Digital marketing and low-budget website building can be a gamble

If you read this blog regularly, you may feel that we are a little bit special about the way we take care of our partners. Whether they work with TKG Access, our small business division, or they are a larger organization with a strong digital marketing strategy, we take it personally.

From strategy development to implementation to results measurement, our team is closely involved with our partners, so we take their gains and losses seriously. This is why it really comes to us when we see companies gambling their brand by trying high-risk, low-budget marketing tactics.

Don’t get me wrong. Having run a small digital agency for over 20 years, I enjoy taking risks like the next guy. But just like poker, risk and strategy must be accounted for.

Common ways we see companies gamble with their digital marketing

Companies often feel the need to check the “digital marketing” or “new website” box by hiring a lower-cost provider who will show up and give them a quote or respond to the RFP. In these cases, the wrong factors are often the motivation behind the decision.

Possible consequences of gambling with your brand

low budget seo

SEO providers that offer extremely low prices often offer little value as well. They tend to focus on generating backlinks and traffic, and are less concerned with delivering real results. This is not their fault. Giving them a $200 or $300 budget won’t let them delve into your brand.

Common unintended consequences that we end up fixing later include toxic backlinks due to poor link building strategies, stuffed keyword content and website optimized content, and blog content that is not related to actual products and services offered by a particular company. In other words, content for the sake of content and not content for the sake of strategy. All of these issues can cause long-term negative effects on your brand.

Half the social media rating

Poor social media management can be a real problem. I definitely realize that not every brand needs to leverage social media for growth. However, since the web is the way most people experience any new brand for the first time, it matters. Even an industrial factory needs a professional presence on Facebook, for example. Employees and potential clients are likely to at least check it out to get a feel for your culture. If they come to your social media page and all they see are posts about coffee and bathroom breaks, what impact might that have on your brand? Your social media presence should be managed by a real communications professional who understands social media, not a guy who just grew up with it.

Send “Quick Emails”

Email marketing and marketing automation still exist today for a reason. they are working. However, if you’re checking this box by sending regular “emails” via Outlook, sending emails to a group of people or using a tool like Constant Contact, you’ll probably do more harm than good. People expect valuable, targeted messages from brands, not a random dump of everything you have for sale or what you can think of. There is a great opportunity to take advantage of the right tool for the job, but harming the audience with too much unfocused email content can harm their perception of your brand.

Investing without a strategy

Pay-per-click advertising has a lot of potential to help any business grow. However, going this route without a strategy to measure and monetize efforts can be a bad gamble.

Google sends credits to entice you. Lots of companies will take these credits and run some ads. Sometimes this results in a regular PPC budget that is managed internally. Oftentimes, concerns about excessive spending prevent these companies from investing dollars based on a return on advertising spend that leads to profitable returns. The brand gamble here may not matter in the short term. However, if that leads to a decision that “PPC is not doing us any good”, it can certainly have a huge opportunity cost. Before spending a penny on a PPC, value your brand enough to set an ROI expectation and just think about the agencies that would like to have this conversation with you.

protect your knowledge

A big part of digital marketing is the process of using the web to help your potential customers find you by demonstrating your thought leadership. It is not uncommon to see companies trying to use their website in order to “say enough to get them to call”. Although this sounds good, it is not likely to work. The truth is that people buy from the people and brands they trust. So, in your digital marketing efforts, don’t be afraid to educate your audience, and perhaps even your competitors. The web and the marketplaces you serve will reward you with work.

Neglecting your website

We’ve said it for years: Building a new website is the beginning of the process. It is not a project. The moment you launch a new website, it starts to age and atrophy. As you prepare the plan and budget for your new website, take the time to consider the maintenance and growth aspects of your website so that you budget correctly and anticipate that this is something you need to pay attention to. Websites with 60-day-old blog posts, ex-employees in photos and cars in the parking lot from the ’90s don’t do your brand justice.

Allow RFPs to make the decision

Web development and SEO RFPs may be two of the worst necessary evils we see on a regular basis. Although I understand that large organizations and nonprofits should do this, it certainly does not serve real goals very well. So, if you have no choice but to submit an RFP, so be it. But do yourself a favor and stack the playing cards to your advantage. Build a good RFP that focuses more on the experience of the people you’ll be working with than on price. If price is the driver, you will almost certainly choose the wrong partner and find yourself making a change in the first year. True digital marketing partnerships develop over years, not weeks or months. Change is painful and can often cost more than the original web development build or strategy.

When we work together, we win together

Ultimately, digital marketing and web development are all about people more than they are about Facebook, email, or Google. People still buy from people and do business with them. The digital footprint is really just a set of tools that help us play the game. If you intend to gamble, do so with strategy.

Contact the team at Karcher Group to work towards a collective win. We’d like to start a conversation about how digital marketing can help you achieve real business goals.