How Digital Marketing Companies Cheat their Clients

How Digital Marketing Companies Cheat their Clients?

There are several digital marketing companies who don’t know how to bring results for their clients or they promote themselves instead of promoting their client’s services or products. I believe it is always good to have your own in-house marketing team or at least to involve in marketing actions as you could know whether you’re traveling in a right direction or not. Outsourcing a marketing company has many risk factors. In this blog post, I’m going to explain how the digital marketing companies cheat their clients and how to stay away from being cheated.

Digital Marketing Scam in Book Publishing Industry

I have helped few authors to an extent in promoting their books. Most of the Authors are publishing their books with the support of Book Publishing Companies. The company which has published the book of my client has charged my client around INR 120000 in the name of Book Publishing and Digital Marketing/Social Media Book Launch.Digital Marketing Companies Cheat

My client approached me after a painful experience and with a limited money left for marketing. He left with disappointment as his dream of becoming a popular author got shattered. In India, Self-Publishing a book is simple as ISBN allotment is free. Publishers cannot charge authors for allotting ISBN. Then I surprised why my client paid huge for getting something which is for free.

They are charging for cover page design, proofreading (which my client hated to the core), printing (Can be done easily with printing companies) and distribution on eCommerce sites like Amazon/Flipkart etc. (If you have GST number then you can list your book on eCommerce sites for free). They created a Book Trailer which can be easily obtained for a cheap price through Fiverr. My client’s book is not actually a novel, it deals with philosophy and no is going to buy by seeing the book trailer. There is very less to nil value for the services which are offered for the package. Their entire strategy is false.

If you paid anything for marketing you book with your publisher. Then its time to check whether you got cheated by them or not. Their marketing activities are not measurable. That publishing company didn’t disclose the budget allocated for promoting my client’s book or what sort of campaign they are used for my client. Everything has been kept in a dark. I couldn’t see any search ads which is very important for any authors to reach the active readers. Later, I realized the book publishing company utilizes the fund collected from the fellow authors to promote their brand instead of promoting the works of an author. Whenever I type “Book Publishing company” or “Book Publishing company in India” their ads were at the top. I clicked their ads and visited their website. Later, wherever I go, their ads follow. This is remarketing. They are collecting a huge fee from authors for the sake of marketing and they are promoting their brand like anything. There is no guarantee for their service or at least there is no transparency in their marketing process.

Digital Marketing Companies Cheat their clients without business ethics

Not only in a particular business niche, digital marketing cheaters are spread everywhere. Recently, I found a marketing company which has a portfolio of different companies which fall under a single industry. Let’s say for an example, if client A promotes General Insurance, then Client B Promotes General Insurance and Auto insurance.

If your digital marketing agency told you that they have an experience in dealing business in your industry/if they worked with clients earlier or working currently who are in the same domain, then its good to avoid them. Let me tell you how these digital marketing companies cheat. For an example, let us assume the CPC for a keyword “general insurance agent” (marked in phrase match) is $10. The company will bid $10 for client A and they will spend $10.5 for the client B. That marketing agency must have done an analysis to predict the bidding for the client A. As they are aware of the prevailing bidding rate without any efforts they will slightly boost the bid and launch your campaign.

As a result, there will be a close battle for the top spots between client A and Client B. A good marketing company should not only work on bidding, they should act as a business consultant in taking decisions w.r.t product/service pricing as they are responsible for the ROI.

Modern SEO Fraud by a Canada based company

My friend who was running a distance education center, wants me to assist him to improve his search ranking for his business website. I told him to assign me a dedicated person who can follow my instructions. But instead of that, he has shown me a Canadian based SEO company which does SEO for just $29/month. I thought of validating their services are found they’re into the business since 2008 (as per whois data). The content on their website is simple and does not have big promises. I advised him to try their service as they are super cheap. Apart from the cheapest service fee, I noticed a handful of excellent reviews on Trust Pilot. He subscribed to their services for 2 months and later discontinued as I found they are the biggest SEO fraud in the recent times. They are actually willing to pay/waive of the first-month service charge against a review on Trust Pilot.

In their user dashboard, I saw some statistics which seems to be static. They are actually banners which pretend to be the analytics report. Some useless reports like website power, backlink attempt etc were there. Most of the dashboard content was made up of static banners which always show data such as Website Power is 100%, 100 backlinks attempted every month. At the end of the second-month subscription, I noticed there are no backlinks built. On an average, any outreach method should give at least 1% or 2% conversion. If they are an SEO specialist then obviously their conversion rate should be better than others. As per the dashboard report, 100+100=200 backlink attempts were made by them in a period of 2 months. I tried understanding their work by asking them what are the websites they attempted as a part of their outreach method. There is no response from their end and I thought of quitting their services as they are not progress oriented. The cheaper price strategy is working well here. According to them, no one is going to fight against them for just $29. They’re the real genius. After ending the subscription, I wrote a negative review on Trust Pilot to make other users aware of their strategy. They are still continuing their cheating business using the loopholes of digital marketing.

In a nutshell, choosing a digital marketing agency is not as easy as hiring other services. Here you’re handing over your complete business responsibility to them. So make sure they do not associate themselves with your competitors and they maintain transparency in delivering the results.

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