Is Your Marketing Agency Ripping You Off?
Here's an overview of common predatory business practices that you should avoid at all costs.
Intro to Getting Ripped Off
Many business decision-makers run their marketing campaigns through outside agencies. This can be a great way to alleviate the pressure and costs of handling these large projects in-house, but it can also be a point of frustration and waste if your marketing agency is engaging in predatory business practices.
There are many marketing agencies who conduct their business with integrity, but there are also unsurprisingly many who would rather make a quick buck than create a mutually beneficial sustained relationship. In this guide, we’ll point out many of the tactics disingenuous agencies will practice, some more obvious than others. So, possibly unlike your marketing agency, let's waste no more time. Here’s how your marketing agency may be ripping you off:
Over-Promising & Under-Delivering
This is the most obvious way that agencies will conduct shady business. They’ll reel you in with grand claims of the number of leads and sales they’ll bring to your business without a real plan to accomplish these goals. You may wonder why agencies would bring in business that they know they won’t be able to keep, and the answer is that with enough scale, these short-term arrangements can be easier and more profitable than maintaining long-term business relationships.
Over-promising isn’t always done predatorily. Sometimes it's simply due to a lack of proper planning and capability. But there are signs when agencies do know that their promises either won’t be upheld or are misleading. The common saying is “if it sounds too good to be true, it is.”
For Example: an agency isn’t likely going to bring your small company a thousand qualified leads in a month out of thin air. You either won’t receive the full number of leads or they won’t be as qualified as expected. That isn’t to say marketing can’t be incredibly effective, but make sure to dive into exactly how the agency is planning to accomplish their claims, and watch out for vague explanations.
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Holding Your Website Hostage
Many marketing agencies include website development and design as part of their service offering. It’s a good idea for your marketing agency to be involved in your web-building process, as they can provide insight into practices that contribute to higher conversion rates as well as deeper campaign reporting capabilities.
On top of that, the agency may still hold your domain name which forces you to come up with a new, often less highly-converting domain.
Stop Paying for SEO Monthly
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Make Sure You Have Access
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Paying For Monthly SEO
Alongside website creation, agencies will often also promote their monthly SEO plans. These are, for the most part, a complete scam. While you should be making sure your website is both working and hitting on the right keywords for your products/services, these aren’t likely to be changing on a regular monthly basis. Agencies that provide these services as monthly plans will often be getting paid to do nothing every month.
Even though you shouldn't sign up for a monthly plan, you do want an agency that is capable of fixing website issues and conducting an SEO audit from time to time. Less exploitative agencies will offer these same services at an hourly rate only when needed.
Don’t let your agency waste dollars that you could be spending on ads.
You could be spending this money on ads, not hourly bills
A lot of the SEO work is performed by Google's algorithm
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Hiding Your Reporting
A reliable marketing agency stands by their results, and an untrustworthy one hides them. How are you supposed to know your marketing agency is delivering on their promises if you can’t even see how the campaigns are performing? Some agencies won’t show any of their performance metrics at all, while others will only send over easily falsifiable monthly or quarterly screenshots.
The client should be able to see how their campaigns are performing at all points in time. An agency not offering a live reporting dashboard is a giant red flag that they are likely underperforming or possibly even pocketing your ad spend for themselves. The client needs to have their own login and the ability to dig into the numbers on their own to know they are getting what they paid for.
Sometimes reporting dashboards will be offered but won’t include the right data to show how the individual campaigns are performing.There will be metrics such as “Total Revenue” or “Leads/Inquiries”that they attribute entirely to the marketing agency without showing what channels any of it is coming from. You need specific channel data to make decisions on where to be spending your ad budget.
Placing Keywords On Your Business Name
Something advertisers will do to boost their reporting performance is add your company’s name to the Google Ads keyword lists. So, when a user searches for your brand, you’ll pop up in both the organic and paid results. This is an extremely easy way to farm clicks, since the user is already trying to go to your website, they’ll likely click the first result they see, which is in the paid results. So, you end up wasting money on redundant ads that could be better served on generic search terms or searches for competitors.
Make sure your marketing agency lets you see the full list of keywords you’re advertising on as well as the individual performance of each keyword. You’d be surprised how many agencies will advertise on searches for your brand and how much of your ad spend goes toward those searches. Don't waste ad spend on people already searching for you.
Make sure your ad dollars are spent on converting, valuable keywords
Don't spend money on your business name if it's already being searched
Set it & Forget it
It’s very easy for an agency only to handle a campaign’s initial setup and then leave it to run without any changes. A quality agency will assign a manager to continually monitor the campaign, then change out creatives, targeting, or channels anytime they see performance dipping. This is a continuous process that takes constant attention to campaign metrics, not just creating an initial plan and sticking to it regardless of how it is performing.
Many agencies know they’ll be paid for the length of the contract no matter how the campaign performs so they’ll just set it up and then never make any changes. Sometimes the agency will even be impossible to reach after they’ve started your campaign, not allowing you to let them know of any changes you want to make. If this sounds like your agency, then make sure to change to one that will vigilantly watch your campaigns and identify ways to optimize them.
Charging For Every Creative Change
Ad creatives have a productive shelf life of less than 3 months, so shouldn't changes be built into your campaign? Many agencies know that they can rip you off by charging extra every time you need a creative change, which can be often. Creatives grow stale quickly, and you can seethe change happen live in your reporting. Knowing that you will have to pay every time you need to make a swap will cause hesitancy which can hinder your campaigns. Also, if your agency isn’t aware of when the ads need to be swapped out based on dipping performance that is indicative of an even larger problem, which is your agency not caring about the effectiveness of your campaigns.
We recommend finding an agency that monitors your campaigns and includes frequent creative changes in the contract. Otherwise, to reach your marketing goals you’ll have to continually be over budget on your monthly marketing spend.
Make sure your agency isn't overcharging for work that should already be done
If the cost isn't front-loaded, be ready to pay by the hour for campaign changes
Focusing on Metrics Instead of Results
It's usually a good sign to be hitting your desired metrics, but it’s also easy to become caught up on the numbers over the actual campaign results. Almost every marketing agency will set a monthly goal for impressions, clicks, or reach and that’s completely fine and normal, but we just want to caution against letting an agency pump up your numbers artificially at the expense of your campaign performance.
Most agencies use metric goals, especially since conversion tracking is becoming harder due to data privacy restrictions. There's nothing wrong with that. Just ensure your agency is bringing relevant users to your site. If your campaign has been running for months and you are not seeing an improvement in your desired actions/sales, then your campaigns or possibly your website need an update no matter how the metrics are performing. Metrics aren't everything.
Bad traffic can be damaging to your site. Where does yours come from?
ROI is the key. Do the conversions make sense based on impressions?
Lack of Planning
Questions An Agency Should Be Able to Answer:
What are the client's goals? Who is their current audience? Are there potential audiences still untapped? What channels are used in the industry to reach an audience? What messages should be conveyed for each campaign? What are the ultimate objectives of their campaigns?
A successful campaign requires attentive planning. Apathetic agencies will try to get campaigns up and running ASAP without the proper care given to the planning process. Agencies must take the time to learn about their clients and their goals for there to be any hope that the campaign offers a return on investment to the client. If the agency cannot answer all of the questions above, then they aren’t ready to run a campaign. It’s sad but not surprising how often marketers will start a campaign with no engaging visuals, unthoughtful targeting, and no clearly defined call to action. There are instances where general branding is beneficial, but most campaigns require a clear message and a selective target audience for the campaign to create any value for the client.
Using Outdated Methods
Some agencies aren’t intentionally predatory, they just aren’t well-equipped to advertise in the modern digital marketing landscape. In one of our blogs, we detailed how traditional advertising has been replaced and improved upon by digital channels.
Many old-school marketers are reluctant to move away from cable tv, radio, print, and other traditional channels because those are what they've always known and they haven't learned how to evolve with the newly digital world.They may not realize how much their clients are missing out by not utilizing modern marketing methods. We recommend moving your ad spend toward digital channels because of their advanced targeting and reporting.
You may be wasting valuable impressions on irrelevant people
Be sure your demographic is accurate before campaign launch
Ditch Your Greedy Agency
If the tactics we’ve detailed here sound like your marketing agency, then it’s probably time for a switch. 3P Marketing has built our business around creating partnerships with clients that help both of us grow together. We provide transparency, responsiveness, adaptability, and expedience to your campaigns, making sure everything is done thoroughly with attention to your goals, message, and audience. Still don’t believe us? Come meet our team and we can decide together if we’d make a good fit. Schedule a meeting today for free.
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Uninspired Social Content
Many businesses will hire agencies to take on the burden of handling their social posts, but not all agencies will provide social content worth engaging with. There’s a common thought among business owners that they just need to be posting anything regularly on their feed to continue cultivating a growing audience. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as posting disinteresting content could even be hurting your social presence.
All the content you post on socials needs to be engaging to your audience. Share fun things happening with your brand, advertise promotions, showcase your products/services, or interact with your community. What you don’t want to do is solely share content without a specific goal or call to action.With all your content there needs to be a desired reaction from your audience. Many lazy marketers will take on social media accounts and then just create a graphic for every holiday to post and call it a day. Then, predictably, when the graphic is posted it gets no interactions. This is just one example, but if all your social content is never getting likes, shares, comments, or link clicks then it’s probably time to ditch your social manager.
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