Do you actually believe everything you are told from marketers and agencies? Have you actually checked out the facts for yourself? Well the answer is probably not. You are too busy to do so and you let the experts guide you, and you trust them, right?
Having being ‘sold to’ myself, I used to check out some of these people and behind the glossy leaflets and fancy flash images on their web sites, actually most of them don’t always practice what they preach. I remember once a company tried to tell me all about search engine optimisation. However it didn’t take me long to discover that every web site they had designed and created, including their own was full of errors in the code. That wasn’t too encouraging.
Another time, I had a sales person visit me and give me a presentation about how their web site was so great and why I should spend thousands of pounds with them on advertising on it. The facts and figures bored me rigid and quite frankly I didn’t care about most of them, actually I didn’t believe them either. I wanted to know if the site was relevant to me, what the cost was and how it looked. Those were definitely the most important points for me, if the answers were positive then I may investigate further, but at the end of the long speech I’d had enough and it put me off that they assumed I would be so impressed by all the visitors, hits, page views etc. It’s no use having millions of visitors if none of them are right people who you are actually targeting.
My advice is to be cautious and make your own basic checks, ask for references and look at examples of their work. Those couple of minutes could save you alot of money.