Are You a Nightmare Client for Your Marketing Agency?

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For many small business owners, their style of management is simply “how they do things”. However, when it comes to outsourcing your marketing – or any other service, for that matter – there is a fine line between a discerning client and one that drags the provider down.

What makes someone a nightmare client for a marketing agency?

1. Failing to see their situation from a business perspective:

lisech, marketing strategy, consulting, outsourcing, nightmare clientIn many cases, small business owners treat outsourced service providers in the same way as they would treat their employees. After all, they have their “style of management”.

However, employees are paid by the hour. Your marketing agency gets paid to produce results, whatever achieving that may involve. Your digital marketing provider quoted you to do a job, and they are expected to deliver, regardless of the number of hours it requires.

If you start engaging in excessive communications and expect constant changes to what they do in order to keep up with your evolving expectations, they need to deal with that in top of the actual work they need to do.

One client who feels they “own” their marketing agency can easily demand so much time that the agency is unable to take on another client with the time they have left.

As a result, they are literally forced to work for half their usual rate. That also means that, if you ever decide to move on, the potential “other client” whose time you demanded as your own, is not there to help carry the loss.

2. Micromanaging their marketing efforts:

Yes, your business is your baby. Literally. You want to do everything you can in order to protect and nurture it. It is a perfectly natural desire, especially if you are passionate about your business.

However, when you micromanage the  tasks and direction of your online marketing agency, several things happen…

a. Again, your management style costs them time, which in term costs them money.

b. Micromanaging the content not only necessitates additional time for creating content that you are “happy” with, but it can also severely limit their options to attract potential customers for you.

c. Micromanaging their efforts signals a lack of trust. If you don’t trust your internet marketing agency to get the job done, don’t hire them.

d. It is demotivating. For those working at your marketing services provider, constantly being told that what they do is not good enough or not correct, eventually leads to them just doing what YOU want, and not doing what they know to be best to attract customers to your business.

It inevitably leads to a reduction in the quality of the services rendered, and everybody loses. You lose because you don’t get the results you hoped for, and they lose because they have to spend more time on providing your services than they anticipated. In the end, when you fire them for not delivering on your expectations, they are relieved despite the loss of income.

If you are unhappy with what is happening with your marketing, call a meeting. Put everything on the table, and hammer down all the details.

3. Assuming it is an intern that does the work:

While marketing agencies love to portray themselves as professional businesses, the reality is that – in most cases, the owner does all of the work. One person is the one with all of the knowledge, and they don’t make enough to outsource any of the work.

As a result, if you assume that your work is done by an unpaid intern, and that their time is worth nothing (so you can micromanage all you like, and waste their time as much as you like), you may be placing an impossible burden on the person actually doing the work.

In reality, this leaves the owner feeling like a punching bag, and can – over time – lead to mental health issues.

4. Not stating your real expectations during negotiation:

In many cases, small business owners hide their real expectations during price negotiations – partly because they want to keep the quote as low as possible, and they fear that being outright could influence the figure.

In part it is also because many business owners don’t really know what they want. They just decide that – when they see what the agency is doing – that they don’t like what they see, they want to start making changes.

This inevitably leads to higher time demands on the marketing agency, which means they are effectively getting paid less for what they do.

Another issue we have run into, is small business owners who don’t disclose that they need instant results. In some cases, small businesses who are running low on cash will approach a marketing agency, assuming that they will turn their businesses around in a month.

It doesn’t work that way – unless you already have a decent audience on social media (which is under-utilized), or if you already have a substantial website which can be tweaked to get more traffic from Google. Anything else that has to be done from scratch will take time.

Even paid advertising takes time in order to run it profitably – because you have to run tests on multiple ads with multiple targeting options before you know what really works. Typically, media buyers (advertising agencies) require a test period of three months before they have your advertising all figured out.

5. Assuming you own the person doing the work:

Let’s face it: Most small business owners are passionate about their businesses. They work hard, often working insanely long hours.

What they tend to forget, however, is that the digital marketer they hired is not passionate about the client’s business. They are passionate about their own business.

And there is a huge difference between working ON your business and working IN your business. If you call on them at all hours or weekends, you are either preventing them from working ON their business, or preventing them from enjoying what little time off they do allow themselves.

Ask yourself this question: If your customers called you at all times, demanding your time and even adding to your workload, while you knew you would get NOTHING out of it…

(No additional income/sales, no additional branding value, nothing…)

How would you feel about that?

6. Insisting that you know better, and they don’t know anything:

In most cases, small business owners hire digital marketing agencies because they realize they lack the necessary knowledge about marketing online. If you feel they don’t know what they are doing, fire them – or if you pick it up soon enough, don’t hire them.

But, if they make a living by offering their professional services, chances are they know what they are doing. Set the parameters during your initial negotiations, and then let them do their job.

If, in fact, you DO know better, and you come from a marketing background, simply be more critical when hiring. Ask more probing questions to see if they are on the level you require of them.

7. Wanting them to jump every time you see a video from a “guru”:

We have had it so many times…

A client sees a video about some tactic for social media or SEO, and they can’t wait to put it in front of you so that “you can use this opportunity to make them more money”.

FACT: Most “gurus” aren’t. They just pretend to be.

Also, most loopholes aren’t. They are just figments of imagination from people desperate to get new clients or customers. In the odd event that a loophole does exist, it is usually closed very quickly once people start exploiting it.

We have heard some real interesting “advice” from clients over the years (after watching videos from “gurus”).

The best one to date was an SEO (search engine optimization) “expert” who recently told a client to add a list of additional keywords at the end of the website’s content, BUT in the same color as the background. Google will see the keywords as additional content, and give you credit for it.

There are just two problems with this “trick”:

a. Google closed that loophole more than TEN years ago. Once they did, they publicly stated that continuous use of the technique will be perceived as being deceptive, and websites who engage in it will be penalized, and can even be de-indexed.

b. Even if Google did not have any problem with the “deception”, it would still amount to “keyword stuffing”, because it would mean the website has many keywords but not enough content to provide natural context. That too, is a no-no.

If your digital marketing agency is worth their salt, they will constantly be on the lookout for ways to improve their results. Chances are they already came across the “new” thing you sent them, and already figured out whether it will work for your specific situation or not.

In conclusion:

Working with any service provider is about trust. If you didn’t trust your doctor, would you allow them to do an operation on you? Or would you let them do it, but tell them how to do their job?

Yes, in the case of working with a digital marketing agency, you need to ask some probing questions. Even if the agency you want to hire does have a track record, they may not have promoted a business like yours before.

But once you have established that they know what they are doing, just let them get on with their jobs. Hold them to account, but let them get on with it.

The sad reality is this: You being a nightmare client is everybody’s loss – because your marketing services provider will not be able to – or inclined to – perform at their best if you are.

You will lose too.

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