Peoples Experience With Online Marketing

Ronan_wals

Hello

I'm wondering what peoples opinion and experiences are like with online marketing. I'm looking for good experiences and bad experiences and most importantly tell tale signs of a shark.

Any help is much appreciated

jimmii

For ourselves it's worked very well but I think it depends on the nature of your business and your target market. We're B2C Facebook works very well for us as its mainly image based and we sell a lot of "pretty" products so we get a much better response there than on twitter.

pedronomix

Is this a question about online marketing or service providers?

PaulPinnacle

I work in the industry (SEO), a massive vested interest so a big caveat for readers over everything I say. I'm saying it honestly, but you've no way of knowing that so do treat it with a little healthy cynicism.


The question is a little open-ended and vague to gain any meaningful responses. Lots will come back with tales of how great it has performed for them and how much revenue & profits have increased, lots of businesses have been built just off the back of digital marketing efforts, and lots will come back with tails of nightmares where cowboy providers (this is most often attributed to low-cost overseas outsourcing, but it's also far too common among Irish providers too) ripped them off and did nothing but spam and invoice. Both ends of the story are completely true and unless you're asking a large enough sample size, which a niche business section of an Irish forum can't provide, any overall trends that emerge in the thread are relatively meaningless.

Is there a specific area you wanted information on?
"Can it achieve results with a low monthly spend?", "Can you outsource it without losing quality?", "Should you train up some knowledge and try and do it in-house?". If so, let us know the specifics and we can tailor the information a little more.


On the general side of things...

Online marketing can be incredibly valuable, when it's part of an intelligent business plan that's already providing a great product/service. It's not a cure for a bad business, a bad product, bad customer service or a bad team. It will help generate more business when it's done correctly, regardless of whether it's increasing social activity, improved organic rankings, more efficient paid promotion, better copywriting on emails or a combination of all the various activities that are part of it (you want to aim for the last one to ensure you're being as efficient as possible with your time and/or money).

The key there really is "when it's done correctly". A good provider will be able to give you fantastic advice on where to focus your time and energy to get the best results at any given time. They'll identify the areas which will provide the most impact with the least work/expense required and prioritise that work for quick wins. In many cases it's those quick wins that go on to fund the ongoing work that good marketers do, while they're providing great results they're earning more trust so that businesses are happy to reinvest an increasing amount back into the efforts. The key there is tracking the results extremely closely and being able to show the return you're generating from the actions (on a tangent, but related... don't expect every effort to return a positive ROI. If the provider isn't having some things go wrong from time to time, they're really not trying hard enough or they don't have enough time to be able to try any experiments. This lowers risks slightly, but it also means you're far less likely to have any great success stories).

Things to watch out for?

Even if your provider is doing very technical work, they should be explaining it to you in a clear and meaningful way. "We implemented the canonical tags while we were iterating the schema structured markup. This means that we'll avoid future crawl efficiency issues, avoid cannibalisation of results in the SERPs and ensure we consolidate link authority onto our optimal converting pages". < That's all stuff you'd hope your SEO provider is doing, but if they're explaining it to you like that and you're not a technical user they're doing it to try and make it sound more complicated than it needs to be. Be sure they break things down, explain them on a nice level you're comfortable with (this part is actually a huge time sink for the providers, but it's obviously vital for the person having the work done - On the flip side some clients don't want to hear/know about it and just want to see the results, which can be dangerous) and are very clear about what they're doing.

If they're building links for you, get them to show clear examples. If you review the links and feel there's something questionable/fishy about them, you're 99.99% of the time going to be right and there probably is. If they're providing you with paid advertising, be sure to monitor the results yourself. If they're providing analytics and conversion reports, be sure you have access to the raw data and do a little sanity checking (if you're spending a large amount, potentially carry out an external analytics audit - a good provider would be delighted with this as they know their work is up to scratch and would value having a second opinion on any areas they can make further gains). Never trust them telling you they're doing a great job, be sure you can see it for yourself (even if it's just a case of comparing revenue and profits pre campaign and post campaign, be sure you have some way of monitoring the results).


The reality is that the industry has zero cost to entry and has zero regulation. There will always be cowboy providers that repackage and sell terrible spam offerings from the likes of Fiverr as reputable marketing services. It's nonsense and it has the potential to seriously damage your business.

Find providers that have solid track records and proven results (we have lots of great providers in this country - from freelancers like Barry Hand, Alastair McDermott, Barry Adams.. right up to large agencies), especially if you can get feedback on them from someone that has used them. Query them on exactly the type of work they'll be doing, how they'll be doing it, how they'll be reporting it to you, what results they hope to see, what will happen if those results aren't met and with any specific queries relating to your exact business.

Have a read through Google's own guide on hiring an SEO firm (though much of the advice in it could be applied to any type of outsourcing). There are lots of similar guides out there, but do take care to avoid any that have inaccurate information pushing a vested interest (some would suggest even the Google guide in some ways is proactive about pushing people towards paid advertising, but I personally don't disagree with anything they say in it and would probably be more negative about my industry if I wrote it myself).

Get to know people within the industry, both from the providers side but also from the users side of things. If you're getting first hand testimonials, you can be pretty confident the information is accurate. There are lots of great networking events and free information events around that you can jump on for just this reason. Google themselves hold events (they've one coming up on Friday morning, though it is limited in the number of attendees), lots of the business support agencies hold information evenings on the topic and there are niche meetups that are 100% focused on the area.
I'm personally involved with Learn Inbound, which is one of the niche ones, where we have international marketing experts in Dublin speaking on a variety of topics across search, analytics and social. Post event the videos are all made available for free on the site, so solid information for anyone looking to learn a little more, and at the events there's a nice collection of many experts if you ever wanted to chat with a few and find one you felt was a good match for you or your business.

EIREHotspur

also if you pay for Google Adwords you will get results......that simple....

Atomico

EIREHotspur wrote: »

also if you pay for Google Adwords you will get results......that simple....

Except it's not! You can get results if you know what you're doing (or have help from someone who does). You can also waste loads of money or just not spend it very wisely - like any advertising medium.

Atomico

Paul really covers it there. That Google event link is for a startup weekend though I think, rather than a marketing one.

Zero barrier to entry, zero regulation = buyer beware! Think about if the building / construction sector was unregulated, and how cautious you would be. Well this is like that, except the online version, and maybe less serious than shoddy foundations.

If you do a bit of research and homework though, you will be fine. There are some good agencies and freelancers there, not a huge number in Ireland at all, but there are some and then you can look at the UK and other locations also.

PaulPinnacle

Atomico wrote: »

That Google event link is for a startup weekend though I think, rather than a marketing one.

Woops.
I'd intended to grab a link to highlight the Breakfast Briefing "#googlebb" series of talks (think it's advanced analytics coming up later this month?), but got distracted when I remembered they had the startup one coming up on Friday.