Paul Romani
3/5
We worked with MLS from Feb 2021 to Oct 2022. I’m very selective about which marketing agencies we work with, having been stung by one agency and one marketing freelancer in the past. There are too many Vancouver-based agencies that want a ton of money and deliver nothing in return.
What caught my attention about My Loud Speaker was how well Matt was able to identify our major pain points. I felt confident that committing what for us is a sizable marketing budget would have a good return on investment.
Unfortunately, that didn’t turn out to be the case for us. While MLS was able to identify our pain points, they weren’t able to fix them. In fact, I feel that we are in a worse position now than before we signed up with them, which blows my mind given that we've never been more appealing to customers.
The MLS team was given pretty much free rein to carry out our marketing project, since I didn’t want there to be any excuse if things didn’t turn out the way they had envisioned. The only exception to this was that I insisted that our current web developers be responsible for the technical aspects of our website update; nevertheless, the MLS team dictated what needed to be on there, how it should be laid out, and how it should function.
The work done by MLS was extensive: Research & Brand Positioning Strategy, Website Strategy, Copy, & Design, and Marketing & Communications Strategy. These categories don't really illustrate the amount of work involved by them and by us.
During the process, I started to feel that what had started off as a very personalised and high quality service became a pass-the-baton approach, as we moved from one person to another. Some staff turnover at MLS compounded this feeling, as we had to work with a temporary project manager before the replacement came along. I honestly didn’t feel that anyone I was dealing with cared about our project being successful, nor cared how the money we were investing was a lot of money for us. Their lack of physical office space (a cost saving thing for them) and seeming unwillingness to visit us (further cost saving) make it seem all the more impersonal. The expression of concern and positivity seemed very fake and the whole virtual meeting situation and lack of interest of the owners exacerbated this. But, I wanted to trust their judgement, expertise, and process.
After a certain period of time, I felt super frustrated and pointed out that we weren’t getting the uptake in responses we had been looking for; in fact, interest had gone down, not up! When I expressed my frustration with this, the response was that MLS deals with marketing, not sales. However, the issue is clearly with the marketing, since there is nothing to sell if people aren’t contacting you, or aren’t turning up to appointments, or aren’t completing applications that they’ve begun.
In our initial meetings with Matt, he made it very clear that their job was to make it so that the customer was already clear about what we do (and don't do) and were sold before they even walked through the doors. I'm not sure if the MLS team sees things this way, though.
Eventually, I had to tell them that it wouldn’t be fiscally responsible for me to invest any more money on working with them.
Ultimately, I believe that MLS’s work would probably - eventually - work out for us. However, we don’t have the money to continue to invest $100K per year for years with no results.
I feel that MLS should realise and be upfront about the fact that their efforts are part of a long-term investment and that results are probably not going to be immediate, at least not in our industry. They should want to partner with companies like us for years to come. This involves reducing their prices so that companies like ours can afford to be with them for long periods of time - and not get so frustrated by the complete lack of ROI in the short term. I thought we'd at least break even on the investment, but we would be financially better off never having started the project.
