Pigeonholed.
Our culture is to grow our clients’ business, and we do that through Media Buying, Search Engine Optimization, Email Marketing, and Creative work. Each of those five main services has several subcategories.
Not everyone hires us for everything, and that’s fine.
One thing we need to better at, though, is letting clients know that we do do all of those.
One of our oldest clients once hired us for SEO, and Media Buying. Three years later, their then-new Marketing Director moved the SEO to another agency. One year after that, their new Marketing Director pulled me aside and said “you know, if I could make a suggestion, you should really offer SEO, we’d really like to have one agency handle it all, but you don’t so we had to hire another agency.” We’d lost out on that business again, because we got pigeonholed into being their Media Agency.
A newer client recently hired a new Marketing Director, a very impressive person who knows the brand very well. Our contract with the client, which obligates us to perform CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) predates his arrival. None-the-less, they opted to hire another agency to work on CRO “because Mason doesn’t offer CRO.” This is despite the fact A) we do and B) it says so in our contract. We got pigeonholed into being their media agency,
A third example: an investor hired us for two of his companies, Company “A” is a lead generation client, and company “B” is an e-commerce brand. We knew that the e-comm brand was going to be very, very challenging for these reasons: Nobody at “B” was in charge of Marketing; they had no sales goals; their budget was too low. We would not have taken them as a client if he didn’t make it clear that this was a package deal: he wanted one agency for both of his projects. When “B” didn’t work - as we knew it wouldn’t - this client said “well, I should have known, after all you are a lead gen agency.” We got pigeonholed into being a lead agency, when in fact a huge number of our clients are e-comm.
To be clear, it’s my fault that we got pigeonholed. I don’t feel comfortable banging every new hire at every client with a list of our services, but maybe I should.