Benjamin Franklin is credited with saying this and for many companies, the lure of a low price when choosing a vendor is sweet indeed. It’s not such a big deal to buy the discount brand of toilet paper but would you choose a heart surgeon with the lowest price? How about a security company? How about a bargain-priced parachute?
Ask three friends about a time they bought something and regretted choosing low cost over quality. Nearly everyone has a story. I will tell anyone planning to paint a room to go ahead and buy the good paint and not waste time and money on the cheap stuff. Be sure and ask me how I know this when we meet!
A terrible surgeon or a defective parachute could be the end of your actual life. Choosing the wrong marketing partner can kill your business just as dead.
We see this happen most often when the purchase is technically complex, like a website build. There is not a lot in common with a quick and dirty DIY site and a full-function, secure, lead-producing, income-generating, 24-hour a day salesperson. But faced with a decision to invest in something not fully understood, many people will choose the low-dough entry point and let their nephew build the site out of his parent’s basement. Three months in they learn the site is not capable of supporting their business. After months of frustration, wasted time, and lost business they spend more than the site would have cost just trying to salvage some of the work. Not to mention those awkward family gatherings.
Targeted Display Advertising and social media campaigns are other areas where business owners choose what seems like a great option but one that lacks strategy. Anyone who attempts to sell a tactic without a strategy is stealing your money. (Stop, go back and read the last sentence again – don’t let anyone rob you!)
Sure the ads are pretty but if you sell hand-painted silk scarves and your ad is being served to a high school boy whose main interests are sports and video games all the pretty in the world isn’t going to get the click.
We see this scenario commonly. A mid-size company hires an agency to manage its social media. The agency posts every single day. They show how busy they are posting content the client loves and many times provided to the agency. But when we dig into the analytics we see the majority have little to no engagement. One particular client has 1500 people who liked their page and the majority of the posts had 1-3 people engage the rest had zero. Ouch.
A tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it…. Or, you post every day but no one engages – did you promote your business or just look busy?
Tami Newman
There is a huge opportunity cost in this. Not only is this company paying an agency to sit on their thumbs, but they’re also tying up resources they could invest elsewhere that could produce leads! They are engaging in a tactic without a strategy. Why aren’t the Facebook posts generating engagement? Is it a Facebook problem or a strategy problem? How can you tell the difference?
Oh No! Did I just describe your situation? If you would like someone to review your strategy, reach out and we’ll get our team of experts to do a diagnosis.
