When you’re trying to conserve capital, you have to cut some corners. For example, you might decide not to stock your office kitchen with snacks for your employees, or you might choose to outsource your graphic design overseas.
These are reasonable cuts. However, if you cut corners with the following digital marketing components, you’ll see subpar results.
1. Search engine optimization
If you’re like most business owners, you want your clients’ websites to come up on the first page of search results for important keywords and phrases. Search engine optimization (SEO) makes that possible, but it’s not a quick fix.
When you cut corners on SEO services, you’ll get people who will perform tasks on-demand, but you won’t get someone who will monitor progress and tweak your strategy along the way. If you want big results, you need the latter.
If your clients depend on you for marketing results, don’t cut corners with SEO or try to do it yourself – hire an agency. There are so many benefits to hiring a professional agency, but the best results come from a white label service.
A white label SEO service keeps all of your client dashboards branded so they will never know another company is doing the work. Some companies, like Nuclear Networking, also manage client interactions, provide real-time reporting, and offer custom solutions.
Your clients depend on you for results, so make sure you provide the best SEO services possible.
2. Content marketing
At first glance, content marketing seems like it’s just a quick and easy way to build backlinks. However, it’s actually a high-level strategy that should be founded on quality, not quantity.
When offering content marketing services to your clients, cutting corners will result in poor quality articles, which will only make your clients’ brands look bad online. For example, say people search for your client’s business and find a bunch of poorly-written articles published on spammy websites. That will reflect poorly on the business and might dissuade people from doing business with them.
Content marketing services create semi-permanent results. Any articles you publish on behalf of your clients will be found on the internet for years to come. When you hire a marketing agency, you’ll get content that represents your clients’ brands and it will be published on appropriate websites.
3. Link building
Cutting corners on link building is the biggest mistake you could make in marketing. You can’t save money on link building and get good results. Cheap link building services generate spammy backlinks that are often published on sites belonging to content farms. These links won’t last long, nor will they give your clients any kind of boost in ranking.
High-quality ink building isn’t cheap because it requires creating substantive content that serves visitors first and search engines second. It’s worth investing in a full budget for link building services. Backlinks are the foundation of every digital marketing strategy. In each niche, the website with the most high-quality backlinks tends to dominate the search engines.
4. Copywriting
Copywriting is a highly misunderstood digital marketing strategy. Copywriting isn’t just the art of writing interesting sales pages and ads. It’s the art of writing engaging copy that persuades a visitor to take a specific action. This is a skill that takes time and training to learn. In other words, you can’t just hire a writer and expect them to write effective sales copy.
If you cut corners with copywriting, you’ll end up with ads that get clicks, but no conversions. You’ll also see a low conversion rate on your sales pages.
Invest in a professional copywriter for your clients. If they’re depending on you to create their ads and sales copy, you can’t afford to hire anyone who isn’t a seasoned professional.
5. PPC ad images
Using cheap graphic design services for small needs is okay, but don’t cut corners on your ad images. If you don’t have an in-house graphic designer to create images for your PPC ads, you’ll get optimal results by hiring a full-scale marketing agency to create your clients’ ad images, ad copy, and everything in-between.
Images entice people to click, and there’s an art to creating ads that appeal to your target market. When a professional marketer creates your ads, you’ll get more clicks and more conversions.
Effective marketing isn’t cheap – price your services accordingly
There’s no way to get good marketing at a discount. While you can certainly find good deals, if you feel the need to cut corners you’re probably undercharging for your services.
Instead of trying to snag clients by offering cheap marketing services, target clients who want results. Then, price your services appropriately based on high-quality services that get results.
