Eight Types of Digital Marketing Clients You Do Not Want to Be Like and Why

The 8 Types of Digital Marketing Clients

Meet eight types of digital marketing clients who can derail any project, sink their own businesses, and make the best digital marketing pointless.

These types of potential clients range from the (understandably) confused or inexperienced to the downright nasty or manipulative.

In almost all cases, it’s important to note that while we may poke fun at some of the more difficult digital marketing clients out there we’d like to help, almost all of them can be reached…if there’s legitimate interest and perceived need on their part.

This means they have to:

• be willing to ask for help,
• be able to appreciate the value you bring to the equation (and be able to tell a neighborhood hobbyist apart from an experienced professional consultant)
• able to discern value apart from price-shopping,
• have an existing and felt need that places the livelihood of their business at stake,
• have the ability to invest for ROI,
• and be able to work with you to scale for incoming growth.

If the potential client, regardless of whether or not they are angelic or match up with one of these “lethal eight,” if they don’t meet those important criteria, they can’t be helped and are likely stuck in an endless loop of denial they can’t break free from. 

Digital Marketing and Stages of Denial

Typically, if a business owner has a brick and mortar physical location, at least a handful of employees, has been in operation for at least five years on average, and has worked with either a marketing agency or a publisher in the past, they’re more likely to possess the above standard requirements to bypass the drama of inexperience or ambivalence.

You can screen or vet them pretty easily before agreeing to take them on as a client by asking a handful of targeted questions that specifically delve into their need (if any), problems that attracting more customers could resolve or increasing online visiblity could resolve, and simply trying to focus in on perceptions of value and need.

Are You an Ideal Client for Digital Marketing?

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The eight types of digital marketing clients who often pose the most danger to using digital marketing effectively begin with the single most common type.

1. The Endless Revision Client

This type of client may seem genuinely sweet-natured or kindly, have a realistic budget or manifest other positive traits. Often times, however, there’ll be a red flag waving in the mind’s breeze, indicating a ship lost at sea, such as having expectations (“I want to be number one in the Google!” for example or “I want to get 100 new customers for my new business within two weeks!”) that don’t match up with realistic, industry-standard budgets. Once one of those red flags are seen it’s not unusual to see another, or another, leading to initiation of a project that just can’t ever end. From the professional consultant’s perspective, if we can’t finish a project, that means we have to stagger our next project, hire more staff to take on more work or delegate, and we can end up losing whatever profits we could have made by eternally tweaking some facet of a campaign or project in order to meet someone’s expectations – and the revisions often have nothing to do with the efficacy of the project or can directly impede it so that it’s no longer professional-quality.

The Endless Revision Client will say things such as “I don’t know what I want but I’ll know it when I see it!” They may opine “I want something that will pop!” Or they’ll want a change that may be cute but could easily look unprofessional and detract from your work (such as insisting you change colors that contradict a brand, insisting you show cute doggie photos, enlarge fonts until they look ridiculously out of place).

Why This is Happening

It’s important to note that the reasons the client may be asking for endless revisions may be due to lack of experience in digital marketing (sadly very common), lack of experience in design or branding, nervousness committing, and the client feeling noncommittal about everything they see.

The way to work with this type of client is first to make sure in your standard operating contract you detail a few factors:

• how and why you make specific design decisions based on commonly-held industry standards
• how and why you study their industry competitors to establish baseline norms in design and content marketing
• your own professional experience
• your happy customers (testimonials or references)
• your desire to keep them engaged by offering weekly “meetings” that could be short calls or video chats to explain your challenges or progress
• finally, the need to limit number of revisions in order to work in an efficient, time-bound, structured manner and that if the client does require endless revisions you may not be a good fit for them.

2. The Price Shopper

Our second type of client you really don’t want to be like is the Price Shopper.

This potential client type is as common as pasta in an Italian restaurant and places low prices over value at every turn when working with digital marketing professionals.

This client sees (what I call “race to the bottom” hobbyist-for-hire) sites such as Fiverr and Upwork (which I fondly refer to as “UpYoursWork”) as indicitave of the true value of the work being done.

If someone on Fiverr is offering to build a generic website for $5, then all websites, regardless of use, must be the same cheap price. There is no discussion or place for using digital marketing to solve business problems, and no mention of pinpointing objectives.

This client either does not see how an intangible service they can’t hold in their hand could ever solve a problem, don’t think they have any problems of any kind that need solving, or aren’t convinced of the value that you could bring into their business were you to be brought in.

I’ve met many of these Price Shoppers over my 20+ years in digital marketing. I vividly recall answering the office phone several times in years past only to be greeted with such questions as “how much is a website?” (as if they were purchasing a stack of business cards) or “how much is it to add SEO to my website?” (as if they were purchasing a sauce). In this type of instance, the client in question is facing several issues:

• they see what you do as a single item or product with limited value, a beginning and an end, not as a service that could need tweaking and maintenance over time
• they see no long-term value in the service provided
• they have little or no past experience in digital marketing for ROI, or frankly may not know what measurable ROI could be for them or what that would look like
• they can’t likely define success for their efforts since those efforts are likely very vague and unclear
• they base decisions on how cheaply they can purchase an item, with their choices always revolving around bargain basement pricing – not value, since that’s not in the equation

So how do you deal with that sentiment as a professional digital marketing consultant or specialist? How do you deal with these sentiments if you are a potential digital marketing client so you can get a firm grip on budgeting for tangible results?

From the perspective of the digital marketing expert, again, it’s imperative to provide the clearly-defined processes for onboarding new clients where you introduce them to how you work, how decisions are made, how you provide long-lasting value to them, how budgets can easily be estimated when compared to traditional forms of marketing they’re more likely to be familiar with and emphasize results – not items.

Conversely, this means it’s necessary to ask them to define what their goals are, what problems they’re trying to achieve, what’s been done to date so far, why, what’s worked and what hasn’t, who else is involved, what happens if nothing at all is done (which is always the easiest option), and how they’ve arrived at their price-shopping number they want to “invest.”

Failure to ask these questions and hold the potential client accountable usually results in either a lost potential client, an unhappy client down the road, endless revisions, or more price-shopping on the part of the potential client….usually until they find a super-cheap hobbyist they decide to work with or go out of business unless someone (preferably a digital marketing professional) can break their way of thinking.

Why This Is Happening

From the view of the potential client, it’s imperative to understand how digital marketing as a service can be used to attract more of a specific type of customer to you, how it can help you expand into new markets, how it can help you automate processes or reduce overhead. Of course understanding how budgets can easily be stimated based on common industry norms is also very important.

Once you can conceptualize the value you might gain by investing for returns, you might be open to working with an experienced professional and discussing the merits of digital marketing as it can impact a growing business.

3. Eternal Tire-Kicker

This client type can also seem like a very nice person, but simply vacillates when it comes to making a decision. More likely than not, they work for an enterprise-level company (fifty or more employees), work with several other departments, nobody in marketing or management really has clarity on what project objectives should be so may not know what they are, either. Since goals aren’t documented and there likely aren’t success metrics associated with a project associated with a tire-kicker, it’s also probable that budget range is unclear to the tire-kicker.

They want to ask questions. Lots of questions. And if you’ve ever responded to a few Requests for Proposals (RFPs), you’ll probably get the impression the tire-kicker may be trying to gauge whether or not they can get the work needed for free, haggle out some kind of deal (such as “I’ll pay you if I’m happy!” or “I’ll pay you only if you can undercut this competitor I found on Craiglist!”). They may offer to provide more work in the future if you work at a discounted rate now, or some other such thing.

In the past, I’ve certainly spoken with more than what’s probably a fair share of tire-kickers. I can easily recall being contacted by staff working at several enterprise-level organizations and nonprofits, and several solo practice lawyers, all very nice, interesting people, actually.

When it comes to getting work done that can move a business forward into increased profitability, however, progress screeches to a halt once they get involved. They ask question after question, want multiple in-depth detailed conversations asking more technical questions (often after which their eyes can glaze over like poached eggs and begin rotating up into their heads), yet still just can’t seem to sign on the dotted line. It could be that they need a hiring manager’s approval, need to coordinate with other disorganized chaotic departments, work under supervisors who are simply price-shopping, or may even be the No Goals=No Business client type we mention later on.

Why This Is Happening

Regardless, the way to work with this type of client is to put into place our screening process from above, find out in our first or second brief engagement if the client has a problem they see as worth investing in solving, can do so, and is ready to commit to taking action. This can be discerned in a calm, polite, respectful manner, but should be done in at least the first or second (very) brief conversation, with technical jargon (obviously) excluded from the discourse unless the person you’re talking to is a more advanced digital marketing expert than yourself (highly unlikely or they’d be solving said problems themselves). Sometimes these types of clients can actually get something done but it can take years of off-again, on-again back and forth discussions. I remember being contacted by a representative for an electronics wholesaler for years, asking vague questions for years. After 2-3 years of off again and on again questions that led nowhere I explained that I would be happy to schedule a paid consultation with the person….knowing this would likely get rid of the person post haste. And it did. Spending even a penny would not happen and was a sure-fire way to get that person to leave me alone.

What if you think the person could potentially be sincere or actually ready to do something concrete? How to cut through the bureaucratic red tape? After a second conversation (no later) simply ask who else is involved and what their roles would be in reaching success and how that success is to be defined. As to book one final conversation with the Decision Maker of the project. Prepare an organized agenda, book the call or local meeting, and get ready to talk turkey or move on.

From the client perspective, you don’t want to kick tires until your shoes wear out so it helps to know what you want, why you want it, what problems you’re trying to solve, what that problem solved is worth to you, only work with those who seem to be experienced professionals (who ask you directly about goals and value and budget range). Once parameters are set, you’ll quickly be able to tell the competent from the neighborhood hobbyist or desperate.

4. The Fixer-Upper

This client type is usually a hobbyist looking for another hobbyist. I’ve met many in my time. Let’s go over a few.

Bob said he owned a local dating agency that I’d never heard of. He had a very basic, amateur-looking website with broken links, odd-looking photos, no website security, no forums, that did not work on modern phones, and so forth. We met at a networking event. Bob wanted to know if I could “update” his jacked-up dating website. When I asked how his dating agency made the bulk of its money, he seemed offended. He told me that he met alot of people at bars, would get people to sign up by patronizing bars, and would solicit help to build or “fix” his company website by offering free beer and food to bar patrons. This model, he claimed, worked for him well. I explained that I don’t drink and don’t work for peanuts (literal or otherwise) and didn’t need to, and that his business “model” was untenable at best. I wished him well and noticed a week or two later that his website had vanished from the internet.

Suzie was a lady I met at another networking event. She sold “branded” candy through a larger wholesale distributor. Her website had no SEO, no written content, just images of what could be ordered. When you tried to order the branded candy, you were taken to a different website that was not secure, did not look the same or even similar to the other parent website, so as a result, she was losing whatever corporate clients she had.

I asked how she got into that mess and she told me she had hired a neighborhood hobbyist to build the site for her for $250 and now that she’d wanted changes made the person had magically disappeared. My suggestion, upon seeing the giant red flag blowing in the wind, was to find that amateur and offer another $250 to “fix” the broken website. Again, she disappeared shortly thereafter. After volunteering as a Certified Small Business Mentor for SCORE (a division of the United States Small Business Administration) years later, I met up with hundreds of people just like Suzie – most of whom, also, are long gone.

 Why This Is Happening

This type of client can be helped by offering to talk to them briefly to find out what long-term goals they may have and what achieving those goals could mean to them professionally and finding out if those goals have enough value for them that they’d be willing to invest realistically to get them done.

For this type of client, it’s a matter of comparing the current approach to finally reaching completion and solving business problems (such as selling more branded candies to corporate clients, gaining more recurring contracts, landing more corporate clients for lawyers, and so on). It’s up to the digital marketing consultant to explain value and make the case for what they can provide as it is for the client to decide if they believe in their business sufficiently to give it the breath of life it likely needs.

5. The Know It All

The Know It All client is one who is degrading to any experienced professional, even possibly insulting. They will tell you that they could “do it themselves but just don’t have the time” or are somehow good at one type of technical skill, know exactly what needs to be done and how, but just can’t do it for whatever reason. Their fragile argument of brilliance crumbles when you ask very innocently and directly, if they could easily do everything themselves, why haven’t they done the work already and moved on? Or if the work that needs to be done is so pointless and devoid of value, why not just leave it? The idea in this line of reasoning is not to attempt to go “tit for tat” with them or even to necessarily try to contradict or question the validity of their feelings, but to ask why they didn’t just do what they said was so easy for them.

The second most important question in trying to work with Know It All clients is to ask them if they have a profit-based, growth-based business that has real problems they want to resolve. Ask for specifics, reasons for why solving these problems matter. If they can’t articulate any needs that sound engaging or worth solving, move on. You can’t make someone care and shouldn’t try.

It’s vital for the experienced (or even new) digital marketing specialist at this juncture and in trying to work with this type of client to preserve their self-esteem.

Imagine going to a dentist and telling the dentist that you could easily perform the procedure needed yourself, for free of course, but just don’t know how to do it or can’t recall some simple “trick.” Or telling the dentist the work “should be easy” and how long it should take. The dentist would probably ask you to leave.

The same would go for a mechanic, doctor, accountant, plumber, or any other professional service provider. So it’s incumbent on the digital marketer to hold themselves to similar standards and not accept debasing comments or bizarre requests not connected to tangible objectives.

Why This Is Happening

You can identify the Know It All by their comments. Statements such as “it should be easy,” it should only take a certain amount of time, should be done a certain way, should only cost such and such, are clear red flags telling you to run, don’t walk, as far away from the impending drama as you can. They’re behaving the way they are because they aren’t convinced of the value return, the validity of their own goals or ideas (which may be unformed), how marketing campaigns work per se, what to ask for, and it could be a combination of factors. Getting to the root of why they feel that they are experts when they clearly are not experts (or would be doing everything themselves by themselves for free) can take time that you may or may not be paid for, and may lead down endless detours. They need to be communicated with politely, respectfully, yet firmly and in a very organized, deliberate and structured manner to determine what they think they want and if they can get out of their own way.

Why Are They Like That?

These potential clients are often people who feel overwhelmed, have had negative experiences in the past with hobbyists, so feel justified (whether consciously or unconsciously) in guarding their interests and trying to take control where they may feel there is not sufficient structure for them.

From the perspective of the client, it’s important to wonder if what you want done has any higher long-term value to your business or just a worry that doesn’t really need to be acted on. If, for example, you desperately need more clients for a legal practice, clinic, accounting firm, or other business, and are happy to invest several thousand dollars in order to double or triple client intake within a few months after starting, you’d have to find someone you are willing to trust who has a process they can explain easily to you. Ask for the structure you need to see. Ask for what you don’t understand. If the person can’t answer your objections after you’ve established yourself as reasonable with realistic budget (remember that almost every project on Planet Earth requires a few thousand to initiate), move on.

For the digital marketer, if the Know It All client gives you more push-back than is comfortable or indicates a need to explain their superior knowledge that surpasses anything you could ever muster, invite them to solve the problem themselves and move on. Is whatever money you could possibly make worth the back and forth power struggle, attacks on your self-esteem, and other potential issues soon to come? Refine your screening process, find the gaps in your onboarding process that allowed the Know It All to get through, patch them, and write out ways to make sure people who claim to be able to do everything themselves for free are not invited into your professional life.

6. The Controller

The Controller is very similar to the Know It All and differs only in that they clamp down on micromanaging project development so much so that it can make it virtually impossible to get anything done in an efficient manner. They will give you unrealistic deadlines, cut corners, try to reduce price, belittle your work often (not always), can stall out on giving you what you need to finish your work, provide endless revisions, and otherwise make providing professional work more of a sharp pain in the backside than it could ever be worth or benefit the client. They can often work at larger agencies through which they outsource “white label” work (meaning you don’t get credit for the work you performed, only they do), hire out through “gig economy” sites where they price-hunt for cheapest deals, or behave in similar ways.

The Way to Try to Work with Them

The way to try to work with them is to require a thorough screening process followed by onboarding, introduction to how you work, make sure you’re paid at least half up front, that your contract is signed and covers any potentially erratic behavior or endless revisions or power struggles, adhere to that once it’s signed and not begin any work until it is. Explain both verbally, in writing, and in some way in the contract your experience, how decisions are made, how disputes or non-payment are handled and stick to those principles.

The Controlling Client

The client is trying to micromanage what they have issues grasping, appreciating, or understanding fully. They probably feel very distanced from involvement in the project, are very worried about some aspect of the problem they’re experiencing but either don’t realize it or don’t want to try to explain it to you. For the client, if you seek out professionals with experience, references, who openly discuss value, use contracts, ask about solving bigger valuable problems in supply chain, automation, expansion into new markets or something similar, that should be preferable to you than needing to exert control over someone else who could legitimately help you.

The final two types of worrisome clients you really don’t want to be like or work with are the Not Ready for Prime Time client and the Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen clients.

7. The Not Ready for Prime Time Client

This client is just not ready for Prime Time. They will likely be a very new small business owner, someone with an idea for a business they themselves have not fully committed to, are an “entrepreneur” with “an idea for a business but just need someone to do all the work” or someone similar to that. They can often appear to be very sympathetic, be very nice people outside of the business arena, but once in that arena can make you feel totally disconnected from reality with uncertainty and confusion over the most obvious decisions. These are often new “startup founders” with no previous marketing experience. They will often have unrealistically low budgets with considerably large problems to solve. They can have issues setting up basic business banking accounts, refuse to provide basic information, not understand shipping/receiving/refund/exchange policies, not want not put practices into place that could quickly accelerate business growth. They may not have the infrastructure to do things, may not understand how to, may not have the manpower or availability, or may be concealing important information.

The Way to Deal with Them

There are several ways to try to work with this type of client but it hinges on first screening them to make sure their businesses are real, beyond just a random idea or theory, that they have a realistic budget range, have someone who can help them if necessary, have something they genuinely want and need to follow through on, and are in a situation where their need is greater than their desire to maintain control or hold back vital information. One way to deal with the Not Ready for Prime Time client is to find out how long their businesses have been functioning and how many people work through them or for them. Traditionally, as I’ve said elsewhere, the typical business will go under within or before five years. If they’ve made it beyond that five year barrier to entry, they should have sufficient financial resources to where investing a few grand for business growth is not unreasonable. They’re more likely to have several employees so they can delegate work to someone competent, and they should be at least somewhat familiar with digital marketing or advertising rates by that point, so the concepts are not too foreign to them.

From their client perspective, again, it’s often a control and fear issue. After two to three calm and organized screening conversations by phone or video chat, you should be able to discern their level or sincerity and level of capability. They need reassurances but even more, guidance. So if you’re a digital marketing professional without the business management experience to guide them through to completion, providing parts of something might not be enough. They need an all around, thorough business rebuild often, so have to be able and willing to let you in to assume a greater responsibility to help them. You can’t fix a business if they’re too busy chasing their tail putting out fires. Explain that, and stick to it.

8. The Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen Client

The Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen Client is one who is a hybrid of many other types of clients. They want control over that which they don’t fully understand so are controlling a mess. They want to cut corners so are price shoppers. They are likely to want endless revisions since they will have more people involved who often don’t communicate with each other effectively, and they’re likely to kick tires until treads (and patience) wears thin.

I remember years ago attending a WordPress conference where I met several women (separately) who claimed to have large enterprise level clients they were outsourcing their project work for. Again, this is wildly common for some reason. The person is usually very well connected socially, works at an agency or knows someone who does, will pick up large clients and then go about outsourcing bits of the overall project needing to be finished overseas to cut prices, maybe bring in someone to translate, and so on. If you’re a developer or digital marketer, you’ll usually be working with one person who is a graphic designer, one person who claims to be an SEO expert, another person who claims to be a PPC expert, another person who says they will write all the content, another person will create a logo for $10, then another person will create an eCommerce solution, and others coming in as work progresses and others drop out. In the cases of these two ladies, the first lady explained that she was working on a website for manufacturing client.

So one person in Cuba was developing the generic website, with another person in China writing the website content, another person in Brazil providing the SEO, and another person creating the eCommerce platform, someone else setting up database administration, and I was to corral everyone and act as the focal organizer for the project. I think at the time her budget for overseeing this monstrosity was a few hundred dollars, which I passed on quickly. The other person I recall worked with a partner who was a realtor. This young lady would have retail clients referred to her through her realtor girlfriend. The clients did not know good websites from generic DIY template builder tripe and trusted the realtor implicitly. The “developer” would sell herself to clients making bold claims, selling emotional excitement inherent in being “number one in the google!” She would outsource generic template websites with no Search Engine Optimization after receiving payment and promptly switch phone numbers before moving on to the next quick flip. Because her girlfriend was a very well connected realtor, she probably burned through hundreds of smaller retail clients before business trickled out. These are two examples of Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen, in which outsourcing to save money becomes self-defeating in multiple ways.

From the Digital Marketing Professional’s Perspective

From the viewpoint of the digital marketing professional, you can spot these types of clients coming if you ask for clarity on project goals, business objectives, how success will be measured (if at all), how their budget was determined, what they’re looking for in an expert, and why. In most cases, the outsourcing client won’t know answers to these simple questions, won’t care, and will try to wriggle free so they can find someone else to outsource to who won’t ask pesky questions.

They’re not interested in results, just getting this out of their “to do list” so they can move on to the next project. Any project with one person creating graphics, one person creating the SEO, one person writing content, one person creating PPC campaigns, one person creating brand, one person creating social media accounts, one person creating video, and so on down the line, is doomed to failure unless all of the people involved are tightly organized within a very clear distributed team structure (which is only common practice in much larger organizations than new ones) and often the outsourcing “wrangler” works for the company they’re outsourcing for. Proceed with caution when see such an enterprise and ask for clarity, standards, expectations, metrics, deadlines, some way to know your co-workers also are working on the same project and in the same vein.

From the Client View Point

For the client, they’re outsourcing to save a buck, plain and simple, distributed team or not, so unless the outsourcing person is willing to commit to your screening and onboarding process, this type of project can often fall flat and bring in people with similar motives. This client needs to understand and value achieving outcomes over cutting costs, they need to value achieving objectives over just getting something up and posted online.

In Conclusion

It’s important to recall that digital marketing like any other service needs to have a problem to solve and a business to represent. These types of clients mentioned can be worked with but only after it’s clarified that they’re a good fit for the person they’re working with, have realistic budgets, have clearly-defined goals, have staff on hand to help them, and meet other criteria mentioned…Otherwise you, too, can be another cook in a kitchen with too many other cooks stumbling over each other, a pawn in a controller’s game, yet another revision in the Endless Revision Client’s game of eternal revisions, or another kick in the back-side from the Tire-Kicker client.