Why Clients Trying another SEO company is good and unavoidable

One of our previous posts, “How to work with a digital marketing agency” got some good appreciation from agencies and customers. This can be concluded in the same series “Agency – Customer relationship”.

We have many of our customers as return customers. They work with us for few months/years, they move to a new company, then they come back and stay almost forever. Reasons why people went for other companies:

• They got a very good deal, recently Times Group gave a great deal to one of our customer, they went and came back after 4 to 5 months of work.
• We have a technical client, for whom we worked with us for 2 months, then they came back for an audit and now they are full time customer
• We have a Yoga center, they worked with us for few months, complained about less returns, went back to another agency, now back.
• So many examples.

Digital Marketing Industry is different, people will leave

Satisfaction is nothing but outcome of your expectation. Digital marketing industry is relatively new and often aggressive targets are expectations. Customers often expect quick, 10x and cheap returns from digital marketing as they have heard many success stories. Digital is cheap not digital marketing, marketing is always an investment. Also customers don’t know what is the right expectation. One of our client said, “when we put a billboard, our board knows what to expect from it, how much is the right costing, so they know whether an agency is doing a good job or not. Now with digital marketing, we don’t have opinions, when you say we created 10k likes for it, we don’t know is it good or bad.”. Generally when a customer interacts and works with 2 to 3 agencies then they get to know more about it. Some of the other reasons are, “making errors, not able to understand the business well”, “mis match is thought process”, “not following the process set by the client or the agency” etc. Our experience says that it takes time to understand the business and the team, so it is better to help the team and the agency understand more, give time and discuss more.

Some quick points:

1. Customer or agency, both shouldn’t end the relationship when there are expectation mismatch. Move on, keep in touch and keep helping each other as most probably there is more in relationship.
2. Focus more on conversation and discussion in the initial phase of marketing than execution. It is important to bring both the parties on same page, it needs some good discussion.
3. Prepare documents – Documents are like your thoughts on paper, it helps both the teams to improve thoughts through documents as there are many decision makers involved. You will not get time to educate all.
4. Strong point of contacts: this will help in building better relationship, at both end you should have strong point of contacts, who can take decisions and have their own opinion (without much fear of seniority)