When done right, online marketing can propel your business to unimagined growth. On the flip side though, I’ve seen the frustrating effects that poorly executed digital has had on countless companies. There is a huge contrast between the results generated by a passionate, highly skilled expert and that of a run-of-the-mill online marketer. Making the right choice in online marketing providers is critical. It can be the difference between the success and failure of your business.
The Secret
Knowing the difference between highly-skilled digital marketers and the rest of the pack … that, my friends, is truly the secret to exceptional online marketing. These exceptional data scientists can produce a return on your investment that could be two to six times that of the run-of-the-mill marketer.
The Challenge
In my past life as the managing partner of a Google Premier agency for over a decade, a large part of my function was to identify and hire exceptional digital marketers from all over the country. It is not an easy process. One of the problems is that the online marketing industry is reasonably young, with no standards to speak of. Everyone thinks they are an expert. They tend to operate in a bubble so they don’t often get exposure to other marketers in order to be able to gauge their own level of skill in relation to the industry as a whole. Most of these agencies don’t know what they don’t know.
The Scary Truth
In my experience, only one in forty online marketing providers fall into the “highly-skilled” category. These are the only people you want doing your online marketing. The rest are literally learning on your dime, or worse, just wasting your marketing dollars.
The million dollar question here is – how does the average CEO or marketing executive know how to identify the right people or agency? This conundrum has become somewhat of a passion of mine. So much so that I sold my online marketing agency and started a new company called OnMark Advisors, in part to address this specific issue. Vetting agencies is one of our core services.
Just the other day, in vetting an agency for a client, I listened to the agency owner talk about how they were the best. They had a very polished presentation and had been in business for 11 years with lots of clients. I can imagine how the average business owner would fall for their pitch. In reality though, through our in-depth discovery process, we uncovered that they were anything but exceptional. In fact, we were amazed at how little they really knew about many of the advancements in targeting methodologies that are now available. Additionally, we uncovered that the size of their crack PPC “team” was just one guy. This kind of situation happens much too often and never ceases to amaze me.
The Solution
Unfortunately, unless you are an expert in online marketing yourself, choosing the right provider can be a bit of a crap shoot. That’s why we created OnMark Advisors, and why people like yourself are finding us to be such a valuable resource. Leverage our knowledge and experience to help you find the right online marketing contractor or agency to meet your company’s specific needs.
