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Turning Clicks Into Clients® Through Digital Marketing is not easy!

PHILADELPHIA, PA, USA, May 22, 2017 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Have you ever had an opinion that changed over time? Sure, we all have. Moreover, have you analyzed why or how that opinion changed? Were the facts different? Could it just be that the facts were presented differently? Maybe you learned more?
With that introspection in mind, I have to ask: is the client always right?
I say no!
I can hear the doubter saying “how could that be, of course, the client is right!” I can hear you thinking “it’s their money and we work for them, so we must do what they want.”
Really? Do you believe that? I do not believe that and I never will. I can show you why I do not, and will not ever believe that again.
If you disagree and think that the customer is infallible, well, I hope that works out for you, and you don’t keep losing or churning clients. You see, it is my contention that if clients are always right, why would they need you? If you are right and know what you are doing, then your clients should abide by your direction.
However, that doesn’t always happen, does it? Clients have the power and authority and the right to make decisions that I believe are wrong. These decisions may not be informed, but if they pay the bills so of course they must be right, right? Wrong!
I get it though. I understand the tendency to defer to customer demands. I, like you, was trained to believe that the client is always right.
But I have to ask is that always true? Marketing and sales have changed drastically in the past decade; and accepting old premises may not be the best thing for you and your client. If you do not challenge – albeit carefully – your clients, you will surely do them a disservice. A dissatisfied customer that feels burned could hurt you with bad reviews and negative feedback. Word of mouth with this former client will most likely end up being “bad mouthed,” and you don’t want this to happen.
There are going to be times when they are so unbelievably wrong that you need to put your foot down with a customer.
For example, I had a new client that told me that he knew the exact keywords that he wanted to rank for. At first, I thought this was great; I’ll use his keywords and build upon them. I didn’t ask how he knew what relevant terms were being searched. He was so convincing that I left our meeting thinking ahead, and building a plan to master his campaign. I would use his keywords and then make them better over time.
Back in the office, I sat with our SEO guy and laid out the scenario. After he had spent about five minutes in AHREFS, he turned, looked me in the eye and pronounced that the client was an idiot.
“Well, that’s a little harsh,” I thought. It turned out that to achieve top ranking for the keywords the client provided would take months and months to gain even a little traction. This was because the keywords were in fact, the most searched and competitive keywords.
The client was currently ranking on pages so far back, I wanted to die. No wonder his current vendor couldn’t get him business. And, since the client is always right (right?) the other vendor did what he was told to do. My strategy of not challenging the client was going to make me the next ineffective marketer that this client replaced.
I video called him – I like to see whom I am speaking with so I know they are engaged and really listening – a nd stated: “I looked at your keyword list and based on your budget and current ranking I anticipate that we could get him on page one within 27 months!”
On the video, he turned a nice shade of crimson, and said “what is with you guys? You take all of my money, and none of you perform?”
“This digital stuff is worse than the old yellow pages,” he exclaimed. He even said that he had already done much of my work for me. By giving me the keywords, he said, that he himself had paid an expert to research.
Ah Ha! I countered with, “Who was this expert?”
The expert was his nephew that wrote his thesis on internet marketing three years earlier, and today is working in the radio advertising industry.
Could this get any worse? It could, but I decided that enough was enough. I was done with this rugby scrum. It was time for me to tell the client that he was wrong, very tactfully!
That is when it hit me: I am a “Smarketing” expert, and he isn’t. If you don’t know what Smarketing is, it is the precise vector where sales and marketing meet, a term coined by Dan Tyre of HubSpot.
I stated to the customer that I was sorry; I did him a disservice by trusting him! He looked a darker shade of purple. He then continues to ask what I meant by that. I plowed forward and asked him this question: “If a prospective or new client told him to put in a ½ ton HVAC unit would he just take the clients word for it?”
The answer is, of course not!
He stated that he would acknowledge the person’s suggestion, but would still need to perform calculations to get the right sized unit that was necessary. Maybe, a ½ ton was not needed. He then explained that he would verify the size needed and if ½ ton were too small, he would show the person why. He wouldn’t let the customer dictate to him because if it were wrong, the customer would be unhappy and that creates additional problem and concerns.
I laughed and said, “well I let you tell me what to do, by doing that I almost provided you with the wrong unit.”
His color slowly changed to something more healthy looking. We then went on to discuss the way we do research and how we look for keywords that generate traffic but are not as competitive in terms of cost. Furthermore, I shared details on other strategies that we would employ to make his results even better. I guess you could say I educated him.
When it was all said and done, the client agreed to our strategy and has since increased his budget by 200%.
Before we ended the call, he said, if someone had taught him this earlier he probably would not have wasted tens-of-thousands of dollars. “Nobody ever challenged me!”
Even though I lucked out, I could have avoided the anxiety of the situation if I had done two things: Listened to him and then educated him.
The education showed him he was wrong. I guess that since he changed the plan, he was right! Right?
Here are the five reasons that I promised to share with you:

1. Clients know their business, but they don’t know yours. Would you want to tell a client how to do their job or run their business? I don’t!

2. The client may have an informed opinion but how or when was that opinion formed? In the digital marketing sphere, data and technology change daily.

3. Has the client studied, tested and been certified in your industry? And even if they had, how long ago?

4. Even if they sound like they do know our business, we must assume they do not and challenge them. They probably don’t know the industry as well as you.

5. As a marketing professional, I learn new things every day as they relate to digital marketing. Your client probably does the same in his/her industry. So their knowledge base should not encumber what you know.

You are the professional. You are the expert. The chances are that your client isn’t any of those things in your area of expertise. He/she may have some ideas, and they may be invalid or outdated.
Your job as a marketer is to provide the service(s) to them that will get them what they want. Never take shortcuts and always challenge your client when need be!
Mike Bannan and the Results Driven Marketing team work to bring new clicks to their clients. The RDM team’s primary mission is to be better, faster and brilliant when helping clients achieve their goals. The visionary digital marketing experts have developed new tools and created new packages of leading advertising strategies that help newer businesses get a foothold into digital marketing area. RDM does this all while using cost effective methods that competitors haven’t even thought of.
At RDM we don’t just take, we provide, help and value. We have created the “RDM” which is a tool that helps marketers greatly reduce their keyword research time while providing them with better keywords that are easier to rank for. The RDM is in BETA testing now.
RDM has been helping clients meet their client acquisition goals since 2013. Should you need further information or just want to talk strategy, call RDM. We provide a free 45-minute consultation to discuss your challenges.

Mike Bannan
Results Driven Marketing, LLC
215-600-3540
email us here

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