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Worcester Business Journal Needs to Find Better Experts

Posted by Pete Caputa on Wed, Mar 19, 2008 @ 12:33 PM
 

The Worcester Business Journal ran an article about online advertising the other day quoting 3 local marketing agencies about online advertising.

The majority of the article quotes Laura Briere, owner of Vision Advertising, which is good. Laura actually knows her stuff quite well. Not as well as she thinks she does, but if I had to pair someone up with a local full service marketing agency who gets the web, Laura is a good bet.  She doesn't make the mistakes that marketing agencies outside of Central MA stopped making in 2001. (I haven't used Laura myself so I don't know what she does and doesn't know. But, on the surface, she's dangerous with this stuff.) 

The other two are pretty hopeless. They're still placing online ads on newspaper sites, designing banner ads and all flash websites (SEO no-no #1) for their clients instead of doing search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, blogging, landing page optimization, and leveraging social media successfully. (Not just expensively.) 

I am sure this problem is not unique to Central MA. But, if marketing agencies want to stay relevant they better learn how to shift their thinking of "how do I spend my client's advertising budget effectively?" to "How do I do things that generate a predictable and measurable ROI for my clients by generating leads that turn into business for them?" 

If the WBJ wants to provide informative articles about online marketing to their readers and help Central MA businesses really leverage the web effectively to grow their businesses, they should look for some more experts past 495. Maybe even hire an online marketing expert to do the writing.  This is such an important thing to get right for the future of the region's business health. 

It's been awhile since I've ranted or called anyone out. Sorry, in advance, for those that I've offended. You deserve it, even though it should be privately directed.

I'll be returning shortly to educational blog posts about online marketing and my networks' activities. 

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Comments

I found myself head shaking and sighing at a lot of this. It always frustrates me that there is this whole ecosystem where clueless online marketers, prey-on/work-with more clueless local businesses that don't know any better, and somehow these online marketers are called "experts".
There is a lot of garbage in that article, and even more behind it I'm sure.
One thing that is blatantly absent from the quotes and thoughts in the article, was what I consider to be the biggest hurdle in moving advertisers online. That is the necessary sea-change that has to take place in the thinking of the ad buyers. They need to move from a non-measurable medium, like a newspaper, where they are awed by the "reach" (which merely means their ad appears in x number of papers) numbers, to a measurable medium where they are able to see and measure the performance and response. The numbers sometimes look surprisingly low to the advertiser (20 clicks vs. 200,000 newspaper subscribers) in comparison, and helping them (the advertiser) to understand the differences in expectations is often the hardest part.
Posted @ Wednesday, March 19, 2008 3:25 PM by Andrew
Well said, Andy.
However, I don't think it's hard for people to make the switch. These marketers just need to take an "Accounting for Marketing Folks 101 Course" that helps them calculate customer acquisition costs. Then, they just need to get a little better about asking "how much revenue and profit do you get from a new customer" type questions to figure out what online marketing activities are worth the expense of time and money.
It's rare that when I talk to a small business owner and find out that they generate say 30k revenue and 3k profit from a sale, that they don't see the reason for investing in measurable and predictable online marketing and online advertising activities, assuming the acquisition cost is below the $3k in profit. And usually, it's much lower, especially once they really start to master blogging, social media and SEO, as those things have continued returns long after the investment is made.
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