As a marketing coach I run into clients who've been duped by people selling them PRETTY graphics design, PRETTY websites, etc.
Let's get one thing straight right at the beginning, in your marketing
It's not pictures that sell . . . it's words, and only the right words at that.
When you are looking for help with your marketing, don't be swayed by "beautiful pictures" Ask "how many clients do you typically get for a client of yours?"
Isn't that what you wanted? More clients?
Yet, most people judge a marketing company by how impressive the brochures and pictures are than by how many clients they have brought others. In fact, if you ask the typical marketing company, "What's your typical marketing response rate?" (that's number of clients divided by number of marketing materials sent out) they won't answer you. In fact, they'll tell you that that's not what they do, nor can they measure that. They just produce "beuatiful work" for their clients.
Pictures can be used to support the words, but when the shift is toward pictures as the prominent area of your marketing, whether it be "your logo", or a picture of you or your staff, or even a picture of some great products or services, words in your marketing will outsell every time. Ugly marketing outperforms pretty marketing.
Beautiful Pictures versus Simple Words
Randy, the president of a remodeling company had just spent over $10,000 on a new website that was FULL, and I mean FULL of flash and pictures. Nothing but pictures. . Lots of pretty pictures. But, after spending that $10,000 he had nothing to show for it, not even one call. So he was asking me for help.
He had won LOTS of awards for the best remodeling this, and the best remodeling that. In fact, he had won the "best remodeler of the year for $600K remodeling jobs" in Better Homes and Gardens, so he wanted to spread that all over the internet. He was starting by placing the pictures all over the website.
Words sell, not pictures -- Don't Believe Me -- Here's the Proof
It's really had for most people to understand that. Especially when they have a picture of some beautiful work they've done. After all "wouldn't everyone want what I have in these pictures?"
When I told him that "it's words that sell, not pictures" he just couldn't quite get it. And that applies to both the humans viewing the website and the search engines. He had no search engines position either. So, not only weren't people finding him, those that did weren't buying, so he had a serious lose-lose approach here.
At first he stood his ground. He wanted to show people his best work. I told him that it's not "about you" but about what the customer wants, and we have to start by TALKING with the prospect, building a relationship, and THEN we can show him those kinds of fantastic pictures, but even then, we have to nurture him along with words that help the buyer THINK what we want him to think.
It was hard for him to give up his $10,000 website, so we set up a totally new one to run "in parallel" until we could prove that this worked. It was a $1,500 website so he wasn't convinced that a $1,500 website would outperform a $10,000 website. But, within a couple of weeks he had search engine positions and traffic. And within another couple of weeks he was actually getting his first calls. With over 2,000 people a month looking for a remodeler in our metropolitan area he was now capturing 20 or more calls a month.
I guess we could look at costs in different ways. However, I prefer measuring cost not from what it costs for the upfront cost of marketing, but what it costs to acquire a client.
Which is more costly, and which is more valuable? Marketing is measured by what it delivers not what it costs.
Which is more costly, and which is more valuable. A $10,000 website that delivered nothing, Or a $1,500 website that delivered 20 calls a month. And since he won't take a remodeling job under $100K that's a pretty nice return for $1,500.
Another client, a freight insurance company, had approached me to help them get more clients. At first they also were fighting against doing "simple" marketing. In fact, they had already hired a major marketing firm to do ALL of their marketing from brochures, to letters, to websites. But it had produced NOTHING. So, they told me they wanted one new MAJOR client a month.
But THEY WANTED those pretty pictures, so when I'd ask them questions about what we wanted to say and put together a set of words that I felt would GRAB their target audience, they'd argue to make it look like what they already had. I told them, "You just can't keep doing what you've been doing, and expect different results."
In fact, I told them at one point, if they wanted to keep going with what they wanted in the first place, whey hire someone like me. I was ready to let them go. But they got the idea.
When they finally let go of the picture concept, they leaped to 15 clients a week, in the first month, 10 a day in the 2nd, and to 50 a day in the 3rd month.
But they called me back to say that a board of directors member thought their new website "didn't look professional." Hmm. It takes pictures to keep this board of director member happy.
They kept getting the 50+ new clients a day (that's 1,500 more than they had before) for about a year. At which time they called me to tell me they had hired a major NYC marketing firm to redo ALL of their marketing.
Within a month they had dropped to 5 clients a month. They had beautiful pictures, and not much in the way of words
6 months later they were begging for me to start over with them. They had consistently gotten between 1 and 5 new customers a month as opposed to the 1,500 a month they had before.
Pictures can support the words, but:.
It's words that sell, the right right words anyway, not pictures.
