Don’t ever ask an Ad Agency to work on your website strategies

This is only my own opinion.  I can still see people talking about this topic why Ad Agency cannot work on your websites recently.   This theory may still be true, and when I hear how their marketing communications work, I am totally convinced not to use them for our online marketing strategies.

Different marketing philosophies

First of all, an Ad Agency tends to talk about the goodness of interruptive marketing.   The “bigger” your brand logo, the better visibility to interrupt the public to get a lot of “eyeball impressions”.  Frankly speaking, I don’t think that eyeball impression is that important if there is only a small fraction of them who are interested in your company.

On the Internet, we are talking about tracking, analysis, conversions, etc.  It’s all about showing the right things to the right people.  And this can be achieved by showing only the relevant contents together

1. when the public is searching for that certain keywords,
2. when the public is reading an interesting article,
3. or even when the public is searching actively for your product directly!

Then, it’s all about converting the right people into prospectives…

Then, the prospectives into potential buyers…

Then, the potential buyers to become customers…

Then, the customers to become after-sale customer support…

Then, the customers continue to buy more from us again and again and again…

Push versus Pull

Secondly, the Ad Agency will only know how to push information to the public even when they don’t feel like watching it.  For example, we are not interested to brands everywhere we go when we are not looking for them and yet they seem to be hunting after us.  For example, is it really important for Facebook to inform the world that they are employing?  In my opinion, Facebook is using the Pull factor to look for interested applicants only.  They are not interested in pushing the information out because it may be costly to use other people’s media, and it is also an interruptive marketing to me.  I feel this somehow “cheapens” the job value if they actually do that…

Internet marketing focuses more on the Pull factor.  Yes, there are a lot of people who are pushing very hard to spam everybody that they are selling certain products… This only causes us to delete the email and forget about it… For sure, some may just got interested about it… But looking from a big picture, it really irritates most of us!  Pull factor refers to showing information only when the people are looking for it.  This is definitely more valuable because we are now living in the world of overloaded information, and it is terrible to see so much information which we are not interested in.  That’s where Google really shines when they can find the most relevant search results amongst all the search engines out there!

Website design

Please remember that graphic design is not the same as web design!  Programming is also not the same as web design!  Web design is a very unique set of skills which involves creativity and a logical mindset.  Hence, it requires your left and right brain!  While you may be creative in your work, you will need to do all these things in the form of programming at the backend!  Or, while you are good at programming, creativity plays a huge role in getting up a successful website!   And to make things worse, you have to have online marketing knowledge to optimize your landing pages!

There is a problem here… The type of work done with the print is usually about graphic design…. TV Ads may also involved programming… But, all these things have nothing to do with landing page optimization!  Which means that there is no real optimization allowed to increase sales conversions.

It also means that we are now facing a very big issue if we were to ask a multi-purpose agency to help us with the web design!

Anyway, that’s just my thoughts… What do you think?