Avoid "Marketing" Ripoffs

I'm Alex Charfen.

And this is the Momentum Podcast, made for Empire Builders, Game Changers, Trailblazers, Shot Takers, Record Breakers, World Makers and creators of all kinds.

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Avoiding "Marketing" Ripoffs

Marketing in the title of this podcast is in quotations because today what passes for paid for marketing should be very clear, but unfortunately there are far too many organizations out there who are still ripping people off, taking advantage of them, selling them a bill of goods and really taking their money without getting them a result, which in today's day and age, when it comes to marketing is completely unacceptable.

Here's how marketing should work today. It's relatively simple. You should work with a marketing firm who can help you identify your avatar and get clarity around it, figure out what platform and how you're going to target that avatar, then put money behind a targeting that Avatar and start getting you leads, so that you can convert and win.

And that process should happen within a few weeks. Today, the barriers to marketing have come down. You don't have to run a national ad campaign. You don't have to be on TV. You don't have to have tons of money. You can be a tiny little business and have a steady stream of leads directed right to you, that you can convert and win with.

But the challenge is, there's a lot of organizations out there that would rather just take your money.

I had a call yesterday. It was actually a sales call, with an incredible entrepreneur. I'm not gonna name names because it's a sensitive situation she's in. She's working in a law firm with several other attorneys and they have a very clear specialty that they help military members who have had issues getting their disability payments from the VA. They help those guys go collect them and as anyone who listens to this podcast or knows me knows, I get defensive when it comes to military members. I think they get the short end of the stick so often, it's crazy. I think throughout the history of the United States, we have done a disservice to people who have served in the military.

And you know, I wish we didn't need a military and I wish we didn't have to have men and women out there fighting for us. But I think that as Americans, we owe unconditional respect to anyone who has honorably served. And when somebody is disabled or hurt serving this country and they can't get the payments or the help they need to be able to turn to someone like this law firm, and be able to get help is incredible.

That's why it frustrates me so much, the conversation we had yesterday. We were talking about how this entrepreneur, this attorney is generating leads for her firm and for the past few months, she has had both a marketing strategist and a marketing service company working on her account. And for the past four months, they've charged her $10,000 a month between the two of them to work on SEO for her website.

I almost cussed when I heard that. It makes a pain in my chest go crazy. In today's day and age, anyone who is selling you a service like SEO over the course of months in a market where you can easily identify your target Avatar and go find them, is crazy. They're selling you a bill of goods, and I was on a sales call with this person a sales call and I went as far as to say on the sales call,"Your marketing strategist and your marketing company should be terminated with prejudice today because they're a fraud."

And if you're a company out there who deals in SEO, I'm sorry, but it's BS because here's what that marketing company told the attorney I talked to yesterday.

That they were going to spend the first few months on SEO, and then once the SEO was working, then they would go start doing paid advertising, so that they could actually get leads, but they really shouldn't do it until the SEO was done.

Anybody who understands how marketing works today would call BS. That's a complete joke. Because how it really works is, you figure out who you want to find. You target them through whatever medium you can, and then you get the leads coming in. And to say that you can't do paid advertising without SEO is an absolute joke. I have clients that are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly on paid advertising and they have zero SEO.

I actually have clients that are selling millions of dollars in goods and barely have a website because today marketing has changed. You need a landing page to capture the lead and then a conversion process to be able to sell them, but all of this other junk is just that. It's junk and if you have a fully tuned lead generation system and you're getting all the leads, you can from Facebook, and you've gone to YouTube, and you've gone to Instagram and you've gone to all the platforms and you're getting the leads you can, and you still don't have enough, maybe... just maybe, you should take a look at SEO.

But really, it might not do anything for you. And when I heard this story yesterday, it got me so incredibly frustrated, because there's an entire market out there, of marketing strategists and consultants and people who specialize in lead gen and who have a really good game and who can talk about it really well, but they're all full of crap.

And for a marketing strategist and marketing company to spend four months and $40,000 on SEO without a single lead coming into this attorney's office is absolute highway robbery. And if you're in one of the following professions, I want you to know you're a target if you're an attorney, a practitioner of any kind, a doctor, a chiropractor, a surgeon, you run a med spa, you have any type of practice. If you're in financial services or any type of service professional, you are a target.

If you're in property management they're gonna try and sell you SEO. If you're a attorney or a doctor, they're going to tell you that you need a nice fancy website and all kinds of other things that are gonna cost you money when the fact is, they prey, these consultants, these advisors, these strategists, prey on the fact that you don't know what you're doing, and they prey on the fact that you don't know that you should be getting leads within a few days, if not, maybe a week or two, because that's how long it takes. Once you've started paying for advertising for you to see results, or you should change your strategy fast, find a new one, and then get that one to start giving you results.

But if anyone has a marketing strategy for you today, that delays the generation of leads for any period of time, you are being ripped off. If somebody's telling you, you need to finish your website and do everything else before you generate leads, you are being ripped off. And if a marketing strategist, consulting guru, whoever this person is that was advising this attorney, should be taken out of business.

Because if you're one of these people, who's advising professionals that they should put money and time and resources into something as archaic as search engine optimization, in today's world, you should be out of business.

So for any of you that are spending money on marketing, here's what you should fully and clearly understand. What does it cost you to get a lead? Your marketing company should be able to tell you that. How many more leads could you get if you paid more? Your marketing company should be able to estimate that. And how many leads are you getting on a monthly basis and how much are you paying for them and what are the mechanisms you can use to either increase that or decrease that?

Because in today's world, marketing has become near automatic, you put up the right ad, you target the right avatar, and you will start getting leads unless you're doing something wrong. But for a company to try and say, that when a company needs leads, what they should do is revert to SEO, you might not see results from that for months or years. And even when you do, it just means you're gonna be the number one organic search term underneath the stack of ads on every search engine today.

So if you're not paying, you're really not playing.

And so I want you to avoid being ripped off by these marketing hucksters, these frauds that say things like, "You need to fully complete the SEO on your website before you go out and generate leads."

And by the time I got off the phone yesterday with the attorney I was talking to, she was determined to go get rid of her marketing company, and here's what was interesting. As I said, "I think you need to fire these people with prejudice."

It wasn't like she argued. She actually had the same suspicions.

She said, "You're just confirming a lot of what I've been thinking, I've been uncomfortable with this, I've been frustrated with this. I haven't really know why we're not getting leads. They keep telling me it's going to eventually work."

And I said, "I want you to think about something. From this point forward, when you hire a firm to market for you."

Now, I want you, for you listening, to do the exact same thing.

If you're uncomfortable with somebody who's doing marketing for you, if you're uncomfortable with somebody who's generating leads for you, if you're uncomfortable with what is going on with the money you're spending trying to bring business into your company, then that company, that person, that organization on the other side, has the responsibility to make you comfortable before you hang up the phone. And they have the responsibility to make you comfortable by showing you leads coming in within a week or two or as soon as you start paying, you should start getting real leads, you shouldn't be waiting. And if they're making you uncomfortable because you're spending 10s of thousands of dollars and not getting a result, something is wrong.

You know, Facebook, and the online social media platforms and search engines have changed the game. You can literally target exactly who you want to talk to with an insane degree of reliability and accuracy, and start testing your lead generation devices to see if it works for exactly the people you want.

That is the only way marketing should happen today. It's the only strategy that should be used as far as getting leads, because if you're doing anything else, if you're relying on organic leads, if you're relying on search engine optimization, if you're relying on anything else, you're waiting for something to happen.

But when you go out and pay for marketing and you learn how to attract your customer and get them into your system and start converting them, you have now found the dial with which you can turn your business up and down.

It's that easy.

And if it's not happening for you, something is wrong. If you're ready to start generating leads, if you're ready to start actually converting more, find someone who will help you pay for leads and get you as many as you want, in a consistent basis. Because if you're a service business, especially one of the ones I named: attorneys, practitioners, financial services and service professionals, you are a target.

When these marketing companies talk to you. They know they can use terms like SEO that you won't understand. They know that they can buy themselves time as they just collect fees and rip you off and they know that as long as they keep you willfully confused and don't give you enough information, you will continue to pay them because you made a commitment and you're not gonna stop.

And so, if this is the situation you're in, if you're working with one of these firms, if you've been in a position where you've already felt uncomfortable, if you felt like you should be getting more and you just can't understand why anything isn't happening, chances are, you're getting a bum deal and you're getting ripped off.

So get on the phone with the marketing company that you have today and tell them, "When are we gonna start seeing leads? What is our strategy? Why am I not seeing leads now?" and make them, make you comfortable or fire them with prejudice.

Because today, marketing firms that are charging fees without getting a result are ripoff artists. Because in today's day and age, and with the resources we have, and the systems we have all around us, getting a lead is no longer impossible. In fact, it's become more probable than it ever has been, that you can not only get a lead, but get as many as you want, as long as you're willing to write the check.

So if you feel uncomfortable with the situation you're in, if you're in one of these arrangements where somebody's had you paying for SEO. If your marketing company isn't giving you consistent leads every single day that you are putting money out there in ads, then it's time you change something.

If you're ready to grow your business, to understand more about how things work today, to stop getting ripped off, serve more people and make an even bigger impact. Reach out to us. I help businesses grow and scale fast, and do it predictably, in the shortest amount of time possible.

Because if you know there's an impact you could be making, let's make it as big as we possibly can. If you're ready to grow and scale your business, reach out to us.

Thanks for listening to the podcast.