Why digital marketing trials don’t work for your business 

As with new ventures into technology, every business enjoys a free trial period to ensure that the product or services suits their needs. Some digital marketing agencies these days may even offer a “free” digital marketing trial to entice your business to jump aboard their agency. While a free digital marketing trial may sound very valuable and attractive to your business, there are many reasons why you are unlikely to see any results from this trial.

 

In this article, we will look at a scenario of what is likely to happen when you accept a free digital marketing trial and why it wouldn’t work for your business!

 

Specific Campaign Objectives 

The most important of any marketing campaign is to set specific objectives so that you know and understand how to drive your marketing activities.

 

With a free digital marketing trial, it is likely that the digital marketing agency will only do enough to show you proof of concept that their agency is capable of showing results. However, the objective they have can be quite different from yours.

 

For example, your business sells “brand A” computers and you are trying to get more people aware of your business to purchase from you. Where your specific objective is to rank for the keyword “brand A computer” to drive traffic to your website, they might just help you to rank long-tail keywords or targeted keywords that are easier to push up the rank such as “brand A computer sellers to business in Singapore”.

 

In this case, while you might still benefit from the efforts from the digital marketing trial, it is not a significant result that you are able to attribute to the agency’s efforts.

 

Time needed

Depending on the type of marketing activity you are looking to engage in, the time needed to see actual results can differ. For example, SEO can take up to 6 months before detecting significant change in ranking. Google adwords, on the other hand, can result in conversions in as little as one to two weeks depending on budget and optimization efforts.

 

When considering digital marketing trials, a factor that will limit the results you can truly achieve is the time needed to observe change. Businesses that are new to digital marketing tend to be a little impatient in seeing results which might lead to dismissal of the efficacy of digital marketing activities.

 

Be sure that if you were to accept a digital marketing trial that you be aware of effectiveness of the digital marketing activities in a limited time period. If you would like to gain a better understanding how these digital activities work and what you can expect, click here to read more.

 

Optimization of results

Another important factor to see real results from any campaign is to continuously optimize the campaign. How the agency is able to continuously optimize your digital campaigns in a timely manner is key to marketing success in a long run. It is also one of the main reasons why you would hire an agency to manage your marketing campaigns, however, during a time limited digital marketing trial, it can be difficult to observe or see how the agency might be executing its optimization.

 

As the trial is likely to be for free, they are unlikely to focus their resources on your account to optimize it as frequently as they should be. Another limitation is that trials usually last for about a month which is not enough time to observe if the agency is good at optimization either.

 

This is why it is key to request and refer to past/existing case studies of clients they have assisted in marketing campaigns and the effort put in to continously produce results.

 

Related: What you should look out for when choosing digital marketing agencies

 

Budget optimization

When it comes to advertising campaigns on or Google Adwords, a large part of achieving the desired results is based on the budget that you allocated. Budgets for digital marketing trials tend to be on the lower end meaning that your bids are already suffering from a lack of budget to actually be effective.

 

A second factor that that is affected by the lack of budget is the budget optimization at a later stage. With limited budget, the agency will be unable to optimize or play around with different bidding strategies to maximise your marketing objectives. These two factors are likely to produce a low ROI on the campaign and it might seem a very ineffective marketing activity.

Overall, we do advise against trying digital marketing trials as the results you get may not be an accurate representation these agencies’ ability. If you are looking to hire a digital marketing agency, do check out this article where we have complied a list of items you should review before hiring a agency.

 

Alternatively, if you are looking for a full-stack digital marketing agency for all your marketing needs, you can contact us, Adssential Marketing, here for further discussion of your marketing objectives!