How To Provide Ineffective Marketing
I had a call from a company wishing me to use their products and/or services. They asked if I had read the email they had sent to me (which, it turns out, they had sent to someone else). I investigated some of the claims they made about their services, and arrived at my own, entirely different, conclusions.
They claimed to be SEO specialists, and gave me three terms which they insisted they were in the first five of google’s results for. Now that’s fairly impressive, particularly with something which is so easy to check, if your computer is beside you when you’re actually receiving said marketing call. It’s surely not the sort of thing you’d just make up.
Guess what? I checked. Guess what? They weren’t on the first page for any of ‘em. Apparently it must have been some other terms that they were in the top 5 for, which the guy couldn’t remember right now. Okay…
Then, for a company who claimed to have been going for a long time, it seemed a little odd to find that their “about” page should imply that their company is one of the longest-standing in the market, and then add the phrase “more content coming soon” to the bottom of their ‘About Us’ paragraph, as this gives the impression that either they have never got around to updating their about page, or that they aren’t as ‘always been around’ as they claim.
As it happens, I think that particular perception would be wrong: I do think they’ve been around for a while, from what I could tell, but those sorts of little questions — if you have been around for so long, why doesn’t your site look finished? — aren’t going to leave me queuing up to use their products and/or services. For goodness sake, if you’re going to phone me up trying to sell me your products or services, at least do the decency to know:
- who I am
- what business I am in
- something about the subject matter you’re trying to convince me you are experts in
…before you start. Then it might be possible to have a productive conversation.
Hello. I am 
