Savvy or Sucker Marketing

0 CommentsTuesday • April 12, 2011 • by Imei

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For the past few months, I’ve been offering a few business-related blog posts for business owners. For those of you who have taken the step to put out your online “open for business” shingle by starting a website or web blog, you might have noticed an increase in emails asking if a company can help you increase traffic by monitoring your site, using SEO (search engine optimization), helping you select keywords that rank high on Google for your business niche, or adding you to a larger network of business owners boasting a large percentage of hits for your local. If you don’t know what these marketers are talking about, you owe it to yourself to figure out whether you can detect savvy or sucker marketing?

What is the difference between savvy marketing and sucker marketing? Savvy marketing helps you reach beyond cold contacts and close friend networks into the rich communities that may be already primed for your business.

To understand savvy marketing, you should experiment with what you can learn yourself. For example:

1. Conducting Google keyword searches for your niche. It’s free. What do you have to lose?
2. Experiment with what happens when you change meta tags, content, ads, and watch your website analytics over a period of time.
3. Note what content your audience responds to. Pay careful attention to how your contacts found you.
4. Paid advertisements are not created equal. Find out the ones that give you the best ROI. Keep track of which ads did well and where they were placed.
5. Create a quarterly or monthly newsletter, thanking your customers, and showing them what actions or methods of participation would help them belong to your network and/or community.

When you’ve done some of these things for yourself, you’ll be more savvy about when and who to hand this to should you choose to hire someone to maintain your website/webblog to increase your business contacts.

You will also be able to detect when you’ve been contacted by what I’m calling “sucker marketing”:

1. The caller tells you he or she works for Google. I find this practice unethical (and possibly illegal). For each person who has called me and said she worked for Google, they have had to “clarify” that she didn’t actually work for Google at all. However, she was reading from a script. This sucker marketing tactic is hoping you don’t know enough about online business and SEO and is banking on popularity of Google to get your attention.

2. The bot message in your inbox guarantees that it can increase traffic to your website if you’ll pay a fee, join their program, or hand over your website maintenance over to their marketer. Even if the company could increase your website’s traffic, there is no guarantee they will increase relevant traffic to your site. A marketing company’s guarantee must be based on whether they can bring you niche-rich traffic (a.k.a. relevant hits).

Want to do an inexpensive experiment on this? Take out an ad on Facebook, put a limit on the amount you’d be willing to pay in weekly time period, and do not put limits on demographics related to the ad. On a different week, add in al the demographics that apply to your niche, and change your ad to be keyword specific. Your traffic hits should go down, but the number of relevant contacts should increase.

If you are going to hire a company to do your marketing and web maintenance, make sure they understand your business niche.

3. The marketer tells you he knows the most effective keywords for your business, and you don’t know what those are.. This one honestly makes me laugh. You can find out more about keyword searches by doing a little research of your own. A great book I have mentioned before is Vanessa Fox’s, “Marketing in the Age of Google“, and she devotes much description and examples to how you can determine your business niche’s SEO-driven keywords to help your business rank high.

If you can at least do this part yourself to get a fundamental understanding, you are now poised to ask a few questions of your inquirers. The following conversation occurred last year, but is a summary of approximately five similar phone calls:

Marketer: Hi, I’m calling from Google. I saw on your website, www dot widgets dot com, that you aren’t ranking as high as you ought to for your business. I can help you discover keywords that you might not know about so that you can increase your website traffic.

Me: (acting dumb) Oh, wow! You work for Google? That must be exciting. You help businesses increase their website traffic, eh? What kinds of keywords are we talking about?

Marketer: Actually, I don’t work directly for Google. I work for XYZ company, but we work in conjunction with Google’s way of searching so that people can find your business. With keywords, let’s see…. with widget sales, you should be using keywords, A, B, and C.

Me: (still acting dumb) You mean, if I used keywords A, B, and C specifically on my website, that would help my business do better?

Marketer: Yes, those are the three main keywords for your business. We can…

Me: (interrupting) Well, thanks for letting me know those three keywords! That was great help. Bye! (hangs up phone).

In the above scenario, the marketer erroneously addresses me as the owner of the business, and not necessarily the same person monitoring my businesses website. The minute I detected the marketer’s “sucker” fallacies, I ended the conversation in a way that would likely guarantee I wouldn’t be addressed the same way. I also did not know the company that was named; this was a cold contact with no introduction via email or understanding of my specific business or its history.

In the ensuing months, you may be contacted by more marketers who now know you know something of your business. If you are ready to hire someone to help expand your marketing plan, select someone savvy who isn’t taking advantage of your lack of knowledge about how SEO works, what kind of content should go on your site, and what type of advertising you want to engage in for which kind of platforms. They should have experience with branding your type of business, and if they don’t but ask to use you as a way to gain experience, ask for a trial period and regular check ins.

3. You receive an email telling you to get in on the exciting world of mobile marketing. I put this in a similar category ask deep linking. Before you agree to do this, you have to look at your business practices, goals, and your present contacts. Did you ask them for permission to be contacted on their mobile phones outside of emails? You can lose good customers without taking time and care to consider what some mobile marketing methods may do to your business.

If your business is very new or very small, know that there is a lot of free information available to help you get started with marketing and branding your company, project, or idea (patented or not). You don’t have to pay beaucoup bucks up front unless you know a reputable person with a plan to build your market responsibly.

Remember, just because you put a website up does not mean you will get business overnight. You have to learn how to “work it”. Marketing can be very helpful, but know what is savvy and what is sucker-ish.

Posted in: Art, Business

Tagged with: good marketing, Google, keywords, marketing, savvy, SEO, sucker