O, what tangled web we weave, we first we practice to deceive.  – Walter Scott 

When you get to be a major player in the digital marketing game like Marketing 360®, you run into a certain problem.

Smaller competitors will try to snipe (meaning steal) your clients.  They do this by performing some type of audit, then make claims that the current marketing effort is failing.

Their pitch, of course, is to remedy the problem they identified.

Usually, this information is unsolicited.  In other words, the sales person finds a business, discovers who their marketing vendor is, does their “audit” to uncover an issue, then uses that issue as a lead in for their cold call.

If you receive this kind of pitch, red lights should go off.  If this agency or person has time to audit companies that didn’t ask for it and needs to cold call to get leads, it’s a clear sign they’re not busy helping their own clients with legitimate work.

This is, in fact, a fairly desperate lead-generation tactic.

But it has been known to work.  If the current vendor can’t back up their work, demonstrate results and disprove the competitor’s pitch, an unknowing business owner can be tempted to switch.

We dealt with a sniper recently, and it’s a case study that shows why marketing software and diligent data tracking are so important.

Case Study:  Marketing 360® Software Takes Out the Sniper

A Marketing 360® eCommerce client who sells rare coins received a distressing series of emails.  A salesperson from a competing marketing company claimed that our client’s SEO rankings were tanking.

It started with a report that overall organic traffic was down 60%.  Our client did not respond at first, but the salesperson was persistent.  Through a series of emails, she managed to get our client to connect on LinkedIn.

Then, she set a small fire claiming that the homepage was showing an improper 302 redirect.  It was at this point that our client sent us the email thread, asking for an explanation.

Did we ever have one.

First, we knew we were dealing with a sniper because of an obvious lie of omission.  The reason she was seeing a 302 error is because we’d changed the domain from http to https, which now a common practice.  She was trying to audit the http domain, bringing up the error messages.

But even better, we had hard data from our marketing software to show that his organic traffic was anything but in trouble.

This was a comparison of consecutive 90-day periods during the time in question:

This shows vital data:

• A 539% increase in keywords gaining organic ranking.
• A 592% increase in organic clicks
• A 3517% increase in organic impressions
• A 355% increase in organic conversions
• Cost per conversion down by 95.89%

It was as clear that organic ranking was increasing:

Guess what?  This client is still with Marketing 360®, and is very happy with these results.

Conclusions

As a business owner, you are all too familiar with cold calls.  Dealing with them – unfortunately – is part of the job.

But when it comes to your marketing vendor, consider what’s happening.  This type of company should be trying to sell you inbound, digital marketing solutions that are designed to make cold calling obsolete.  How good can they be at that job when they have to cold call you?

Worse, they start throwing misleading or incorrect data at you, making you think your current marketing is lacking.

And you’re not entirely sure…you don’t know all this.  It’s why you hired a marketing company in the first place.

It’s an important reason to hire one with the reporting tools in place to demonstrate what they’re doing and verify it with results.  There are still a lot of smaller marketing companies out there that piecemeal their reporting.  It’s no wonder their clients easily doubt if what’s happening is delivering ROI.

If you’re reading this post and you’re a sniper, remember that Marketing 360® is transparent and accurate with our campaign reporting.  Our software is specifically designed to show our clients metrics that reflect what they care about:  ROI.

If there is a problem, our client is already aware of it because we told them and we’re fixing it.  If things are humming like usual, don’t try misleading our clients.  We’ll shut that BS down.

And you don’t have to worry about us sniping you.  We don’t need to cold call or snipe other firm’s clients.  We don’t just do a great job of inbound marketing for our clients, we do it for ourselves.

Leads reach out to us because we’re professional and we can back up what we say.  Fake data doesn’t have a chance against the arsenal of reports our marketing software can generate.

For our clients, the web isn’t tangled at all.  It’s a clear, solid source of business growth.

*Results are based on past client performance. Individual account performance may vary. Results are not guaranteed.