Scott's Musings

I just got off the phone with a guy in Missouri who builds swimming pools.

His debit card got hacked and his bank placed a hold on that card and notified him.

During those few days, his digital marketing payment was due to be drafted by his “large digital marketing company” and of course the payment declined.

The digital marketing company (let’s call them “v” for short) was “in-between” representatives, so the ‘bean counters’ in finance simply terminated the account and pulled the website down.

Black hole.  404 Error – Not Found.  Crickets.

The shocked business owner now had to channel his inner Perry Mason and prove his card was declined. You can’t make this stuff up.

He was beyond livid.

Never missed a payment, been with this digital marketing company for over 5 years. Plenty of money in the bank. Isolated incident. Yet, he was cancelled.
(The silver lining is, he found me online and called me) :]

I showed him some tricks to track down his website by utilizing software that goes back in time and loads the pages. I then told him how to copy those pages and content, so a new company can re-build and get him back online ASAP.

The problem he has is losing his SEO juice and ranking. Google will crawl the same website every 3-8 days. When Google’s bots come back to his pages and see 404 ERROR-NOT FOUND, his placement will drop faster than a battleship anchor.

He is under contract with his digital marketing company for 4 more months. He asked me how much I would charge for my consulting time and my reply went something like this, “It’s on the house, you have been through enough torture, just get your site back up one way or the other…”

Since our agency was formed in 2020, I have seen way too many horror stories exactly like this one. Whether we assist someone transitioning from vivial, thryv or hibu, the story is the same. Poor communication.

Are you having any issues with your digital marketing right now?

Look, I’m not saying I’m some sort of genius. I’m a small business owner just like you.  But I’ll tell you this… I am proud and truly blessed that my vocation, my gift and my passion all converged into this new digital marketing agency for small business owners.

You need a personal digital marketing agency, and one point of contact to learn your business and prosper. Fire your large digital marketing agency if you aren’t thrilled with your current results.

We become true partners with each of our clients. In fact, we don’t accept new clients unless there is a discovery meeting that makes sense for us and our client. (We turned down 8 prospective clients in the past two months).

The idea behind our concept came from the traditional “agency of record” marketing model that large corporations use. Large corporations don’t typically bounce around from one marketing agency to the next. They carefully interview many marketing agencies and decide on one to represent them as a marketing partner.

These types of relationships are built on a solid foundation of trust, communication and accountable results. Small business owners tend to bounce around from one digital marketing company to the next with relationships built on sand.

I’m asking you to take a closer look at your digital marketing.

You are on a small list of prospects that can be a great fit with our personal, one to one digital marketing agency. I would like a chance to meet you and learn your unique story.

Maybe it would make sense to do something, maybe not.

When we were building our current Mader Marketing website, I was asked by one of our designers to give her our mission statement. I had to ask her exactly what that meant.  She said to speak from my heart and write down what truly motivates me, get’s me out of bed each morning.

Here’s what I wrote about our mission:

“Our mission is to ensure each of our clients realize their personal goals through our unique digital marketing agency, as we believe a small business should serve the needs of its owner and not the other way around”.

If you are having any issues with large digital marketing companies- I invite you to reach out to our current clients, (currently we have 22 ex Vivial clients). Please feel free to contact any or all of them to see the difference that our digital marketing agency of record can make.