I was recently doing some freelance, in-office marketing work for a business owner friend of mine.
I was contracted out three days a week for a few hours. I was surprised to see all the advertising vultures that either called or walked in the door attempting to and sometimes succeeding at taking my friends money for worthless marketing efforts or pointless ads.
First there was the printing company who printed their business cards and flyers for twice the going rate and who didn’t even bother to redesign the old card when the business needed to add their new web address to the card. So what they actually did was insert a white block over the address at the bottom and put text on top of that in an entirely different font than any on the rest of the card. On top of it looking like crap, you couldn’t see the web address unless you used a magnifying glass.
Now I know you may be thinking, “Ok Angela, its just a business card”. Well it would be just a business card but that same tacky set-up was used for their flyers and then almost used on a $4,000 a month billboard – before I intercepted it.
Next we have (blank)P.com, which is owned by A(blank) & (blank). I’m not sure if I want to get on their case for being overpriced or for being worthless. Ok….we all have to make money as business owner’s right? But why in the hell would anyone pay thousands of dollars for a listing on an online phone book when they offer a free listing? Of course this goes for all of the other online phone books.
I called them in to find out if they could send text messages or mobile ads out to cell phones within their network and they told me I would have to supply them with the email addresses. I guess this is fair. But, I actually don’t need anyone to contact the contacts I already have access to contact. Do I?
Then there’s the billboard guy who for some reason refused to give me his contact information or business card on two instances. I’m not sure if he was the actual ad agency or a middleman trying to hustle a gig but he was actually trying to blow up the graphics from the tacky business card and put its contents on a $4,000 per month billboard before I stopped him! What is this madness?
Now I know Miami is one slick city and things are rough right now, but the more I deal with clients the more I find that a lot of small business owners are really being taken advantage of.
On a personal note, my former mother-in-law was charged $700 for a five-page website that has fewer than 100 words in total on the entire site. And the site was never even submitted to the search engines. They had the nerve to add on a maintenance fee of $250 per month!
Hell, there’s nothing to maintain except for the misspelled words and grammatically incorrect URL that doesn’t match the actual name of the business that the so-called web designer purchased for the web address.
I noticed similarities in all of these business owners:
- They have a decent amount of money to spend
- They have had success in the past and are now trying to amp up their advertising efforts through new mediums
- They are good, trusting people
- They work at their own businesses and lack the time to be involved in or research what they are spending their money on
- They trusted the slick/quick talker more than they trust the person who was honest enough to tell them that their marketing efforts might take a little time.
- Basically they were impatient and wanted to be told what they wanted to hear “Instant Results on All Levels”.
If I can offer any small business owner any advice when it comes to slick salesmen, it’s “Have a little Patience”. Before you purchase any advertising research the company offering that ad and make them show you some type of reasonable proof that they actually get the results they claim.
If I had a dime for every ONLINE phone book, magazine, newspaper, radio station, etc., that substantially exaggerated their web stats I would be in Fiji right now fishing! Should I jump in on the new, high pressured sales tactics and over priced Chamber of Commerce local services? Nah….I’m gonna leave that one alone for now.
I could go on about this forever, but I think you get the picture.
There are a few tools on the web where you can check websites stats for free. So the next time some advertiser or online magazine tells you they get one billion unique visitors per day, you can pull up one of these sites and send them out of your office or make them give you a much better deal.
A couple of those sites are:
- http://www.alexa.com/
- http://siteanalytics.compete.com/ (you can check and compare up to three sites for free with compete)
There may be others…..
If you are wondering about a particular online phone directory or mobile app where people go to look for businesses, just ask your friends, family members or peers if they know about it or use it at all. That will give you a pretty good indication of its actual popularity.
Don’t get me wrong; you have to spend money to make money and often times lots of it. If no one spent money on marketing, I would be homeless right about now and definitely not ever going to make it to that Fiji fishing gig I mentioned earlier (smile).
Business owners – Make sure the money you spend is well worth it!
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