil before, but we knew that YouTube would… Brazil was the second biggest platform for YouTube and Facebook was very popular there. So we could use their same systems, we already had in place. They gave us a $20,000 budget to spend and by the time we worked everything out and got the contract signed, we had about eight days to spend it. So, we were trying to figure out, okay how can we effectively spend this budget in a small amount of time and make sure we are getting called by the leads. What also made this challenging is a qualified lead, meant these people were able to invest about $500,000 into the service. So, it made it, we had to make sure we’re very targeted, well and then to add to it. The first two days we were running ads. Facebook had some issues and we didn’t get it running till about a day and a half in. So that cut our time to six days to generate enough leads to fill all the seats for this conference. Now Jace if you go to the next slide. Basically what we did, we started out, we created 11 campaigns. And the reason we created Olympic campaigns is because we needed to test images, headlines, and as many audiences as we could in a very short amount of time. So, we build them all out at once and started running them. We saw a lot of thing happen, initially we set our budget about $1,000 a day, and we were spending about 300. Facebook would spend as much as it could and stop about 300. And so, it took about three days for us to start hitting our full budget, but as the budget increased we saw better conversion rates and better click rates to the website. In this next slide you are seeing, basically, our most influential ad, where we had just over 14,000 clicks. Our clicks per to the website were 18 cents and this one was interesting thou. Because we went a little bit broader on this, but we did target. Obviously the demographic would really turn the corner for us, because as we are creating these ads we saw, we are obviously seeing a lot of numbers, but we have spent a lot of money and stayed targeted. So, if you go to the next slide would really turn the corner for us. We knew we needed to get to the wealthiest in Saint Paul. So we actually searched the most expensive neighborhoods in Saint Paul and read a few articles and hopped on a few real estate sites to make sure we were finding the most expensive places to live. And then we actually went into Facebook and hit the location from the latitude the longitude and then we’re able to target multiple neighborhoods, multiple wealthy neighborhoods, to generate these high quality leads. We didn’t get as many clicks on those, but the clicks that did come were already high quality in turn to our most qualified leads. The other thing, so Facebook worked out really well for us, once the Facebook allowed us to run our ads. The second thing we did was YouTube. We obviously wanted to hit as many people as we could, but we had a mixture of mattered. So, initially we set our targeting budget at 2 cents a view. So, our first 3,500 views we were getting for 1 cent. Once we’d run out for a day and a half the campaign stopped. So, we bumped up our targeting a little bit higher and then, in the end we ended up giving up just under 80,000 views at 3 cents per view. Our reach was very strong on YouTube and we got really targeted with some placement and different things like that. So, a lot went right, we had some issues, but in the end we ended up generating enough leads to force them to move their conference to, basically they had to move their conference because we generated too many qualified leads for them, to make sure everyone fit.
Jace: And Wes you tell them the number, how many leads did we get? So we got in the 300, what was it?
Wes: We ended up only spending $10,000 of their budget, we got 368 leads and about 100 of them were qualified to invest that much. And so it was huge numbers. We were only hoping to generate about fifty, so we doubled our goal. And what’s great for this client is if they close one of those cells, they made their money back. So, yeah it was a great campaign.
Jace: Yeah like, they’ll make it back five, six, seven, eight times, so that is a good thing. So, and I noticed some of this numbers, I mean 3 cents a view. It’s pretty typical and this is for Brazil. So you do get a little less if you are over in the United States, it’s going to be a little more than 3 cents a view. The biggest thing was, this client came to us. We were on a big crunch, but that’s exactly what we do. We took his message, we ran Facebook ads, we ran YouTube ads and we got him leads. So Yinc, if you guys want to check us out go over to yinc.com, marketinghy.com, just read about what we do. And our whole goal is, we want you guys to get an ROI, we want to run your Facebook ads, we want to run your YouTube ads, and there is all these little things that we know and understand that a lot of other companies don’t. So, if you have questions were around, you can contact Wes. His e-mail is wes@marketinghy.com. You can always e-mail me at jace@marketinghy.com. Or just go over marketinghy.com and fill out our contact form. That is it. We will be around. Talk to you later. Bye Wes.
Instead of telling you what to do, I am going to show you what I did and how you can do it too.
It all began this last week when I attended the Start SLC conference up in Salt Lake City. The Conference was a jewel. In fact, it was so good I plan on going for years to come or at least until they let me be the keynote speaker.
I’ll invite you when that happens… 🙂
While sitting in the audience being inspired, I came up with a simple solution to land those big clients.
I have to admit that I am not much of a networker. When they have those networking parties, I will usually go grab a sprite and head back to the hotel.
I know…
It’s bad, but for some reason I never have liked the whole networking thing.
So…
While sitting in the audience listening to a speaker from Domo I came up with a couple of ideas on how to target a specific company or a specific person with a customized ad. I decided to target all the executives.
Why do you want this?
Imagine if you are a finance company looking to land that multi million-dollar client. If you could run a particular ad to that individual, don’t you think that would have an impact on their decision? Meaning you run a custom ad designed to land that one company.
You can also use it to set up a lunch appointment or speak with a company’s executives. It’s just a great way to get attention.
For this to work, you will need the following:
Facebook ads (a Facebook account)
YouTube Channel linked to your website
Landing Page
Adwords Account
Remarketing pixels
Here are the Step To Become An Amazing Marketer A.K.A Stalker:
You get the target’s info
Build a customized ad
The target sees the ad
Goes to the landing page
We cookie his machine
Run him video ads on YouTube banner ads on other sites in the Google network
Step 1: Collect The Targets Info
For this to work you need to get the Target’s email address. You will upload the email address into Facebook. Facebook will then locate the Target’s Facebook Page.
I found the executives of Domo on LinkedIn, became their friends, and then exported my contact list.
You can also get them to like your Facebook page and start running ads to those who like your page.
Not a perfect system, but it worked.
Step 2: Build the Assets
1. Build a Facebook ad, a landing page, and a video.
2. Place a Remarketing pixel on the landing page. You can place a Facebook remarketing pixel and a Google remarketing pixel.
3. Embed the YouTube Video on the landing page. This is will be used for YouTube retargeting.
Step 3: Create The Ad
Jump onto your Facebook account and create the ad. Under custom audiences you we be able to upload the contact list.
Warning! You have to have a minimum of 20 people on this list. Facebook changed its guidelines a while back, but it’s really not a big deal. If your target is a male you can fill the rest of the list with females and select “Only Market to Male.”
Make sense?
I hope so because it’s not an easy task to pull this stuff out of my brain, but I do it anyway all in the name of sharing…☺
I actually uploaded all 2000+ Linkedin contact because I wanted to see if other people would click on the ad out of curiosity.
Like I said…not a perfect system but it works. You might have to have a broader audience, but we are paying such a small amount per click that it won’t matter if you run the ad to thousands of people. That’s what I did.
Step 4: Run It
Once the ad has been created it is time to let it fly.
Step 5: Generate a YouTube ad that is customized.
Picture this…
You’re on YouTube and you’re about watch your favorite One Direction Video. I say One Direction because just last night I found out my wife dropped $1300 for the whole family to go see them in concert.
It’s been a rough night…
Since your target has watched the video that was sitting on your landing page, you now can run custom pre-roll ads.
(If you do not know what those are, I will direct you over to another article. YouTube Pre-Roll Ads. http://marketinghy.com/youtube-preroll-ads-work-company-run-video-ads/ )
Once your target clicks on the play he gets a customized YouTube ad that speaks directly to him.
“Hey Don… We need to do business and I would like to take you out to lunch. What day works best for you? Click here to set up a time…I’m waiting Don!”
Creepy? Yes.
Funny? Absolutely!
Effective? Who could turn that down?!
Here is a good example of a YouTube video that is customized.
Quick Recap
1. Find the target and get ahold of his email address 2. Create a landing page and place your retargeting pixels on the page 3. Create an ad that speaks directly to the target 4. Turn on the ads and drive him to your landing page 5. Run a YouTube pre-roll ad that is customized for him
Questions?
I hope that helps and make sure to let me know if you try this out. There are a lot of people that would like to hear about your successful campaigns.
The Results…
So far I have had a good number of clicks and I have received a phone call from a guy that works with Domo. He tried to sell me on his product…
I have some fine-tuning to do, but I know I will get some results.
Have a great day and I look forward to hearing about your success
Hope you enjoyed
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Alot of times people we find they are too busy or they just do not have the technical skills to implement our strategies. If you can not implement this strategy, we would love to do it for you. Everything we do is based off of ROI and will help your business. Sign Up and we will get you started right away. We will manager your Video Ads Campaigns, Email Campaigns and Autocomplete Services. They Work and we use them. Sign Up and see if we are a good fit. We may not be…but it’s worth seeing. This could change your business.
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How To Create a Creepy Marketing Campaign. Some Call It Stalking We Call It Amazing Marketing.
Facebook Ads Can Make You Money Or Break The Bank. What is it going to be?
Yep it’s an important blog day in Jace Vernon’s land of marketing. I have been running more tests to see if Facebook Ads really can produce quality leads at a lower cost than Adwords, YouTube and Bing.
It’s time I reveal the best marketing websites that I use daily. These are some top secret sites so use them and abuse them. The best marketing websites of 2014 will help you grow your business, increase your website traffic, get leads, and improve your online marketing campaigns.
In order to make my list, you have to give out something of value, meaning you can take the information provided and apply it immediately to your business.
It is pretty hard to beat this guy when it comes to Facebook Marketing. Jon Loomer spends most of his days researching the latest and greatest trends in Facebook. I encourage you to use his ideas and apply it to your Facebook marketing campaigns. If you are reading this Jon, we appreciate your knowledge.
[Tweet “Thank Jon Loomer For His Amazing Facebook Knowledge”]
