If you’ve shopped for marketing help, you’ve probably seen the pitch. A set number of social posts a month. A list of keywords. A few blog articles. A monthly report.
The dentist gets that pitch. So does the roofer, the law firm and the pizza place. Same deliverables, different logo on the cover page.
Here’s my take: the package usually isn’t built for you. It’s built so the work is easy to sell and easy to staff.
That’s why so many of them don’t work.
Plenty of good agencies don’t operate this way, and this isn’t about them. It’s about a way of selling marketing that’s become the default.
A Fixed Price Is Fine. A Fixed Plan Isn’t.
I’m not against packages. I sell defined projects myself: a clear scope, a clear price and a clear finish line. That’s good for business owners. You know what you’re getting and what it costs.
The problem starts when the plan is decided before anyone learns how your business works.
You can spot it in how the work gets measured. Twelve posts. Twenty keywords. Fifty backlinks. Those are units, and units are easy to deliver and easy to report on. They just aren’t the same thing as more customers.
The newest version is the AEO and GEO package. In my first post, I explained why that’s the same work SEO always was, with new letters on it.
Start With the Business, Not the Channel
Before I suggest a single tactic, I want to understand five things:
- How your customers decide. What they search, who they ask, what makes them pick you over the next option.
- What one customer is worth to you over time. Not just the first sale. Everything they spend with you while they’re a customer.
- Where your leads come from today. In my experience, one or two sources usually do most of the work, and they’re often not the ones the owner would guess.
- What your operations can actually handle. More leads only help if someone can answer the phone, book the job and do it well.
- What’s already working. The fastest way to waste money is to break something that was quietly bringing in customers.
The answers change everything. The right move for one business is the wrong move for the business next door, even in the same industry.
That’s the part a package skips, because it can’t be done from a template.
Borrow From Other Industries
This is the idea that ties this whole blog together.
I’ve worked with businesses in more than 15 industries, and a lot of what I do is carry what works in one into another. Most businesses only look at their direct competitors for ideas. The better ideas are usually already working somewhere else, in a business that has nothing to do with yours.
Here’s the one I use most, and it comes from restaurants.
Restaurants think about growth in three ways. Get a new guest. Get an existing guest to come back more often. Get each guest to spend a little more per visit. In restaurants, it’s everywhere.
It isn’t a secret, and it isn’t mine. Plenty of businesses know some version of it. Restaurants just live by it every day, and that’s where I learned to use it.
I anchor every tactic, for every client, to one of those three. If a tactic doesn’t clearly move one of them, it doesn’t make the plan.
Here’s how the lens travels. These are illustrations, not client stories:
- A bigger average sale: a dental practice. A restaurant suggests dessert or a second drink. A dental practice can mention whitening at a cleaning the patient already booked. Same idea: offer something useful to someone who’s already there.
- More visits: a tree or HVAC service. Gyms and wine clubs turn one-time buyers into members. A tree or HVAC company can do the same with a yearly care plan, so the customer calls you every season instead of searching for someone new.
- New customers, sooner: a summer camp. Concerts sell around an on-sale date, because a deadline gets people to act. A camp can do the same with an early-registration deadline instead of a quiet “registration is open.”
And one rule that comes along with all three, also from restaurants: never run a promotion the kitchen can’t handle.
- A contractor. Don’t buy more leads than your crew can call back the same day. A lead that waits until next week often ends up with someone else, and you paid for it anyway.
None of these are secret tactics. They’re just ideas that already work somewhere else, applied by someone who took the time to understand your business first.
The Fundamentals Outlast the Tactics
Every platform change rewards the same things. In search, that’s a site worth showing, a clean technical setup and a real reputation. I walked through all three in AEO and GEO Are Bullsh*t (So Was SEO).
The same is true for ads, email and social. The channels change. Why people buy doesn’t.
A package is built around channels, so it has to be rebuilt every time a new platform shows up. A plan built around why your customers buy just picks up a new tool.
How to Tell If You’re Being Sold a Package
You can use this list on any agency, including me:
- The proposal could have gone to any business. Swap your name for a competitor’s and nothing else would need to change.
- Nobody asked about your customers, your margins or what your team can handle.
- The results are promised in counts, not outcomes. Posts and keywords instead of calls, bookings and sales.
- Someone guarantees rankings. Google itself says “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.”
- You can’t reach the person doing the work. Every answer goes through someone who’s relaying it.
- The accounts aren’t in your name. Your website, your ad accounts and your data should belong to you. If you part ways, you keep everything.
Google’s own list of questions to ask before hiring an SEO ends with a good one, and it applies to any marketing help: see whether they’re interested in you and your business.
What You’ll Find Here
This blog is called Beyond the Tactics, and here’s what that means:
- Every post takes a stance. If it doesn’t disagree with something, it isn’t ready.
- Fundamentals over the acronym of the month. What will still be true after the next update.
- Ideas carried between industries. What works for a restaurant, a contractor or a camp, and why it travels.
- Every claim is sourced. If I say Google said something, I link to where Google said it.
- Practices, never people. I’ll go after how marketing gets sold. I won’t go after the people selling it.
What you won’t find here: hacks, “10 quick tips,” or a package.
How I Work
Flip Creative has grown entirely on referrals. I’ve never run an ad for it. Every client works with me directly, start to finish, with no account managers in between.
I also don’t pitch businesses in your trade near you. If one comes to me, I tell you and ask you first.
That’s what working from the business instead of the package looks like in practice.
The Bottom Line
A fixed price is fine. Know what you’re paying for.
A fixed plan, decided before anyone learned your business, is the reason so much marketing money disappears without a trace.
Start with the business. Borrow what works from other industries. Measure what matters. The tactics come last.
If you want a plan built around your business instead of a package, let's talk.