You’ll always be better than me!
I have to write these Posts as I think of them, so it’s down tools for 10 minutes while I bash this out.
We work hard for our clients, we really do, we advise, strategise, implement, reflect, analyses, develop and push. But then suddenly a client gets a Boost – what caused it… certainly nothing we did – ah yes, they were features on that mega website. I get it.
So what happened – for Clients the website is part of the sales and marketing mix, it maybe the most important part – but it is probably not the most influential part. Getting noticed by a Newspaper, or magazine can bring in huge amounts of interest albeit for a shortish time. Being spotted on a Blog, going viral, featuring in a video, being in the news, all these activities can lead to huge boosts in website and online traffic.
Some examples:
- Social Media – a client become so excited that he was going to start a social media campaign that he contacted some Bloggers he liked the look of, even before we started, he went from zero to over a million viewers in just a few days, his pictures went viral and from that we built a social media campaign. My Point – the client did it, just by contacting randomly some websites he liked.
- Feature Press – a client (actually same story two clients) – were featured for their products in related magazines, both on and off lines… the result was for 1 client the featured product went straight to ‘most popular on the website’ within 3 days and for the other client they had their best eCommerce day ever. My Point – the clients did it, they had their work featured.
- TV Show – for years we could not work out why almost a third of traffic was coming from a BBC speciality website – but when the show was on, traffic rose week after week, all that existed was a simple ‘supplier’ link on the speciality website… so nothing special, but people saw the show and clicked the links. My Point – the client managed to get their products included in the TV show, resulting in a third of the web traffic for a number of years.
- We’ve been doing SEO on a website that when made over 5 years go was excellent, but little has happened since, no new content, little innovation, yet we’re still trying to win the SEO battle, recently the client was featured on another website and traffic rose and dropped back. My Point – without proper input from the client we get stuck.
The old adage springs to mind, you get what you put in, frustrating as that may seem. When you outsource something, be it Adwords, SEO, or your website content – you can only do this if you fully understand that your input remains extraordinarily valuable. You still need to contribute.
We’ll do the bread and butter, we’re do everything that we can for you, but ultimately your business remains your business and what you with it has a much greater effect than what we can do.
Now, I am honestly not trying to cop out of any responsibility here, we’re paid to do a job and we do everything that we can. I just want Clients to understand why sometimes we cannot do more.