Pay & Pray Marketing

The other day I was talking to a prospect and they used a term that I’ve never heard, but I think encapsulates what a lot of people are concerned about when they’re running marketing, and the gentleman said pay and pray. And I was like, pay and pray, man I’ve never heard that before but it makes a lot of sense. You’re gonna pay a lot of money for marketing and you’re gonna pray that it works and that’s often been the case when it comes to types of marketing like print advertising or billboards or direct mail, you pay and you pray that it works, and that’s also the case in digital marketing if you’re not tracking your campaigns correctly.

You’re paying a bunch of money, and the conversions aren’t tracking so you see all the metrics, you see clicks, impressions, traffic to your website, but you really don’t know how well the campaign is performing and so you’re paying and you’re praying that it’s gonna work out for you. And there’s a fundamental problem with that when it comes to digital marketing. Digital marketing is built in a way that allows you to track everything. And the foundation for what we do at ParaCore is really conversion tracking, and that relates to conversion tracking on your website whether that’s a form submission or an ecommerce buy or a purchase.

And phone call tracking, which is something like CallRail, or a different call tracking provider. And when you implement conversion tracking in your digital marketing, there’s no such thing as pay and pray anymore because you just know what’s happening. And then it’s pay and does it work? And it some cases it’s pay and it doesn’t work, and in other cases it’s pay and it does work. But there really is no pay and pray, it’s pay and determine if it works. And for instance, if you’re paying and you find out it’s working but maybe not as well as you’d like, then it’s pay and optimize. If it’s pay and it’s working great, then it’s pay more, pay more, pay more, and it’s working.

So a lot of times when we’re talking to people, I’m talking to prospects, they’re saying well, how do I know it’s gonna work? Do I know if it’s gonna work? At ParaCore we offer a three month contract that allows us to get the campaign up and running, make sure the tracking is in place if we’re onboarding or setting up a new account, do some optimizations that we generally think are necessary depending on what sort of campaign we’re taking over, make some improvements, monitor it, and then assess the performance. And after 90 days, you have a pretty good idea if it’s gonna work. I mean, you’re either way off as far as cost per purchase or lead cost, or you’re pretty much in the realm of reasonableness, or you’re performing the way you wanted to.

But the idea of pay and pray should not exist in digital marketing, and if it is a concern of yours and that’s something that you feel like you’re experiencing right now, in your office over the last couple months or with a provider, or internally, or whatever, however your digital marketing is being run, then you need to make a change. It doesn’t have to be ParaCore, but it has to be somebody that’s really, really, really focused on tracking conversions, making sure that’s set up correctly and then reporting on those conversions. Because the idea of pay and pray does not exist at ParaCore and it shouldn’t exist in any other PPC agency. And in many cases even a full-service agency they may not have the nuanced understanding of how all the conversions work, maybe their development staff is overloaded, there are a lot of different reasons why maybe a full-service agency may not be able to report on the real, real, real metrics, the ones that matter, not the vanity ones. There are a number of reasons they may not be able to report on that, but ultimately, if you’re paying and you’re praying and you’re finding yourself in this position right now it just doesn’t have to be that way.

So if you have any questions for me my name’s Adam, I’m the owner of ParaCore. We’re a pay-per-click generation agency. I hope you like this video, you can comment below with questions. Hope you’ll subscribe if you’re watching it on YouTube. And again, please reach out if you have any concerns or just wanna talk about your conversion tracking or your digital marketings performance. Thanks and I’ll see you in the next video.

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