Branding
Marketing, Strategy No Comments »My partner runs her own business - it’s an exclusive personal shopping business with a small but very important client base. They are the kind of people whose buying patterns aren’t the same as the rest of the general population, they buy based on different paradigms. It is true that they do use the Internet, but not in the same way as the “majority”.
Today, I took a call for my partner from a search engine optimisation company. They call my partner’s company periodically touting for business, and it’s usually quite polite. Here’s a typical conversation:
SEO: “Hello, I’m Mr Smith from SEO Company. We have been looking at your website and noticed you aren’t being found in the search engines. We’d like to send you a free report that highlights our findings so that you can see how to improve your search engine results and get more traffic.”
It’s at this point that the call is usually transferred to me since we look after the web side of things.
Me: “Many thanks, but we’re not looking to increase the number of visitors to the site. The service is aimed at a small number of clients and we only take on clients through word of mouth and personal recommendation.”
SEO: “We see that you’re not appearing in the top results for phrases such as ‘personal shopper’, and our free report can help you improve this and achieve a high ranking for a number of phrases, including ‘blah blah blah’ and ‘an other phrase’.”
Me: “Thank you. However, the personal shopping service is bespoke and clients are effectively ‘hand picked’ and so additional search engine traffic is not necessary. We’re not looking to generate volume sales through the website so do not need SEO.”
SEO: “….”
After 2 or 3 rounds, the SEO company I am referring to get the point that we don’t even want the free report (which will try to sell their services of course) and usually politely end the conversation and we both go about our businesses.
However, today, the SEO representative - and I don’t know if they were sitting in a call centre somewhere doing cold calling, or were actually in the company offices - was of a different breed and left a very sour taste in the mouth.
It all started quite politely …
SEO: “Hello, I’m Mr Smith from SEO Company. We have been looking at your website and noticed you aren’t being found in the search engines. We’d like to send you a free report that highlights our findings so that you can see how to improve your search engine results and get more traffic.”
Me: “Many thanks, but we’re not looking to increase the number of visitors to the site. The service is aimed at a small number of clients and we only take on clients through word of mouth and personal recommendation.”
SEO: “We see that you’re not appearing in the top results for phrases such as ‘personal shopper’, and our free report can help you improve this and achieve a high ranking for a number of phrases, including ‘blah blah blah’ and ‘an other phrase’.”
Me: “Thank you. However, the personal shopping service is bespoke and clients are effectively ‘hand picked’ and …”
But I didn’t get to finish the sentence today …
SEO: “So, why have you got a website then?” He cut me off and questioned the business model. I suspect this was on the basis that he couldn’t figure out how to get a sale based on my polite refusal and thought that by wrong footing me he’d maybe spin a sale.
Me: “Because prospects still like to see that Street Chic is a credible organisation even if they are recommended to us personally.”
SEO: “So, you need to increase your rankings for ‘personal shopper’ so that you can generate more leads.”
Me: (still polite, but now frustrated that the usual 2 or 3 exchanges didn’t conclude the conversation): “No, we don’t. Our clients purchase a service such as ours using completely different criteria to online shopping and our marketing strategy does not require any SEO components in order to reach them effectively. I’d like to …”
I didn’t get to finish:
SEO: (muttering) “right then” (click)
It sounded as if he was saying something else under his breath as the receiver went down - I couldn’t quite hear - but he was not happy and definately the candiate for “worst telephone manner during a cold call.” He was aggressive, rude and disrespectful - all in the space of 3 minutes - to a company he was trying to win as a customer.
And this is where the question of branding comes in. This experience with this individual reflects directly on the brand that the SEO company is trying to build. In the past when they had called I had a mental note that, maybe, I might use them in the future for a client project if that client fitted the profile of their company’s SEO offering. However, this representative has completely undone any goodwill and completely undermined the brand experience to the point that I will actively avoid them.
A brand is much more than a logo, a picture or a design. It’s a whole company philosophy that appears at every touch point for that company. I wonder what his briefing was like? Maybe something like:
“Get as many free reports out as you can. Don’t take no for an answer. Use any method in the book, as well as some that aren’t, but get the free reports out. We’ll worry about converting them later.”
If that’s how they plan their own sales process, what does this say about how they plan their SEO campaigns? Could it be inferred that it is by the same scatter-gun approach and they’re only interested in the numbers rather than the results? That may be a leap of faith to some, but in my mind this is how the company’s brand is now perceived (remember too that his sales pitch was more concerned about visitor numbers instead of targeted visitor numbers?)
A brand is a sensitive object and all representatives - even call centre operators - must be aware of the core principles in order to communicate the brand effectively, even if they don’t make a sale.
As an aside, there is a good tool from Market Leap (not the people who called) to check your website’s visibility for different search terms. You can find the “keyword verification tool” here. They also have a good incoming link checker.