It’s starting to get tough out there. At the moment I’m not losing too much sleep over the business impact from the recession – most of my client base is in industrial sectors unlikely to be hurt too badly, and our overhead is relatively low, and we have a whole continent of businesses to prospect. But even so, everyone’s having to shuffle and adapt to stay afloat.
In past years, this first quarter of the calendar year has been defined for me by big cushy jobs offered up by marketing firms: five grand here, four grand there, usually website jobs. I usually end up making half the year’s cash just in January and February. This year, that’s almost entirely dried up – I spent January calling my marketing company contacts and virtually all of them had guns in their mouths. They count on big Q1 jobs too, and they’re just not happening this year. Businesses are still spending money, but they’re understandably being much more demanding about their ROI. Big website redesigns aren’t easy to justify right now as immediate sales drivers, so those plans have gotten shelved and the marketing firms that do them have gotten pounded.
I produce the written copy component of that, but luckily I’m not absolutely married to the Q1 marketing cycle; I’ve just profited from it in recent years. A writer can do all sorts of things in this climate. Sales letters. Email-based B2B newsletters. Fact sheets and case studies. White papers. Lots of stuff that individually are too low budget for a marketing firm to take on, not to mention requiring too much technical understanding for the average marketing geek to have. So where marketing firms are getting their backs broken right now, we’re still able to cobble together decent billing each month so far.
One thing I’ve noticed though is that there is absolutely NO room for incompetence out there now. Businesses need sales. They need ROI. And if you’re “all hat and no cattle” as they say, you can’t hide behind the luxury of a growing economy anymore. You’re going to be found out.
I’ve been working for a particular client for almost a year now; I was brought into the gig by a marketing firm that has been working with this client for several years, promising the world and never quite delivering it. I was called in to write copy for the client’s website in an effort to bolster their search engine rankings. They’d been fighting this battle for several years with little success.
Over this last year I’ve seen them advise this client and do things in ways that seriously made me question their competence, but the issues fell outside of my arena (copywriting) and so it really wasn’t my place to get into it. But lately.. oh god, please.. I’ve had to be diplomatic. This client is paying for results and he’s not getting them. And the firm’s been screwing up big. And I consider it just bad business etiquette to toss a colleague under the bus when they were the ones who brought me into the project to start with. But man oh man: I’ve had to walk a thin line.
And this week it’s gotten so much worse. More bad advice. Lousy graphic design. The uncovering of long term major mistakes. It even turned that, despite working with this client for over three years, they had no idea really what the client produced until I sat down this week and explained it to them. Three years of monthly retainers.
Finally yesterday morning, just before I had to leave to make a dental appointment, the client calls. He’s a very nice guy, smart guy, down to earth guy. Good client. Doesn’t deserve the crap he’s getting. And so he calls yesterday morning and after a bit of small talk asks me for my honest opinion of the situation. And like Taylor Mali, I too have that policy about honesty and ass kicking: if you ask for it, I have to give it to you. So I take a deep breath and tell him exactly what I think about how this marketing firm is handling his company.
I’m pretty sure they’re on their way to being fired. And they should be. I just hate feeling like I threw them under the bus. I know that they did it to themselves – most clients would have fired them two years ago – but still.
I suspect that’s happening everywhere now. In good times, success doesn’t always require competence. Rising tide lifts all boats and all that, and for marketing firms in particular it’s easy to claim a dubious campaign success when business is going great anyway. But when the economy starts sputtering and choking, it’s easy to see where people are screwing up. And if you can’t walk the walk, talking the talk just gets you fired.
I wonder how many marketing guys out there are in exactly that position now. And how many businesses are bleeding money on marketing firms that don’t know what they’re doing.