After Reading This, You'll Probably Fire Your Digital Marketing Agency

I'm an Internet nerd.

I've been on the Internet since it first came out. Before that, I dialed into private web servers inside people's homes and on University campuses and even hosted my own bulletin board system (or 'BBS' for short) for a little while. 

Most Internet Marketers today have been on the Internet less than 5 years. I don't say this to boast or enter a technical expertise competition. I'm bringing this up because my years of experience gives me a perspective that the majority of the industry doesn't have and that gives me a distinct advantage in business and technology. 

The advantage I have is understanding how the Internet works as an emerging media and communications tool. I've spent more than 15 years learning what does and doesn't work to market and sell products and services on the web. As a result, I understand how to incorporate whole systems thinking and network effects to business models and marketing strategies to automate and scale Platform Brands. 

I didn't learn all of this from a book or from attending a TED talk or interactive strategy conference somewhere - I've learned it the hard way by doing it day in and day out, working with hundreds of organizations and individuals as they each made the leap onto the Internet. 

So I get really angry sometimes, and frustrated, when marketers take advantage of small business owners and nonprofit organizations because they care more about taking your money, being "creative" and "flashy", or earning another award for their firm than they care about doing the job they were hired to do. 

I've been politely quiet for a long time but I just can't stay quiet any longer.

Not all of the Internet marketers out there are terrible, and not all bad marketing is due to a bad marketer. Marketers are human beings, they make honest and innocent mistakes. On top of that - the Internet is new and changing daily so there's lots for all of us to keep learning through experimentation. Experiments don't always prove our hypothesis and that's ok. That's how science works, actually. 

Great marketers are worth far more than you can afford to pay them, but bad ones just flush your marketing budget down the drain. I want to share my knowledge and experience with you to help you differentiate the great Internet marketers from the bad.

Here's 7 thought-provoking questions for you to use to evaluate your digital marketing agency or marketing consultant to determine if you should fire them. 

1) Will they commit to a specific quota of qualified leads and/or conversions for each campaign? 

Bad marketers love to tell you how many new visitors, likes, and retweets they'll give you, but if you ask them to commit to getting 10 new prospects each week that have the budget and need for your products and services, they start acting like a cat with a hairball on it's way up. 

While there's no guarantees in marketing or sales, the best marketers aren't afraid to write down SMART goals that make it clear what you're both trying to do, as partners, to increase their sales pipeline. If they get you 9 instead of 10 qualified leads, that's better than getting 1,000 new site visitors and 0 conversions. 

2) Do they talk to you about your business objectives or just about your promotional tactics? 

I want to help my clients achieve their business objectives. For most businesses, those objectives fall into 3 categories:

1. increased sales,
2. decreased costs, and
3. improved customer loyalty and retention. 

Bad marketers want to look like they're doing something to justify their hourly rates: they'll talk about all the content they'll write, the website design and redesign, how they're going to tweet and send you fancy reports from your search engine analytics.

The one thing they won't do is connect the dots between all that activity and your business outcomes to demonstrate how they're contributing to your growth.

3) Do they tell you marketing is an "art" or worse - it's a mixture of art and science? 

Art most assuredly has a place in society, and I value great artists and their work beyond words. So let's not offend great artists by calling marketing and business tactics "art".

Bad marketers use art as an excuse to avoid doing the hard work of scientific experimentation and measurement because most of them have no real clue what they're doing with your data and analytics reports. 

You can't measure art, but you can measure marketing results and sales numbers - and this is in large part made possible because of the Internet and the growing number of analytics and data science tools.

In today's data-driven business environment, your marketing agency needs to be skilled in creating attribution models and analyzing your customer data across your different sales channels to give you a clear picture of what to do more of and what to do less of. 

4) Do they focus on the design and colors of your digital brand more than they focus on understanding your business, your customers, and your market? 

Bad marketers tell you that your digital marketing could improve if you redesigned your website or added more graphics and images. Great marketers will go talk to your customers and analyze your customer data, they'll talk to your sales team, they'll want to spend time at one of your industry events, and doing everything they can to get to know your business and your market as well as you do. 

5) Are they blaming your sinking search engine rankings on one or more of Google's algorithm changes? 

It's true that Google's algorithm changes have probably affected every single website out there in some way or another, even if you followed everything according toGoogle's best practices and recommendations. BUT that's not the real issue. The real issue is that Bad marketers rely on outdated tactics like SEO instead of updating their skills and taking the time to educate their clients as the landscape of search engine marketing evolves. 

Why? Because they're bad at sales (see above) and it's easier to sell a short term result than sell a long term value added service. Bad marketers cheat to get short term results. Great marketers ignore short term "hacks" and focus on your customers' goals and your business objectives to find ways to align the two. 

Before Panda nerfed keyword stuffing and thin content, I was advising people to focus on writing quality content that was relevant to their target market and would attract their ideal customers. The results? Higher conversion rates (ie more sales dollars) and their page rankings improved while their competitors' rankings were penalized. 

Companies who paid to have their website link placed across different blog post comment sections and directory listings all felt the pain when Penguin came out. I continued to "preach" to my clients - "Write quality content that's relevant and useful to your ideal target customers and prospects. Don't try and cheat the system." I would say, "Because cheaters never win." 

Before Hummingbird came out, I was already researching and recommending context and hyperlocal SEO tactics. How did that advice go? It sounds a lot like this "Write quality content that's relevant and useful to your ideal target customers and prospects. Don't try and cheat the system." 

6) Are they talking to you about integrated strategies that incorporate your offline marketing strategies or do they just try and get you to pay to add another social media network to your Brand portfolio? 

Marketing tactics alone don't get the job done. You have to have a strategic plan that looks at the entire business as a whole and takes into consideration all the different ways your customers connect with your Brand's products and services. 

Print isn't dead, event marketing still has one of the highest ROIs for B2B Brands, and people are using their mobile devices because they're moving around out and about in the real world seeking physical experiences. We're not digital people and Brands that don't integrate their online marketing with their offline customers will quickly become commodities instead of Global Platform Leaders. 

Why do you think all the great Digital Thought Leaders write and sell hardback books and go to conferences to speak?

Great marketers understand the value of getting out of the building, of going offline to connect with people as often as, if not more than, they go online. Great marketers understand the power of their thoughts can be shared across the Internet and that information is still just as correct - but relationships aren't built on electrons alone.

Great marketers will advise you on how to be where your customers are when your customers are in the buying mindset. They won't tell you to sign up for every social media network that pops up on the web and waste your budget. 

7) Do they constantly recommend new tactics that include a higher budget or do they respect your budget and focus on results-driven execution?  

Bad marketers always have advice on what you should do next, and that advice usually comes with a bigger budget than you had expected. Your monthly invoice from the agency always comes back higher than you were expecting and you aren't seeing your sales numbers increase alongside your marketing spend uptick.

Great marketers know that consistency and focus is more important than adding more tactics to the mix - this is especially true for small businesses and startups where you're still trying to build your strong customer foundation. 

Great marketers will know how to work inside of your budget. If they aren't a specialist in your market or they're unable to work with your budget, great marketers will recommend you to someone in their network who will be able to best serve your business' needs within your budget. 

What questions have you found most helpful at selecting the right agency? 

I'd love your comments about your experience evaluating marketing agencies! And if you're looking for help with the upcoming Google Algorithm change for mobile SEO or other Internet business and marketing, connect with me on LinkedIn and let's chat!