I was working for a small business. They had done much of their marketing in house for most of their existence and had primarily relied upon PPC ads. But those ads were getting more and more expensive because there was so much competition.
We read about content marketing and decided to try it but we didn’t have much initial success, in part because nothing we created ever went viral.
The company hired an SEO agency at a relatively cheap but still quite high price (they were based in Europe) and they fixed a whole bunch of SEO problems with the website. Immediately traffic started to improve, albeit incrementally.
But they also got us to put them on a five digit monthly retainer to help with our content marketing.
6 months later it was clear nothing was improving. Moreover, they were doing what we had been doing before, albeit with a few small variations. We were paying this company as much as an employee and they were contributing significantly less.
One day we ended the contract and decided to try it ourselves. That company has gotten over 4,000,000 unique views to its network of websites only a few years later.
The lesson I took from this is that anybody – us, you, your competitors – can figure out internet marketing and do a good job of it. Five and six digit retainers are not required. You just need to know how to do it. That’s where I come in.