I’m a full-time digital marketer. I have been in this industry for almost 8 years now, and I have worked with a lot of clients. I have run a lot of my own projects, and these are the types of clients that I am never going to work with on a freelance basis or in my own agency, which is real marketing. But if they come to Life Productions, I can’t help it.
I started my career with my own website, and I was selling weight loss diet plans back in the day. Then I shifted to e-commerce, and then I shifted to my first real job, and that was as an SEO executive at First Rite IT Services, there was my first interaction with my first client ever.
The client was good. I delivered what I promised to them in 60 days, whereas the timeline that I actually gave them was 6 months. 180 days’ work was completed in 60 days, and in doing so, what I expected was a bit of appreciation. Fuzail, you did a good job. Now let’s focus on other keywords and try and get more rankings and get more business.Instead, what I got was, “since we have ranked on these five keywords now let’s stop the work.”
I mean, bro, do you have any serious business sense? Who the fuck does this? You rank on your keywords, and now the next part is to rank for more keywords so that you get more traffic and more business. If you’re not growing, your business is going to die.
This is the first kind of people I don’t want to do business with: people who do not want to grow. They are going to hold me back. They are going to hold you back. If you are the one who is reading this blog, if you ever get a chance to work with people who do not want to grow, for fuck’s sake, do not work with them.
Next is the kind of people who do not understand numbers. Now, I get it. Numbers are not everyone’s cup of tea, and I don’t expect it to be, but when it is explained to you, we expect you to listen.
I’ll tell a short story. Recently, a client came. I won’t take the name of the client for privacy reasons, but I will tell you this: they are into jewellery, and I was doing e-commerce ads for them. They gave me a target of 10x ROAS, and I said it is doable, but it will take its due course. It will take its time. I made the whole media buying plan based on their previous ads:
- This is the current CPM that you are getting.
- Based on this CPM and the industry standard CTR, this is how many clicks we can buy.
- Based on the clicks, this is how many people will visit your landing page.
- Based on your current conversion rate, these are going to be your total number of purchases.
- Based on average order value, this is how much money you are going to make.
Then I did all the math to come up with the ROAS. I gave them a projection that these would be the numbers for the next 6 months, and in the new course, we are going to achieve the given target. However, we are going to need a few things from them.
Now, I started the work, and then I started getting good ROAS from a negative ROAS. I bought them to positive, and I hit an ROAS of 3 in the first 7 days itself. I told them, “See, I have done my part of audits and re-audits, and these are my findings:
- Your page speed is very fucking slow, so that is something you need to work on.
- Your landing page: we need better imagery, better content, and a better offer, because no matter how good your product is, if the offer sucks, nobody is going to fucking buy it.
- I am going to need some good videos, so that is something that you have to provide.
Based on this, we can work together to bring down the CPM so that we can buy more clicks, hence leading to more landing page views, more purchases, more sales leads, and better ROAS within the same budget.” The client fucking refused, said ki ye to budget mein nahi hai, and I said, “Bro, if you are not going to help me, how am I supposed to help you?” At the end of the day, if you invest and the profitability was at a 5x ROAS, it is not that if they bought enough influencers or worked with a few, or even worked for a barter collaboration, they would have gotten a negative ROAS.And when these kinds of things happen and people refuse, you end up questioning yourself. This is something that I don’t really want, and because of this, I’m not going to work with such clients where they refuse to help us help them.
That is why, for my current contracts, I have everything written down. If creative is something that is supposed to be provided from the client’s end, that needs to be written down so that he doesn’t come and say, “What the fuck do you guys do? We make the creatives, we do everything.” My job is to tell you what creatives to make, what kind of audience we will be targeting, and based on that, you are going to make the creatives.
So that’s it. That is all the yapping from my end. These are the two kinds of clients I’m never going to work with:
- People who do not have their expectations, who do not want to grow.
- People who do not understand numbers and people who refuse to help you help them and then blame you for everything that goes wrong.