A woman walks into the butcher shop
just before closing. She says, "Thank Heavens I've made it in
time! Have you any chicken?" The butcher opens his fridge and
takes out his only chicken, and plops it onto the scale. It weighs 2
1/2 pounds.
"Ah, haven't you anything
bigger?" the woman inquires. The butcher returns the chicken to
the fridge, takes it out again, and plops it onto the scale, only
this time, he keeps his thumb on the chicken. The scale shows 3 1/4
pounds. "Marvelous!" says the
woman. "I'll have both of them please."
Sales. The mere
mention sends shivers down the spines of many, conjuring images of
sleazy, mustached salesmen in ill-fitting plaid sports coats, or
conniving merchants like in the joke. And let's face it, there are
bad apples in every industry. But today we're going to tackle the
sleazy sales tactics that are used in the “phonebook style” web
marketing sites. The rest of the world's questionable sales doings
can wait for another day, after all.
And so you say
“what's wrong with phonebook style marketing, after all?” Well,
dear reader, there is plenty. Let's pretend that you are a business
owner, and you decide that you need some online marketing help. No
shame there, you are good at what you do, and you know when to call
in other industry experts, right? So you opt with one of the
phonebook style web marketing companies. Guess what? You're getting
ripped off. Why, you ask? It is likely that your target demographic
is not only on laptops, but on tablets and smartphones. Those people
are typically wanting more info than is usually found in a phonebook.
And what is more, while search engines like Google and Yahoo are
still growing in number of users, the phonebook sites are declining.
So, right off the bat you are not getting your money's worth as far
as people viewing and using your information.
Now, let us look at
how they actually do your marketing program. You might hear that
they-gasp!- cannot find you listed on a search engine! But what
exactly were they searching for? Did they go and find an obscure
keyword for your business and then do a search for it? Or did they do
a search for keywords of your competitors, rather than your own? Ok,
so once you get that sorted out, you might be surprised to discover
that the phonebook sites are now simply middle men for the bigger
search engines like Google. They have to buy clicks from Google (for
example) in order to get their clients ranked higher. And have they
ever looked at and picked apart an analytics report? Likely not. And
after all of that, they still do not do any sort of social media
marketing for their clients. If anyone has tried to sell anything
within the past few years, is it not obvious by now that it is more
than wise to market on Facebook, Twitter , etc? Oh, and another fun
nugget of trivia for you, did you know that the person managing your
marketing campaign changes day by day? You don't own your campaign,
and there is no consistency as to who is working on it!
So, as you can see,
a business owner who goes to a phonebook style site for marketing is
getting ripped off in more ways than one. But if you go to someone
that is a local professional, someone that will sit down with you and
listen, and see your marketing campaign through from start to finish,
then you can get somewhere. Someone who will work with search engines
directly for you, thereby getting you faster results. Someone who
will tailor the campaign to your needs, not use a cookie cutter
approach that they use for all businesses. Someone like the people
over at Addison Technologies, but we're just saying. And Addison Tech
promises that we will not keep our thumb on the scale.
What You Get With a
Phonebook Plan
- No social media
- Daily changing campaign managers
- Sketchy keyword tactics
- Middle-man buying of clicks
- No use of analytics
- Cookie cutter marketing plan
- No clear understanding of SEO
