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Digital Marketing Agency Red Flags List.

2024-09-29 | 320 Print PDF

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Top Digital Marketing Agency Red Flags To Avoid.

When choosing the right digital marketing partner or agency for your business, one must be certain that both you and the marketing team or consultant share the same goal, and that you both understand each other, because if you kick off your marketing campaign with the wrong set of individuals or organization that might create lots of setbacks for you and your business growth at large.

Why do I say this? Well, for instance, let's say you fall victim to a digital marketing firm that promises to deliver top-notch quality service and you can't get your desired results, will that not translate to failure on your path?

To be frank the industry startup for digital marketing is not as challenging as other businesses, hence the idea of contacting most digital marketers online is a very easy breakthrough. With the world's sudden epiphany of the value of online presence, we now have lots of digital marketing companies and agencies springing up. So many of them do not have a physical address ( this is not a red flag per se, even SEO Web Analyst does not run a physical address anymore but runs a virtual office for meetups, etc).

If you understand the point am getting at here, then you will get the topic headline. There are now more conscientious entities in the online space disguising themselves as professional digital marketers with zero pedigree and falsified or stolen work reviews. The shocker is the fact that some even rely on buying reviews for their online accounts all in the name of parading themselves as being relevant. I have seen enough of this nuisance degrading the working ethic of the digital marketing space and it has poised me to write the main points you need to do when researching for a digital marketing partner for your business growth online.

 

6 Major Marketing Agency Scams To Avoid

1.) No Work Proof: This is a major red flag if the agency or consultant you are trying to hire cannot display any professional knowledge in the service field you want to hire them for. Though there are no certification preferences when hiring a digital marketer, a well-experienced digital marketing firm would be able to showcase some of their past work if not demonstrate technical know-how in that regard.

If the marketing agency or consultant is a one-dimensional fellow or organization then there is the possibility that they are not the sole owner of the property, meaning they rely on freelancing services. This will push me to the next point to avoid during your digital marketing partnership scouting, which is pricing.

So if the digital marketing company or consultant does not have proof of work of what you want and cannot demonstrate any key knowledge in this regard as well as assuring you of delivering a sublime service, I will advise you to get back to them in "no time soon".

2.) Cost of Service: This area is quite a delicate section to discuss because each digital marketing approach can be unique concerning the business needs, the same can be said with pricing. There is no standard guideline for pricing for digital marketing from one agency to another, but that does not mean you can not have some correlation with the way they render their service and pricing. I will give an instance, a client wanted to run Social Media Marketing, and we gave her a package for 3 months at the rate of #200,000 per month. She was surprised and nagged our cost was so expensive that she was getting it cheaper. Her previous vendor provided a service fee of #100,000 per month and a campaign budget of #100,000 per month, which to our calculation still amounts to the same budget our approach will be different as we gave a total package fee and not separate expenses.

Another instance will be the pricing of a service that is substandard, this is well common in SEO services, where you are given a package pricing to rank for useless keywords that are not traffic generated or have no consumer intent behind them. A good example is my encounter with a client who compared our e-commerce SEO service pricing to another firm, mind you we run as a consultant. I had to strongly defend our pricing which was #200,000 off from what the other firm was offering. Our SEO service in the long run offers steady growth to LSI keyword ranking, we offer lesser main keyword-focused ranking but can assure a far more recommendation keyword ranking for the same page versus our competitors, in turn, this results in better performance than the competitors offer and hence why our service seems to be more expensive, and not to mention our rankings keeps improving in terms of more discovered LSI ranking keywords over the years from just a contracted 6 months SEO service.

The pricing you are getting from your digital marketing partner needs to be justifiable and you need to be convinced you are not paying more for less in this regard, let them explain to you why the price is in such a category, if they are not transparent enough then I will say you should be cautious and provide a timeframe for results-driven cases, What I mean is that you and the digital marketing partner might have to reach an agreement as to when you need to start seeing traction for the cost of service. I will not be paying 20% more for a service and they are telling me till the end of the contract before I start seeing a difference.

3.) Transparency: This can cut across in so many ways, in terms of the digital marketing agency or consultant carrying along in the decision process and marketing execution of your campaign with them. If you have a digital marketing partner that does not facilitate communication in all stratosphere of the online marketing process, you might need to start asking questions. Even with my over a decade years as a professional digital marketer I still ask questions, I still need approval from clients as to what am to do and how am to go about it, I share my challenges with them as well and find solutions to any stigma I encounter.

If you have a digital marketing partner who seems uncomfortable with you always calling or cannot assure you that they are working or commencing work on your project, you might need to start looking at pulling the plug on the project and am not talking about reports or performance analysis. Maybe because I run my business as a consultant it makes it easier for my clients to be more comfortable to reach me at any time (literally any time of the day, a client that buzzes me up around 11 pm and another left a note around 2 am, etc).

You as a client should be able to ask questions regarding your paid service and should not be made uncomfortable when you do eg gatekeeping knowledge, also talking about transparency, you should be given a working time frame or schedule, and a follow-up, and check-up should be part of their service, I know I do this even after delivering my service to clients I do a follow up check on their progress and contact them after a couple of months into the service to see if they are noticing changes with their business online.

4.) Centralize Decisions: One thing I do not do is assume total control over a marketing project, As I have mentioned earlier during the communication process which is a continual thing during the marketing phase, I do not solely take full access of how to go about any stigma or challenges I might face, I let my clients aware of this things. Their input can help avoid repetitive issues, eg a reason why a client might want to optimize their other business under a subdomain versus buying a fresh domain to optimize for that new business subsidiary instead.

If your digital marketing partner does not have the courtesy to get you involved in their decision-making or actions that will impact your business online then you might notice some poor judgment in your selection of a digital marketer. I will give an instance when we needed to optimize an e-commerce website, we had to decide to provide each product a unique name instead of their product ID, this had an effect on the e-commerce site also provided offline records of these products and they where already recorded with their product ID, now you can see the dilemma. Imagine I had made the selfish decision not to communicate with the client this would have led to a sales mismatch and my SEO effort wasted.

So you might need to ask the digital marketing partner if they prefer to communicate decision-making with you or if they rather make decisions on their own, there might be minor decisions that may not require your attention or lead to major impact like the example above, but still, it is advisable to be sure of your decision process with the digital marketing partner.

5.) Lack of Initiatives: Your digital marketing partner should be initiatively inclined to find the best ways to drive more revenue for the business, they need to be creative with their marketing approach, to foster growth and outshine your competitors.

They will stay up-to-date with the latest marketing and consumer trends and monitor your data to make informed marketing optimizations that reach and engage your target audience. Be on the lookout for any agencies that fail to come up with new approaches for your company to achieve your goals or miss opportunities to reach your audience. 

Such companies or agencies are solely interested in the money aspect of your business with them, I had a client ask me if my pricing changes when they start to see an increase in revenue, and I told her NO that is preposterous for a digital marketing firm to engage in such, rather they should focus on introducing their clients to other new means of growing their sales and presence online.

6.) Unrealistic Guarantees: If a digital marketing firm can provide proof then their guarantee on your own personal job delivery should not be a challenge. Note I mentioned that every business is unique hence the results are never the same, not to mention when you execute digital marketing from different parties.

You need to be realistic when it comes to results, most clients want to see results as fast as possible and when they are being assured of this they fall victim easily to scammers and fakers out there. I make realistic projections for clients' results and to be more precise to the level of work at hand. eg, For a job I know will take much longer to start seeing results is going to be impossible for me to give a false outcome of three months when I can observe and read into the client's expectations as well.

What I am saying here is that you as a client need to be realistic with your expectations so that digital marketers will not use this to scam you into making payment for a substandard service.

Recommended Read: Top 10 Branding Design Agency For Nigeria Startups

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