Since we started Idea Ladder in 2004, startups and direct response advertisers have turned to us because they required a level of service that their budget simply couldn't get them with a big agency or design firm--but they didn't want to sacrifice the quality of their brand by choosing a discount shop that didn't have the qualifications or experience they needed to make their business successful online.
It eventually became clear to us that we could provide something big agencies couldn't:
To achieve this level of service cost-effectively for our clients, we've eliminated two big expenses for you.
We just think these things should be part of doing business as your partner. And we don't think that you should have to be a little fish in a very big agency pond just because you have a limited budget to launch or grow your business online.
Perhaps one client's story will help illustrate what we do and why we do it.
A client, who shall remain nameless, had contracted with a very large agency for its online marketing. Said agency spent $68,000 of that client's money on a banner advertising campaign. Said campaign drove exactly one sale. That's right. One. And the product sold most assuredly did not cost $68,000.
So who was financially responsible for that debacle, do you think? Not the agency, that's for sure. My client was out $68,000, and they learned a very valuable lesson.
Online is a direct response channel -- and if media isn't working, you shut. it. off. Then you figure out why it wasn't working, re-strategize, and try again. New campaign, new site, new channels, whatever it is.
Now an online agency, which is typically compensated on a percentage of the media purchased, doesn't have much reason to do that. In the previous example, the agency made a cool $10K off that abysmal campaign's performance. That's $10K they wouldn't have made if they'd shut it off in week one when it obviously wasn't working.
Two things went wrong here: First, my client didn't have a resource they could trust to tell them to shut the campaign off; at the time, they didn't even have in-house marketing people. So they relied on the agency, which wasn't monitoring their account very closely at all. Obviously.
Second, the agency had no reason to monitor the campaign too closely, since they weren't being paid on the sale of the product; they were being paid on the purchase of the media. Sure, in the long run, they were destined to lose the account if they continued to spend the client's money with no visible return on their investment. But they didn't invest their time and resources into monitoring the short term spend because they're used to working with huge companies with huge budgets who will eventually find something that works and will balance out the initial loss of the first two or three failed campaigns.
When you're a startup, or you're launching a new product, (or you're simply trying to sustain your business in today's economy!) you do not have that luxury. Even if your company is well funded, you simply cannot burn money online the way companies used to back in the good ol' days.
So we have a different model.
For lack of a better term, we call it online marketing consulting. What it means is this:
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