The Myth of the Magic Marketing Trick

From time to time, we run across people who seem to be convinced that there is a secret arsenal of marketing know-how that can deliver droves of customers at little (or even no) cost. That there’s something that big-company marketers know about that they hide from the little people.

All they have to do is discover it, like secret pirate treasure.

Unfortunately, this is akin to Magical Thinking, and often equates to people saying urban myth-adjacent things like “well, when so-and-so launched [Name of Software Company Deleted to protect the innocent] he told his marketing team they could spend absolutely nothing”, and then going on to talk about how that company went on to become marvelously, stupendously successful through “growth hacking”. But the truth of the matter is, of course, that the company in question really has spent a ton of money on search, social, and traditional media channels. Oh, and “growth hacking” is just a fancy way of labeling what good marketers should be doing every day… but more on that later.

Of course, myths like this cause people to stubbornly cling to the idea that there’s some magical beast out there that will grow their business to the multi-million dollar range overnight, with no marketing spend. You may have had that hope when you opened this article.

At Urban Sherpa, we’ve come up with a name for this magical beast; we call it the Magical Marketing Minotaur™.

(Yes, we like alliteration.)

There are many variations of The Magical Marketing Minotaur™ out there, and people with minimal marketing mastery are quickly seduced by the promise of a cheap, easy, and supernaturally effective way to grow their business.

Examples of too-good-to-be true marketing tricks:

Growth Hacking: Before we get a bunch of hate mail on this one, there are legitimate tactics that end up under the growth hacking umbrella. Content marketing, podcasting, influencer marketing, and social media channel building are among them (and as I said, good marketers are always thinking of creative ways to game the system, especially when working with small budgets). The problem isn’t so much with the channels themselves, but rather with the expectation that they will somehow instantly produce stellar results and transform your business overnight. The fact is that most of the things that fall under the Growth Hacking umbrella are long-term, brand-building tactics that take time to begin producing results, and many require some hefty marketing dollars behind them to get them to take off.
SEO: Once the Holy Grail of Marketing Minotaur™s, SEO is now largely a “cost of entry” sort of thing. Your site definitely needs to be optimized so that your organic rankings are as strong as they can be, but the days of “secret tips and tricks” that will rocket you to the top of Google’s listings for given keywords are gone. In fact, many of the “tips and tricks” in this category will land you in trouble with Google these days. SEO is effective, but it’s predominantly a science, not an arcane art. You can read more about SEO here.
Viral Marketing: Possibly THE quintessential Magical Marketing Minotaur™ is the idea that you can cheaply create a viral campaign that circles the world and gets you a bazillion followers overnight. The simple fact is that no one can determine which campaigns are going to “go viral” and take over the internet; although there are some tips and tricks that will help a campaign gain momentum, there is no formula that can be applied that will insure a viral response. The proof in this is that if there WERE a way to ensure that a campaign would catch fire and run wild, people would be doing it every day. Also? Many of those famous viral campaigns (think Old Spice and the Dove Beauty Sketches campaign) took a heck of a lot of money to get rolling. Yeah, not cheap, folks.

The sad fact is that The Magical Marketing Minotaur™ is, like its namesake, mythical. Please do not spin your wheels hoping to find it. There is no secret tactic that can rocket your business into the stratosphere overnight for cheap. Like an old teacher once told me, “the only place Results come before Work is in the dictionary.”

Real, effective marketing is actually a lot of work. There are no shortcuts, no “get rich quick” schemes, no snake oil solutions. And those fancy campaigns that get bandied about actually took enormous resources, both of time and money.

So what DOES work for the small business on a budget? Tried and true methods, backed by the time and effort to optimize, test, and tweak them into fully functioning, if less showy, workhorses.

The three marketing channels that work best for small business:

Paid Search Marketing (SEM- Google and Bing Ads): The cool thing about Search Marketing is that it’s also the Great Equalizer – small businesses that are highly relevant in their space can effectively compete with mammoth competitors. (We once ran a campaign that beat out Walmart…)
Social Media Marketing: With the amazing targeting possibilities of these platforms, you can extremely cost-efficiently serve paid ads and promoted posts to the people who are most likely to be looking for your product or service.
A great website: A great site speaks volumes about your business, adding legitimacy, increasing your page ranking, and helping instill confidence in your business. And a great site will also help you convert customers more effectively, driving down your cost per acquisition and conversion numbers.

All this said, don’t feel bad if you’ve fallen prey to The Magical Marketing Minotaur™; practically all of us have, at one time or another, wanted to believe in something that was simply too good to be true. Plus—and we mean this—we like to see people thinking outside the box and testing all the angles. Great small business marketing requires creativity and flexibility… as long as you also remain grounded in reality and an understanding that there is no free lunch.

In other words, please do not sacrifice an effective (if boring) marketing campaign in order to chase something that doesn’t exist.

And if you need a Theseus to help guide you out of the Minotaur’s Maze, let us know. We’ll bring some heavy-duty string to mark the way out.

Happy small business marketing!

Theron & Katie

At Urban Sherpa Marketing Co. we offer marketing advisory, strategic planning, and implementation services for small businesses and startups. Think of us as your outsourced marketing department, strategic marketing advisor, or even your phone-a-friend marketing lifeline. We specialize in building efficient marketing programs to grow your business without blowing the bank.

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How much should a small business spend on their marketing?

Hands down, the question we get asked the most is about marketing budget – how much a small business should spend on its marketing. And unfortunately, it’s one of the few questions for which there is no concise answer.

If you ask the great question-and-answer-box of the internet, you’ll get answers ranging from about 2% of revenue to about 11% or 12%, depending on who you ask, how new your company is (traditional wisdom says you need to spend a higher percentage as a young company both in order to become established and because your other overhead items, like payroll, are often lower), how big it is, whether it’s digital, brick and mortar, B2B, B2C, or whether you have an office cat or not (I kid on that last one).

Helpful, right?

Let me try to do some actual helping, here.

First: while well-funded companies have more flexibility, understand that as a really small business, a really young business, a mom ‘n pop, a single-shingle, a bootstrappin’ startup, or a solopreneur, the stats above aren’t super helpful. Your business isn’t going to run the way something with deeper pockets will. While it’s a really great idea, for instance, to spend a larger percentage of your revenue on marketing when you’re first getting going, if you’re literally funding yourself with your credit card, you may not have that luxury.

What we advise clients is to start with what they think they CAN afford, and then test until they have a level that works for both their business budget and their marketing efforts. In other words, test until you’re spending enough to bring in new customers without running at a constant deficit. We also are great believers in flexing marketing spend with seasonal and business cycles, if necessary.

Sure, this isn’t a simple answer. But, as a wise adviser of mine once said, “there is no should”. You need to do what’s best for your business, not what the Small Business Administration says small businesses “should” do.

But where do you start developing a working marketing budget?

As I said, what can you afford? What amount can you keep up for at least a 6-month runway before it starts to really bring in customers? Realistically, you’re going to need at bare minimum $100-$200 a month per platform (a platform refers to a particular marketing effort, like Facebook ads or search engine marketing) to make any dent, but if all you can afford is just that $100/month, that’s fine. Build your marketing strategy off of that, but plan on increasing your spending as you achieve more revenue.

But then pay attention to how things are performing. Remember, in order to get to sales you need to start with a large pool of people (your target customer group)—and once those people have seen your ad several times, a small percentage will visit your website, and from them, an even smaller percentage (we’re talking single digit, here), will call/submit a lead/visit your business/buy something. If you’re spending too little on your marketing, then your target customer group isn’t seeing your messaging/ads enough to register. So if you turn things on and you’re not seeing any activity, you may need to increase your budget.

Once you have a baseline (this is the joy of digital marketing), you’ll get a feel for how much spend on which platforms results in how many new customers. Then you can work backwards from your revenue goals to set a good marketing budget. Marketing isn’t a mysterious black box these days. You can track what your spend is delivering.

Marketing budget woes: can you spend too little on marketing?

Absolutely. As I said above, if you spend too little, you’ll be spreading your messaging/ads too thin and won’t get the results you need. This recently happened with a client of ours who wanted to start with $1/day on Facebook ads; at that budget, nothing happened—but when we bumped it up to $2/day the web traffic suddenly picked up. You also need to spend enough to have quality marketing (your website, good ads, possibly photography, etc); if you cheap out on the important things you may hamstring yourself.

Handy tip: if you suspect that too little budget is behind a non- or under-performing marketing program (here’s a guide to troubleshooting), try reducing the size of your audience by adding more targeting parameters or reducing the size of your geographic reach. This will allow you to get a better saturation of your market.

Can you spend too much on marketing?

Assuming that a) you have a well-thought-out marketing strategy, targeted messaging, and a good website, b) you’re not going to go bankrupt doing it, d) your campaigns are optimized and efficient (stay tuned, or subscribe below, for our next post on this very subject) and c) you have the staff/production/infrastructure to handle rapid growth, then no, probably not. Marketing is one of those things that—again assuming you’re doing it right and there aren’t other factors at play—the more you spend the more you get. Let me rephrase that: if you spend more, you get more customers.

Before you go out and mortgage your house to plump a ton of cash on your marketing program, however, remember to always scale your marketing with your service and support capabilities. We’ve seen businesses make big investments in things like Groupon, only to be so slammed with discounted customers that their customer service and response times suffer. And the resulting negative reviews will haunt you forever.

One final thought: it’s our experience that you’ll actually need to spend more than you think you will in order to get things moving on the marketing front. There’s always some tipping point between not-spending-enough-not-getting-customers to spending-the-right-amount-getting-good-customers. For us, that tipping point was about 5% of revenue.

But your business is your business. And there are no “shoulds”.

Happy small business marketing!

Theron & Katie

At Urban Sherpa Marketing Co. we offer marketing advisory, strategic planning, and services for small businesses and startups, including content marketing. Our goal is to make high-quality marketing possible for every business, no matter the size. Think of us as your outsourced marketing department, strategic marketing advisor, or even your phone-a-friend marketing lifeline. We specialize in building efficient marketing programs to grow your business without blowing the bank.

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Unintentional SEO: when search engine optimization hurts rather than helps

Every once in a while we’ll get fired up about our SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and go on a tear, doing all the things that we think are critical: optimizing tags on our site, making sure images have alt-text, etc. etc. etc. (a lot of which is largely useless anymore, but that’s another story).

The problem is that in our frenzy we often ignore the truly critical element of modern SEO—namely, good, human-readable content—and its impact on our site’s rankings and user experience. We’ve written about that before, and so won’t spend a ton of time going over the importance of content to your SEO strategy.

More importantly (and often entirely overlooked) we often ignore what pages on our site are ranking on Google and Bing, and hence being delivered to our visitors. Sometimes we focus a little too much on our page rankings in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), to the detriment of our visitors’ experience on our sites.

Said differently, it’s not enough to rank #1 for a given keyword. If we’re not paying attention, it’s entirely possible to end up in a scenario where a truly suboptimal page takes over our organic rankings, leading to a poor user experience and, ultimately, bad conversion rates.

Recently, we came across a perfect example of this issue. One of our clients had an article posted about their business in a major publication. The client’s’ previous marketing company copy-and-pasted the story, in full, to a new page on our client’s site. They helpfully provided a ton of useful backlinks as well. Over time, that page continued to amass authority with Google, to the point where it became the #1 landing page on our client’s site, accounting for close to a third of their organic traffic, eclipsing the pages that dealt more with our client’s core business.

Unfortunately, while it accounted for about a third of the organic traffic to the site overall, it also had a 95% bounce rate (meaning people came to that page, looked, and left). So, while the aim of the previous marketing firm in posting the article for our client was good, the outcome was not. It was vacuuming up traffic without converting them to customers.

Unintentional SEO and what you can do about it

I’m going to go out on a limb and create a new acronym for this: USSR (Unintentional Suboptimal Search Reality).

Here are a few of the common mistakes we’re all guilty of making with our website pages that can lead to Unintentional Suboptimal Search Reality:

Way too much copy. Yes, search bots may read it all, but we’ve seen instances where this leads to a page taking over your results and pushing down other pages that are more likely to convert visitors into customers if they had landed there first.
Way too many topics. A good landing page is generally pretty focused on one or two concepts. If your landing page meanders all over the place, covering a multitude of subjects, it may end up ranking well for multiple keywords in the SERPs, but it may also make your visitors throw up their hands in frustration.
No obvious CTA (Call To Action). If your landing pages don’t have an obvious CTA that’s relevant to the term(s) for which you’re trying to optimize, then your visitors will likely be confused and/or too bored to continue.

Checking for Unintentional SEO on your website

How can you find if you have USSRs lurking on your site? One place to start is by taking a look at Google Analytics and specifically looking at behavior on your most popular, highly visited pages.

If those pages have unusually high bounce rates, you may want to take a look and make sure you’re not overwhelming your visitors and making them wade through a ton of copy, or hiding your CTA way below the fold, etc.*
If people are spending a lower amount of time on your landing pages than the overall average time spent on your site, it’s a good sign that they’re not easily able to digest the contents of the page and are abandoning it for greener pastures.
Take a look at your visitors’ behavior after they’ve hit a given landing page. Ask yourself the simple question – “Are they doing what I want them to do once they’ve hit that page?” In other words, if your goal is to have them move on to filling in a contact form or buying a product, are they converting? And if so, is it happening at an acceptable rate, or could it be higher?
When building new pages, make sure you’re keeping them tight and to the point, with clear CTAs. Ask yourself if they would make sense to someone who landed there first.

This can be an insidious problem and often one that’s difficult to solve without taking some risks and reworking significant portions of a website. But in the long run, focusing on the user experience on your site will pay dividends. Google never rests; it’s continually looking for ways to reward sites and pages that have great user experiences.

Sooner or later, the sorts of clunky, suboptimal pages that are currently “working” will be penalized as Google updates its algorithm.

Start today and break down your own personal USSR. In the words of one of our past presidents, “Tear down this wall Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Happy small business marketing!

Theron & Katie

*Note: if you have a content marketing program, you will naturally see some blogs that rank high and have high bounce rates, and that’s OK—and the last thing you want to do with content is litter it with CTAs. Fight USSR in this case by including pop-ups on content pages that collect email subscriptions before people leave the page, and make sure that your content is super relevant to your industry and what you do.

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Content marketing: what every small business should know

Take a short cruise through the interwebs and you’ll come away with the idea that content marketing is pretty darn near magic.

It works three times as well as traditional “push” marketing! It costs 62% less! In fact, the language is so glowing, if you’re anything like me (with my highly-developed “you must be selling me a bridge” syndrome), it is pretty easy to assume that it can’t possibly be as good as they say.

But… Content marketing really does work. And it can be inexpensive as well—the double whammy of goodness for small businesses. This is especially true for B2B companies that have trouble reaching decisions makers, or businesses with long sales cycles, or a product or service that people use only once in a while, like real estate.

Why does it work?

It helps you cut through the noise. We live in a world that is inundated with ads. Something like 5,000 a day. Content marketing provides value to the user, so they actually want you to send it to them. Imagine someone voluntarily signing up to get ads in their inbox every week. The mind boggles. But people do that with content!
It demonstrates your expertise and thought leadership. It’s especially important for businesses that are hired because they know what they’re doing. Thoughtful content proves you’re good (without having to say so).
It’s great for SEO (usually; see rule #3, below). SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is how you make your website easier to find in organic (as opposed to paid) searches. A blog that is chock full of keywords does wonders for your organic ranking, especially because writing a blog on a regular basis keeps your website constantly updated as well.
People share it. People beyond your normal reach will see it-—and possibly share it in their turn—which means that it keeps spreading without any more budget behind it.
It’s the perfect excuse to get in front of people again and again (with their permission) which is, in turn, a really helpful way to remind people to refer you to their friends.

So what exactly is content marketing?

Content marketing is the technique of creating helpful or informational content in the form of blogs, short (or long) articles, vlogs, videos, speaking engagements, infographics, podcasts, memes, etc (the list of possible content forms is long), and then sharing this content out to current and potential customers. This can be anything from five ways to winter-proof your garden (assuming you’re, say, a garden center or nursery), to a thoughtful rant on the newest HR trend (if that’s your field). If there is anything to do with your business that people need help figuring out, you have a content topic. Heck, you can even just interview interesting people in your field. Great content makes your target audience’s life better, makes them think of you as an authority in your area of expertise, and, builds their trust in you so that they ultimately reach out to you to buy your product or service.

Making content marketing work

Make sure the subject adds value, and is interesting, to your target market. Don’t rant about stuff that only matters to you. If you’re an architect who serves couples that are building their dream home, don’t write about the technicalities of joist supports—instead, give them some insights on how to really decide what is a must-have and what is a nice-to-have in their new home. Pro tip: boring content will get you nowhere, so make sure you provide enough “meat” for people to chew on. Many people new to content marketing are worried about giving away too many trade secrets and will keep their information too vague. Or people write something so obvious that nobody will read it at all. Resist both temptations, unless your sole goal is SEO.
This is not an ad. DO NOT SELL. The whole point of content marketing is that it is “pull” marketing, not “push” marketing. Nobody is going to sign up to read about you bragging about your business every month. Instead, provide great information and show your expertise. People will make the connection.
Think keywords. Content is great for SEO… as long as you’re actually including the keywords your customers are looking for. Pro tip: make a list of the two or three keywords you want to hit on each piece of content and mark how many times you use them. If your content is in the form of a blog, vlog, or video, try adding a transcript (or at least a long intro) on your webpage to make sure that our friendly Google Bots are catching those keywords. A video, by itself, is pretty useless for SEO.
Don’t expect immediate results. This is a biggie. Content marketing is a long-term marketing strategy. Don’t expect the phone to ring off the hook the second you drop your first podcast and assume it’s not working if it doesn’t. Instead, your goal is to gather more and more followers who think of you first when they need your product or service. And that can take time.
Promote it! Many people make the mistake of creating really great content, then simply putting it up on their website and posting it to their social media page(s) and hoping people read it. This isn’t empirically bad; after all, you’re reminding your followers that you exist, but it sure as heck isn’t getting your name in front of new potential customers. Instead, increase the power of your content by promoting it to targeted audiences on social media. If you have the budget there are also platforms, like Outbrain, that will spread your word even further.
Embrace the popup: make sure you add a popup on your content pages that encourages people to subscribe. This will increase your signups dramatically. Homespun is OK. If you’re a small company, it’s often perfectly fine to create vlogs with your iPhone or make a podcast that’s not pro-quality. Just make sure your content is interesting and makes people’s lives better (see rule #1)

As to what form of content is best, well, that depends. If you’re creating your content yourself, I always suggest doing whatever interests you most or you’re most comfortable with. If you really hate being in front of the camera, you’re not going to do a great vlog, for example. If, on the other hand, you’re having a friendly marketing company create your content for you, it will depend mostly on who your customer is and what form they are most likely to engage with. In a perfect world, you’d do multiple forms.

Now, one last thought as we sign off: unlike an ad that goes away when you stop paying for it, content is out there forever, reaping benefits for years. Some continue to compound (the search traffic to them increases over time). Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

Happy small business marketing!

Katie & Theron

At Urban Sherpa Marketing Co. we offer marketing advisory, strategic planning, and services for small business and startups, including content marketing. Our goal is to make high-quality marketing possible for every business, no matter the size. Think of us as your outsourced marketing department, strategic marketing advisor, or even your phone-a-friend marketing lifeline. We specialize in building efficient marketing programs to grow your business without blowing the bank.

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Small Business Marketing Packages: Approach with Caution

We’ve all come across them: the AMAZING marketing package deals. You know what we mean; they promise to get your company/product in front of thousands of potential buyers with one easy package. Sometimes they come with a pretty steep price tag, but they sound like such a sure-fire thing that many of us end up taking the plunge and spending thousands of dollars… or sometimes they seem so inexpensive you’d be stupid not to try it out.

But wait. Would you?

It’s our (hard-won and painful) experience that marketing “package deals” rarely pay off, leaving us always frustrated, usually angry, and often with a depleted marketing budget.

See, good marketing strategies look at your specific needs: what your marketing goals are, what your budget is, and who you’re trying to reach, and build a plan around those parameters. Unfortunately, marketing packages start at the other end of the equation: they have something to sell, and they are looking for people to sell it to.

They have, as we say, a solution looking for a problem.

If it just happens that their marketing package fits your marketing goals just fine, then they are a great choice. But if you aren’t the square peg for their square hole, why in the heck would you spend your money on them?

It’d be impossible to put together a comprehensive list of all the different marketing packages that are out there, but the following are a few of the fairly common deals we’ve seen. Bear in mind that these are not always necessarily bad in and of themselves. Some of the packages we’ve seen can be good complements to a well-rounded marketing plan. The trouble usually comes in when we decide to make these the centerpiece of our marketing plan, or worse, our only marketing plan.

Some marketing packages to be wary of:

Online packages that include social media marketing, on-site advertising, and broadcast media: We hear about these a lot from clients. They are usually radio and TV stations who sell packages for one low price—often a really, really low price. They tell you that you will get placement on their website, a set number of posts on their social media pages, and on-air/on-screen mentions of your company. Sounds awesome right? The biggest issue with these sorts of deals usually lies with the relatively low traffic or poor targeting of these websites and social media pages. Having your brand showcased on their home page for a whole month sounds great… until you realize that their site doesn’t get much traffic—or none of the traffic they get is your target audience. And as far as the on-air/on-screen placement goes, not all times are equal. Savvy media buyers don’t buy or measure anything by the number of times a spot will air. They’re more interested in concrete numbers for the type of audience you’ll be reaching and the time of day your spots will air. To illustrate a bit, there’s a big difference between being guaranteed 50 spots that end up running at 2 AM on the basket-weaving channel and being guaranteed to reach 300,000 of your ideal target audience during an NFL game.
TV Infomercials or ad/media packages: If you’re selling a product, chances are you’ve come across a pitch for these. They usually consist of two main components: a production piece and a media buy. You’ll be offered either a segment in a 30-minute infomercial or the entire 30-minute infomercial, with the company providing all video production, hosting, scripting, etc. In addition, you’ll be guaranteed a number of spots (times that your infomercial will air). These often have fairly significant price tags—one we recently saw was asking for $50,000—but they sound really good, because your infomercial will be shown a huge number of times, and at the end of the production, you’ll be given a copy of the spot that you can then use for your own promotional purposes (posting on your website, social media, etc.). So why are we throwing up a red flag on these? Well, like many things in life, the devil is in the details. Once again, if those spots are running at 2 AM, or on a channel that isn’t watched by the customers you want to reach, you are wasting your money. The other issue with these types of packages is that you usually end up with some pretty heavy restrictions on what you can do with “your” spot after it airs.
Conferences and trade shows: yep, this is a common one. A trade show promoter reaches out and tells you that for “just” a few thousand dollars you can get your logo on their promotional materials and their website, a booth on the main concourse, and, in some cases, a “speaking opportunity” at the conference. You’ve got platinum, gold, and silver sponsorship opportunities, all with a different price tag. Why not, you ask? Well, in some cases, trade shows are a great opportunity to showcase a product, especially if the people coming to the show all fit your customer profile. But remember, you’re crammed in there with a whole bunch of other people, all selling to the same audience. It’s not exactly a blue ocean marketing effort—and just imagine how much digital marketing (say, search marketing, or Facebook ads) you could run for the same price. Also, just a word to the wise? Just slapping your logo on something is a really ineffective way to get your customers’ attention.

As I mentioned, these are only a few examples of the many, many marketing packages that might find their way into your inbox at some point in the future. And since we can’t always be there to run things by (or can we?? – we actually can!), here are a few of the key questions I like to ask regarding “package deals/sponsorships” to determine whether they’re worth the investment:

How to Vet Marketing Package Offers:

“Does this sound too good to be true?” As in other areas in life, this is always a good question, but when it comes to marketing proposals, this is the first thing to ask. Remember, the people making the proposal to you ARE MARKETERS. It’s their job to make their package sound like the most amazing thing ever. Make sure to ask a lot of questions and look for potential pitfalls, such as:
“How big is the audience that will be exposed to my message, and who are they?” Marketing is a numbers game: you want to get your message in front of as many people as possible, provided they are the RIGHT people. If you’re selling a revolutionary beard trimmer, but the package someone’s trying to sell you has a 95% female audience, that’s probably not a great fit. Often package deals pay little or no attention to who your specific target market is, with dire consequences. (BTW, if you want to learn how to identify your target market, check this out).
“When will my message be seen?” A lot of package deals make use of remnant media, meaning your spots will air or your ads will show in whatever leftover, unclaimed time slots are available. So make sure all your spots/ads aren’t going to run at 3 AM Sunday morning (unless you’re selling an insomnia cure!).
“What reporting will you provide during the time the package is running and after it’s completed?” If someone is uncomfortable providing you concrete reporting and metrics on what they’re asking you to sign up for, that’s a big red flag. Reputable partners will be more than happy to provide proof that their deal was a good one for you. The same holds true for specific information on who, when, and where their media buys are.

Like many things in life, a little common sense goes a long way. Trust your intuition, keep a firm eye on your marketing goals and who your customers are, and you’ll generally be able to avoid a lot of pain and wasted spend.

Happy small business marketing!

Theron & Katie

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