An Inside Look at Search Marketing Service Operations

One of the most frequent complaints that we hear from clients is the difficulty in evaluating and differentiating each firm’s capabilities, experience and ability to deliver. With more than 2,000 firms offering some form of search engine marketing services in the United States, businesses looking to hire or buy a search marketing company encounter a cluttered marketplace with little information on how to distinguish between each firm’s strengths, weaknesses and differentiators. This whitepaper was designed to provide that starting point.

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The following is an excerpt from the Thrivepoint white paper, “The Anatomy of Search Marketing Firms: An Insider Look at Search Marketing Service Operations.”

The approach that a search marketing firm employs in its strategy and tactics for achieving results is born from its search marketing philosophy. A firm’s philosophy is taught from day one to new employees and re-enforced to existing employees through process, training, compensation and other aspects of the firm’s culture. While every firm has a unique approach and competitive positioning, in the search marketing field, there are two general philosophies firms tend to segment themselves into.

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Hiring an SEM is at minimum a million dollar decision and for many marketers, the stakes are much higher. Advertising budgets will be allocated. Managers and line workers will be hired. Revenue will be projected and counted upon. Thousands of hours will be put into establishing and managing the relationship. While the upside will be apparent, how can clients limit the downside risk and hire the right partner?

Ensuring success and limiting risk starts with the implementation of a robust regimen of upfront planning before any SEM meetings take place. The upfront planning process is designed to ensure that clients are making objective and well-informed decisions that lead to long-term, successful partnerships with their SEM.

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In SEM (or other digital marketing) agency pitches, many buyers keep information close to the vest. Information is an important asset when negotiating a deal and buyers want to be in a position of strength during negotiations. However, there are some important pieces of information that can ensure that a sales meeting and pitch process is productive and efficient. Disclosing this information will ensure that the agency provides the right information for evaluation and constructs the best possible deal for the buyer.

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Yesterday, we attended the Search Marketing Expo West event in Santa Clara, California. One of the topics that captured our interest was the Landing Page and Multivariate Testing session. The goal of landing page testing is to increase the number of visitors that become customers on a business’ website.

After listening to the panelists present case studies with results and innovations for testing, we asked the panel about risk management. Specifically, with client budgets on the line, what is the best approach to manage and limit risk from a testing regimen?

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The search engines’ proprietary systems crawl billions of web pages to determines which pages will rank for each keyword within the top 10 organic search listings. These listings are the results on the search page that are not advertisements and to which approximately 40% to 60% of the clicks from the search results go.

With Americans conducting more than 12.6 Billion searches in October according to Comscore, search engines are on track to give away almost 100 Billion clicks for free per year. As you would expect, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become the must-do activity for online marketing success as businesses compete to get as many free clicks as possible from Google and other search engines.

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The economy continues to ring with uncertainty. Despite retail sales being up year over year this past Thanksgiving weekend, the stock market is down as the future remains cloudy. It is easy to become frustrated in these times, but often, the best businesses evolve and improve in exactly this type of climate. The work starts first with investing in your existing customers.

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In the last post on Line of Sight Marketing, the focus was on capturing website visitors contact information for an email marketing program. In this post, we explore how advertising buys that are intended to prospect for new customers can employ line of sight marketing without requiring the user to register or login.

One of the key tools in an advertiser’s toolbox is the “cookie.” Cookies are a common component of most website tracking and online advertising targeting systems and are defined as: “A message given to a Web browser by a Web server. The browser stores the message in a text file. The message is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server.”

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One of your most important assets is your customer list. Managing this asset effectively is as critical as managing your finances or intellectual property. One of the most important things you can do with your customer list is to retain a ‘line of sight’ with each customer.

Line of sight marketing implies that the conversation with the customer is continuous and uninterrupted. When the line of sight is broken, the connection with the customer is over and the customer must be ‘found’ again or replcaed before restarting the conversation.

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Financial institutions are failing. Fortune 500 marketers are cutting budgets. Inflation is increasing. Consumer spending is uncertain. Trade deficits are rising.

The news is filled with dire headlines and seemingly worse news everyday. The market appears to be moving to a more conservative state. Through all this, you still have a business to run and grow. Here are five best practices for your marketing to help you come out ahead during an uncertain economy.
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