Digital marketing is full of options. In my almost 20 years of providing web marketing services to clients, there has only been a handful of times where the client had enough budget to do everything that was necessary at any given time. In most cases, there are a number of recommendations on the table that our team and our clients have to prioritize, implementing what we can and leaving the rest for later.
Yet there is more to making smart web marketing decisions than just considering the priority your options.
As the web marketing agency, we present our recommendations to clients for approval, making the best assessment for the priority of each. Most of our clients trust our recommendations. However, sometimes one or more get shot down. Ultimately, that is on the client, but it’s important that they understand the ramifications of not implementing any particular recommendation being made.
If an SEO is making a recommendation, there is usually a valid reason behind it. For the most part, we’d rather spend less time explaining and more time implementing, but there are times when explanation is needed. Clients should be very careful before shooting down any recommendation made by their SEO team until the fully understand it.
Here are some specific questions to consider when deciding which recommendations to or not to implement:
- Why is this recommendation being made?
- What will it take to implement?
- What value will it bring to the campaign?
- How will this get us closer to our goals?
- When should I expect to see results?
- What happens if this particular recommendation is not implemented?
Asking these questions will help you better understand the value of any given recommendation. No recommendation should be shot down without such an assessment.
But even still, there does come a point where you just need to trust your web marketing team to do what needs to be done. If every recommendation gets questioned before implementation, you’ll consume most of your team’s time in email and phone calls rather than on actual implementation. That may make you the most knowledgeable guy on your side of the table, but it will also ensure a slow moving campaign.
It’s said that you can have too much of a good thing. Knowledge and understanding are always good, but not if it’s getting in your own way. Seek knowledge, but ultimately, trust your team. Remember, the goal is to keep things moving forward toward success, not get bogged down in knowledge.