I know I said this back in February. But I’ve got a brand-new website!
This time, it’s through Wix, not Marketing 360/Madwire Media. And being a small business, that makes a huge difference.
If you’re a small business looking for a website creator or marketing team, then run away from Marketing 360/Madwire Media. Run! Don’t lose thousands of dollars on them like I did.
They’ve got a great sales pitch about how 97% of their customers get back their full investment within a certain amount of time. Six months, I want to say?
Don’t believe it. Or at least don’t believe they won’t carelessly dump you into the 3% if you’re a small business.
Marketing 360/Madwire Media will also give you a great first impression once you’re officially on board. But once again, this is all a front. It’s so you don’t pull out your small-business money before they can claim the legal high ground and say, “We can’t give you a refund for our carelessly defective product because we already put the time in. Besides, you have a beautiful website out of it.”
Those last 15 words are practically verbatim what I heard when I called up customer service after practically five months of no paid results in a six-month contract. That was after:
They initially told me they’d have my brand-new website up and running in 3 ½ weeks. Tops. Yet it took them 4 ½. And when you’re working on an almost $600-a-month contract, that lost week is inappropriate. Not that Marketing 360/Madwire Media ever acknowledged the delay.
The website wasn’t SEO optimized. I had another industry expert walk me through all the blank areas on my behind-the-scenes data until I realized exactly how little effort was put into this area of my small business site. Do you know what happens when a small business can’t attract search engine attention? Nothing. That’s what. With such minuscule online visibility, there’s no online-generated revenue and certainly no profits. (Fortunately, I was also marketing on my own.)
I actually hate saying this next part, because I did like my marketing rep as a person. But as a marketing rep, I’m assuming he wasn’t properly incentivized to care about a small business like mine. As such, I had to contact him repeatedly about issues he should have been monitoring.
For instance, my Google ads weren’t working for me. Apparently, they’re usually not effective, but I had to learn that on my own. I also had to ask him to switch my advertising efforts over to Facebook after Google ads kept failing me, which also didn’t do me any good. The ad he created didn’t even generate me a single sign-up to The Genuine Writer, which is free. And then I had to call him up and have a Dear John talk about how poorly my Marketing 360/Madwire Media investment was going. He assured me that some efforts take more time than others, that there was nothing unusual about how things were unfolding (or not unfolding), and did I want to add in an extra $200 to my advertising efforts to give it a quicker boost? Like an idiot, I said yes.
That’s why I had to spend the next five months designing my brand-new website on my own and transferring all the data, including months’ worth of blogs. And that’s why, on Monday, I officially severed my relationship with Marketing 360/Madwire Media.
Except for warning every other small business away from them, I won’t be looking back.
So here’s to a Marketing 360/Madwire Media-free 2018! I think it and my brand-new website are going to be great.