Fundamental Flaws With Internet Marketing Companies

– There is an inherent conflict of interest between you and your marketing company.

1. An inverse relationship between a marketing company’s profitability and the amount of work they do for each client.

Simply put, the more time your marketing company spends working on your project, the less profit they make.

Every marketing company’s goal is to get new clients, but when they do, they don’t hire new employees to handle the extra work.

That means less time gets spent on your projects and the quality of work gets diluted.

2. A marketing company’s intention is always to maximize the client’s spend.

Digital marketing companies would much rather find ways to increase your budget spend than analyze your budget and get rid of excess spend.

This is how they make their money.

So, as the client, how do you know which marketing services are truly beneficial and which are only done to increase your spend?

And how can you trust your marketing team’s recommendations when their interests don’t align with yours?

3. Little to no time is spent on market research or a budget allocation audit

Digital marketing companies rarely do any market research, and rather, operate on a kind of wing-and-prayer model, not really ever digging into the analytics of the who-when-where-s.

They rarely do any market opportunity analysis or marketing strategy optimization because it takes time and costs them money.

You should optimize your budget often with a budget allocation audit. If not, you are wasting your marketing budget.

How many times has your marketing company done that for you?

4. Marketing companies practice the art of the Upsale

Marketing companies make the most profit by charging you for as many services as possible.

Take social media for example – they are charging you for each platform, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., right?

But how many of those services do you actually need?

How much is each one actually helping you?

What is the ROI on each platform?

And how much time are they spending building your audience on each social media platform?

Or are they just using automation to push content from one platform to the next?

And charging you for each!?

(Many companies use automation shortcuts like Hootsuite automation.)

5. Lastly, they are usually NOT experts in your industry

Despite their claims, most digital marketing companies know nothing, or at best, very little about the industries that they are marketing in.

Let’s say a fictitious Marketing Company X has 30 clients from 20 different industries.

Their content writers, social media team, media buy team, and management knows little to nothing about the industries they are marketing in.

So, how can they be effective marketers if they don’t know your industry?

Is there a solution?

There is a fundamental flaw in the current design of the digital marketing agency model.

I suspect in the coming years the model will evolve to fix the flaws which I have just described.

In the meantime, hiring an independent, outside auditor team like My Marketing Auditors to perform a marketing audit on your current marketing is a great way to ensure that your budget is optimized for the highest ROI.

Learn more about market opportunity analysis and marketing audits here.