‘When you pay peanuts, you get monkeys’ -Anonymous
Being in business, it’s likely that you’ve heard the above saying before – either as a sly observation or a cynical remark. No matter how optimistic you are and however much you don’t want to believe it, the idiom is, more often than not, extremely accurate – and even the most ardent bargain hunters need to understand at some point that cheap work rarely gives you the results you’re looking for. But why exactly is cheap very rarely better? We did some digging to find out:
Service
Great customer service is an attractive quality, but some customers may be disappointed with the lack of communication or with a lower quality service than expected. Unfortunately, for cheaper agencies this is the norm because many projects are viewed as liabilities – for that kind of work, there is little return and the objective becomes to complete it and get it out of the door as quickly as possible, rather than build a relationship with clients. In our experience, this sours the entire process, which is why we only service a handful of clients at any given time, allowing us to sustain relationships for longer.
Quality of work
As we hinted in our opening quote, you get what you pay for, and by paying for more time and effort to go into your project, you can be confident that the quality of work will be higher. There are two reasons for this:
1. Greater planning, more thorough research and a higher level of detail can be focused on – something that is particularly true in a digital marketing agency
2. Clients are paying for the entitlement to demand high quality results – if they’re not satisfied, then they have the right to ask for more because that’s what they’ve paid for.
Aftercare
Once website design is complete, some agencies simply allow their clients to go their own way, even though they may need a level of support with their new site. This is more often than not because there isn’t enough money in the budget to focus on a previous project. This is a vicious cycle in that agencies become accustomed to tackling cheap, quick wins without continuing the relationship, so they must always depend on such work, making it difficult to retain clients.
Reliability
Chanel, Gucci and Prada are all expensive designers and it’s simply accepted that their products are going to stack up much better against a supermarket brand of handbag – after all, if they can afford to charge more than their competitors, it shows that they have a steady influx of loyal customers. The same could be said for a web design agency or digital marketing expert – if people are continuing to pay them a higher rate than their competitors in the same field, then they’re clearly having success, or else they would have been priced out of the market a long time ago.
Resource Commitment
Finally, by paying more for a project, you’re helping the supplier to afford greater resources – resources that will help to increase the value of their service. This could include additional freelance services, paying a highly skilled/highly valuable member of staff, and better stock material. Obviously, time is also a resource, and extra time on a project means more extensive work can be carried out, such as keyword research or audits of competitors’ social media.
Of course, we still encourage you to shop around for the best deal, but it’s important to remember what we’ve said above when looking for a creative agency to fulfil your project work – to quote another relevant and popular idiom, ‘if you think it’s expensive to hire a professional, wait until you hire an amateur’.
Give your business the gift that keeps on giving this Christmas, with a brand new website re-design from Christian Michaels full service digital agency. Simply get in touch and let’s talk about what we can achieve together for your social media, website design and digital marketing strategies.