When you pay money to a service provider, whether a digital marketing agency or a healthcare professional, you should refuse to be patronized. Most digital marketing agencies for roofers patronize their clients and tell them to increase their budget while insulting their intelligence.
In today’s Roofing SEO Podcast episode, Nolen and Jason discuss how roofers should react to salespeople and agency owners that patronize them regarding digital marketing services.
The Insulting Nature of Patronization
To patronize someone is to speak to them as an inferior, mainly when providing supposedly helpful information. Unfortunately, patronizing clients is par for the course in the digital marketing industry. Most marketing salespeople don’t respect their clients and talk down to them regularly.
Roofing companies should never stand for these insults. The truth is, most roofers are entrepreneurs and have at least a basic understanding of business marketing. Dealing with web geeks who have a superiority complex is a joke.
How Much Should Roofers Know About Marketing
At Roofing Webmasters, we deal with a full spectrum of clients regarding marketing knowledge. Some business owners ask us many questions about technical marketing tasks, while others want to remove themselves from the process altogether. Either attitude is fine with us and works well.
Marketing Savvy Roofers
Roofers that want to know the details about marketing specifics should respect the marketer’s expertise but refuse insults or patronizing. Like we don’t know everything about installing a roof, roofers don’t know everything about search engine optimization.
Nevertheless, we never talk down to clients who ask for specific details about the marketing process. In many cases, their hands-on approach to their business makes them successful. We provide clients with all the marketing information they need to foster a great working relationship.
Hands-Off Roofing Companies
Some business owners want to remove themselves from the marketing details altogether and pay us to handle everything on their behalf. This attitude works well, too, as long as you choose the right digital marketing agency. We don’t look down on roofers who don’t care about specifics.
Keep in mind that if you have this attitude with a terrible marketing agency, it can end in disaster. As a result, choosing the right digital marketing agency is critical if you don’t know anything about SEO, PPC, website design, content marketing, etc.
How Marketing Salespeople Insult Roofers
If you’ve tried to invest in marketing services in the past, you’ve probably encountered a salesperson who tried to patronize you with marketing. Unfortunately, these people inherently lack respect for your business sense and talk to you as an inferior. Check out some examples of this below:
“Increase Your Budget”
If the salesperson’s answer to every marketing inquiry is to increase your budget, they are patronizing you. An example of this is with PPC ad spend for roofers. If you find yourself infuriated that the marketing agency wants you to burn through more and more cash, you are with the wrong provider.
“Check Out This SEO Report”
Any salesperson can enter your website URL into SEMRush and produce an SEO report on-demand. Furthermore, they can highlight select metrics that tell you a misleading story about your organic traffic. For example, if you recently lost 45% of your organic traffic on Google, it looks terrible.
However, the lost traffic was to a non-conversion page in many cases. As a result, the traffic was worthless for your roofing company and is being used for manipulation by the salesperson.
“Act Now, Or Else”
The “Act now or else” sales routine is a popular tactic for roofers with existing websites. The salesperson’s goal is to create urgency and fear around your existing marketing presence. They use select metrics to insult your intelligence and undermine your current marketing agency.
Of course, this particular sales tactic is highly unethical, but that, unfortunately, fits right in with 99% of marketing agencies. By educating yourself about the basics of roofing SEO, marketing, and web design, you can better understand the cheap tricks these salespeople utilize.
What Roofers Can Do About Fraud Marketers
Unfortunately, roofing companies will likely experience unethical sales pitches regularly because the industry is ripe with bad actors. The best thing to do is educate yourself about marketing basics to intelligently dismiss these highfalutin hacks trying to manipulate you.
By signing up with Roofing Webmasters, you can have confidence that your campaign is run by an honest group of people with a proven track record in the roofing industry.
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