Since moving from the safe harbour of paid employment into the fantastic world of running my own business, I am talking to roughly 50 people a month who seem to have issues with their marketing.
One of the common threads in most conversations is some of the shady practices marketing companies are employing to keep their clients locked into a contract.
In this monthly article, I am going to list a few things that have shocked me, and what I would do differently
“I can’t move marketing company because they own my domain name”
There is no reason on earth that you shouldn’t own your own domain name. A domain is the web address for your website. It usually starts in www and ends in a .com or similar. Imagine someone owning your limited company, or your equipment and being able to ransom it to you at will.
A domain name is an important part of your business identity. The money and time you spend on it through improving your domain authority, search engine optimisation and content marketing is all linked to your domain. If someone else owns it, and refuses to give it up, then you might have to start again. And that means a lot of money wasted.
A standard response from marketing companies is to say that you don’t understand domains and they are helping you. It’s not that hard and you should ask them to teach you, or find someone who is willing to help with your domain whilst you own it.
My advice to you is to find someone who can talk on their level and negotiate a way to get them to transfer your domain to its rightful owner… You!
“My marketing company accidentally deleted my website and the backup they have is 3 years old.”
I mean, come on!, The number of processes you have to not have in place for this kind of disaster to happen is staggering. Why aren’t they backing it up every time you change it? If they did, how did they lose it? And how did they delete it in the first place?
All of these questions don’t help you now. If they don’t have a recent backup, and without intimate knowledge of their platform, I am sorry to say that you may have to start from scratch.
In future, if I was you, I would ask your marketing company to send you a copy of your backup so you can keep it somewhere safe (one in the cloud and one on a memory stick.)
And if this is the kind of stupidity your marketing company is capable of, then I’d suggest you find a new one.
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