#8 - Paying a Premium for an Illusion (Micro-Podcast)

Paying a Premium for an Illusion: In this episode, we pull back the curtain on an agency we vetted during a client review process—one that promised white-glove service but was, in reality, reselling a cookie-cutter platform with massive markups.

We explore how agencies like this thrive by banking on a client’s lack of technical insight, and how their tactics—fancy dashboards, inflated fees, and vague service descriptions—create an illusion of value. If you’re a business owner who’s ever wondered what you’re really paying for, this episode will help you spot the difference between legitimate service and repackaged fluff.

Not all agencies are created equal—and not all value is visible on the invoice.

Over The Bull is brought to you by IntegrisDesign.com. All rights reserved.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut through marketing noise. Here's your host, Ken Carroll.

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How would you like to pay four times as much for something that you could pay a quarter for on this episode of Over the Bull? As you know, our podcast is really about real stories and real experiences. In the last week, I was qualifying a vendor for a new client. Basically, he asked me to attend a meeting, and we were just going to see what this particular vendor was offering, because this company was a newly acquired company. So, I started to, you know, I obviously joined a Zoom session, and in that Zoom session... This particular vendor opened up a custom portal with their logo on it and spent about 30 minutes going through the services that they offer. Now, it ranged from local business optimization, which most of us are focused on Google business profile optimization, And he was basically showing us how he was optimizing what's known as the NAP score, name, address, phone number. Then he went into review management. He went into some call tracking. He went into Google ads. And then he landed on the fact that they create a couple of blog articles a month and were optimizing a website. So after the kind of beginning kind of overview session, I knew what he was doing. He's reselling a product and I knew the product, but it did all this stuff. And so the question for an owner may be, well, what's the big deal? Well, there's a lot of big deals. The first biggest of all is the fact that this particular product, he was marking up significantly in I mean, absolutely significantly. So in the meeting, I called it out and I said, so you're literally using this product. I said, everything you've shown me is like a tutorial from this particular product. Are you doing anything outside of that? And, you know, you got to hit them. Sometimes you just got to go right at it because you don't have a lot of time, you know, in life to kind of soft sell this stuff. And it turns out that that was primarily what they were offering. So then my questions before that was about assets and things like that. I wanted to make sure that our client owned the assets. And so the first thing is you're going to spend a lot of money when you buy a reseller product, especially if they market up to such an extent, and then claim that they're actually doing human work when in reality they're kind of putting this one size fits all for your business and then claiming that there's a lot of work going on behind the scenes, which is usually not the case. There's also a lack of transparency. So when companies resell a product without making it clear, clients don't understand what they're actually paying for, right? And so this lack of transparency not only erodes your wallet, but it's also going to erode your trust. And you may not be the happiest camper in the world when you find out that that was going on, especially if they sell it as though they're doing a lot of manual work. So the next thing is the missed opportunities. Okay. You know why we didn't buy this product? It's a good product. It really is a good product, but it has limited in its scope. It's like if I was selling only size seven shoes, I'm only going to be able to sell those to a certain number of people. This particular product sells a really nice size seven shoe, but it doesn't fit for most businesses. However, Companies like this agency out of Nashville, they force fit it and they force fit the entire solution into every single business. And that's not wise. So that's why we didn't opt into it. We do customization. We have to do a lot of homework in order to make our clients successful and have the best opportunities. So when you buy something that looks really shiny and nice, but it's a reseller product, not only are you going to pay more for it, not only is there a lack of transparency, but you're also going to miss out on the customization and what you could really gain by having a product that's tailored to your business. So There were a couple flags that went out immediately that this, I assume, is a decent-sized agency, really didn't know what they were doing. Number one, they're also managing a website and talking about search engine optimization. Yes, of course, knowing that they're just reselling a product and that was 30 minutes of their presentation and me calling that out in a meeting was enough. But I wanted to make sure the client's assets were secure and that they own the assets and they weren't basically using intellectual property of the company. Because sometimes, believe it or not, you have someone build you a website, they'll keep ownership of that website even though you paid for it. So keep that in mind. But they did say that both the web address and the website itself were the property of the client. By the way, web address, there are other words for it. The URL of a website, the domain of a website, those are all synonymous terms with basically the web address. But as it turns out, they did have ownership of the web address and the actual website. There was some mental gymnastics in order to get them to... Release that content. I think as of today, we do have that content, but we pretty much have already built it because it was a minimal website effort. So it wasn't that really difficult to just reconstruct it. Once we saw the hiccups, we just went ahead and rebuilt it. Now, the other thing that you want to know about them was... These clients didn't know, or this vendor did not understand some basic terminology. Like they couldn't navigate through Google Ads very well. They didn't know where they were hosting their websites. And it turns out maybe they did because it was a truly kind of cheap location that you really shouldn't market websites to. You really want to use top tier hosting whenever you can with features that make it as quick as possible. You don't want to go with the cheapest hosting you get because... Just like bad neighborhoods in the rural world, there are good and bad neighborhoods on the Internet. And so using like AWS or Google hosting are always good ideas. So the next thing was not only did they not understand some basic terminology with Google Ads, they were also using kind of outdated techniques for creating content. They would just go solely based on keywords or collaboration with the previous owner and then come up with an article and write that article. Basically, today, when you look at how you generate content, there are really advanced tools to help you do that. Those tools will help you determine what you should write about, the subject of what you should write about, how many paragraphs should be in that particular article, how many words should be in that article, how often you should use certain words in that article, and also what words you should not use that often in that article. It can be very elaborate, even down to the number of pictures, et cetera. And so for someone just to crank out an article using something like ChatGPT or even if it's organic but unfocused, those articles have minimal value in today's world. Now you want to go back and check out the EEAT, which was the last podcast, to understand how organic content plays into it and why you don't just use strictly AI. So the idea this week is you want to make sure that when you're qualifying a vendor, You want to make sure you have somebody on your back. And that's somebody that's got your back. You want to make sure that they're qualifying those vendors and making sure that they're not reselling a product and giving you access to a portal that appears like it's doing something when in reality it's not. Now, without me being there... That particular presentation, in all honesty, it probably would have looked impressive. You probably would have thought this particular agency had some magic and they invested a lot of money into having a platform. You would have never guessed at a glance that this particular vendor for this client was using a canned system that was not a good fit for them. So be careful out there. Until next time, this is Over the Bull.

SPEAKER_00: 9:00

Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bowl, brought to you by Integris Design, a full-service design and marketing agency out of Asheville, North Carolina. Until next time.