Web Marketing Pricing and Public perceptions - Rant!

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link8r

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Why is that so many Irish people will happily blow €20k or more on a car, especially cars that will devalue within seconds of buying it, but baulk at spending €2k on a really good, effective website and/or marketing campaign?

I just don't get it. I have people calling in every week, sometimes in cars that cost over €60k but can't comprehend that they cannot take Argos on over the internet without spending more than a few thousand?

I'm not complaining about everyone, just about 40% of the people I meet. Obviously many people do understand what it is they are doing and need - but where do these other guys come from? Who told them they can automatically rank in Google for free? Who told them that all they need is a basic web "page" - no "bells and whistles" - they're not looking for a "Rolls Royce" of a site.

WTF is a Rolls Royce site anyway? It either works or it doesn't. I understand that people don't want to spend €5k on a 10-page website and SEO/SEM/Marketing campaign when they could spend €2.5k but who thought they could realistically outsource the development and online marketing of a website for less than €2k for something commoditised and competitive?

Where do companies who offer SEO for €200 come from too? how can you guarantee any site for any industry for €200 - €800 ? what if the client wants to appear in 16 countries on 4 domains for 10 keywords like "Investment Property", "Property" and " International Property for sale" ? If the minimum wage in Ireland is ~€10 and the average wage around €15 per hour - then how will you achieve this in less than a weeks work ? wtf ?

Am I going crazy?
 
mneylon

mneylon

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Staff member
I won't disagree with you :)

Take a fairly "typical" business owner.

They'll happily "invest" several thousand in a print advertising campaign in a national newspaper, but there are two things that they won't do:

  1. Get a good quality print ad designed (a lot of them will allow the newspaper's inhouse designers to do it)
  2. Invest in hosting
 
nevf

nevf

New Member
Yah, I agree.

Negligence on the side of business owners is leading them to lose out in lots of ways.

Word of mouth advertising is free. A website is relatively cheap. Both go hand in hand. And, when you compare it to a newspaper advertisement, is a no brainer.

Advertising and Marketing is a gigantic overhead on a business, and like HR management - if you can't do it right, then you're wasting your time. Even the large retail stores in Ireland can't seem to do it right.
 
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link8r

New Member
blacknight said:
Most of the large retailers don't sell online

Their counterparts in the UK and US do
Click to expand...

I think more are. Next do, A|Wear do. Argos does to a point (ok, you have to collect). All of the DIY stores do have large online presences. Even Superquinn is online. The only one I can think of now who doesn't is Dunnes. Anyone else I'm missing?
 
mneylon

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
As for the supermarkets - they're all incredibly limited in the areas that they cover which render their online offerings a bit useless (also the slot system really sucks - if I have to plan that far in advance it's easier to go to the shop in person)
 
L

link8r

New Member
and you dont get to see special offers or new product ideas online. Incredibly handy if you have any mobility issues of course.
 
caminowebmaster

caminowebmaster

New Member
I think one of the main problems is the amount of SEO spam flying around. I have clients that forward me emails they get from mostly UK companies telling them they will rank them for a few hundred pounds.

Clients are then trying to use that to force down my price. I believe it will get better as more Irish companies become aware of SEO and the benefits they can gain.
 
L

link8r

New Member
I'm seeing a lot of "guaranteed" placings coming from UK companies.

I suggested to one of our clients that they try one company out, as it was guaranteed and the visitor numbers they quoted were making them salivate. Turns out that some of these guys really just have incredibly large directory type sites / leftover sites from the search engine wars (pre-Google when everybody and their dog had a search engine, except Microsoft [well not that far back - mid-to-late 1990's]) - and they had domains that were getting traffic from the categories in their search directories.

It really didn't deliver and it didn't do anything for their SEO as it wasn't SEO....They didn't get their money back either as the company did send the traffic to their own domain and their own domain did rank ... albeit for one long search phrase ONLY.

Such a pity.

Not sure if accreditation will help this matter either. I saw a college/Uni in Dublin offer an online marketing course over 10 weeks. It looks like a pretty good primer in terms of getting people to understand the terminology, some of the basics but it also has a lot of misinformation (like suggesting that if two websites link to each other, the links cancel out and could result in a penalty - which is a poor and rather abreviated understanding of things) - and so the course is definitely far from authoritive on the matter.
 
Byron

Byron

New Member
I got a client to pull a few print listings about eight months ago, they paid for a good print copywriter to do the content for their site and drop me a "nixer" wad of cash and it seemed to work better.


It seems to be we are too much of a pushover industry. Tell the truth, design and development (especially SEO) from anywhere other than Ireland won't work. If your web company doesn't have an e-booking, content management system website (custom template) or great references from a good source... don't trust them.

We mightent be the best in the world, but if we dont tell the selective truth, (never lieing), I dont think people actually think of web development as a career in Ireland sadly.
 
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