Monthly Archives: September 2010

Are you too nice…to your clients?

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-       Do you find yourself saying yes to every client request?
-       Has your project fallen out of scope?
-       Is your client in the driver’s seat of the project?
-       Have you outlined project limitations, or is everything fair game?
-       Does your client understand what they paid for?
-       Are you treated like a full time employee charged with extra work at no extra cost?

As the project manager, it is your role to successfully deliver on the project, set client expectations as well as define the limitations of project scope. Most clients will strive to push beyond the scope of the project, making it your job to draw the line in the sand. Here are some tactics to mitigate scope creep in SEM projects.

1. Education = Understanding
SEM work is time intensive, it takes hours to do a thorough keyword analysis, concerted effort to write quality  & unique ad copy and even longer to do the analysis that helps you formulate the right tactics for project success. Make it clear to the client what the work involves – in PPC, success is a moving target, so even if week on week you are not delivering tangible deliverables the client needs to understand the type of work you are in fact doing. Ensure communication flow is continually open to put project priorities into perspective.

2. Spell it Out
Spend time with the client at the start of the project defining objectives, describing deliverables and the final outcome. For absolute clarity indicate what is within scope and what is out of scope – get the client to sign off on this. Clients often rush the project start date in order to see ‘real work’ being done. Do not proceed with any deliverables until the client has signed off on the strategy road map that spells out the work that will be done.

3. Balancing Act
If a client is striving to push the scope of the project and makes a request that will impact profitability and project hours, it is important to put this into perspective. Indicate that the request itself makes sense, but it raises potential risks that may be costly, both in time and money. Paint a picture of cause and effect: If you implement x, it will impact the quality of y because the time that had been dedicated to y will now have to be shifted to x.

4. Good Business is Mutually Beneficial
Even though you may try to be flexible and accommodating to meet your client’s needs, you cannot just continue to be ‘nice’ because the client will learn that they can exploit this. No matter how many systems you have in place, it is the verbal and interpersonal relationship that needs to be managed. It lies in the ability to raise a criticism while maintaining your commitment to the project and relationship. If you have reached the limit in your ability to invest in the relationship, at your cost – make your case clear to the client.

If you are delivering good work, in a client centric manner you should not be afraid to present the case for a mutually beneficial relationship. The client needs to understand that you too, are trying to run a business and only if both parties profit, will the relationship continue to make business sense.

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Selling C-level Executives on Search

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Marketing managers who are responsible for a company’s online strategy continue to face vast challenges in receiving support from the executive team. Having to work much harder for fewer available dollars than their traditional offline marketing counterparts, for many managers it remains an uphill battle to get C-level executive buy-in.

Ask the Right Questions

An old English proverb goes by: Ask a silly question and you’ll get a silly answer. Much the same can be said for pitching the executive team when trying to get support for engaging an online marketing agency. At this juncture, it is critical that you remember your audience; these are people who live by the numbers, hard facts and executive summaries. Take a preemptive approach and ask yourself the questions that you could imagine the C-level posing. Allow these questions to drive your overall pitch as you build a business case for search.

  • Why should we (the executives) care about search marketing?

Define the problem. Outline the big picture. Show the missed opportunity. The key here is to research your industry and hit the executives with real numbers.

Show data such as share of marketplace, overall market opportunity vs. your share of voice (SOV), show monthly searches, impressions, keyword coverage, ad coverage, what competitors are spending etc. Get the attention of the executives.

Then show a heat map to share what people are paying attention to in the search results pages. Indicate clearly where the opportunity gap lies; utilize the heat map imagery to share what people are actually interested in on a page and why it is so critical for your business to capture that online real estate.

  • What do you propose we do?

Now that you have their attention, you need to put your pitch into context by helping the C-level decision makers understand that search is really a part of an integrated plan. Make sure that you connect search with traditional marketing; align and integrate with them – they have the budgets. It is important to avoid any ‘us and them’ type of language.

Marketing is marketing, whether discussing online or offline marketing, ensure that you are not isolating search but incorporating it into a holistic approach. In this way, you are aligning yourself with marketers in the company and shifting the perception that search is done by ‘IT nerds’.

Propose a pilot program with high success potential and sell them on incremental growth of the program and monetary investment.

  • What is the competition doing?

C-level executives are competitive. Play on their emotions and competitive drive when sharing competitor information. Move beyond pointing out just position comparison in the SERPs; show share of voice, share of impressions, share of clicks, compare traffic volume etc.

Leverage marketplace data and tools such Compete.com to get competitive insights. If the data is compelling, this may be just the impetus you require to get sign off on the project.

  • What is the value of the project?

Share the revenue opportunity – leverage charts to indicate total search demand. Describe the management system that will be used to measure visibility increases and provide a summary of ROI benefits. List the costs clearly and the associated specific benefits.

The data you present here should be compelling and begin to drive home how NOT doing search with an online vendor, is a problem.

  • Why should we fund this over any other marketing project?

Loss is another emotion on which to hit. Searchers do not just search spontaneously; usually that demand is stimulated by marketing. If other marketing efforts are driving demand, failure to capitalize on the search demand is a lost opportunity. Educate senior management that not investing in the online project has opportunity costs associated.

Further questions around which to build your business case include:

  • How will this help us meet our financial goals?
  • How much will it cost? (Include time & resource costs)
  • How long will it take?
  • What are the risks?

In your presentation, remember to educate first. Address the fears and pain points. Do not act like you have all the answers because of the accountable panacea that is search marketing. Be respectful of the business experience the executives have and rather than offering a marketing solution that threatens everything they have learned in their careers, integrate the online project with the offline marketing initiatives the executives understand and support.

Originally posted on AskEnquiro

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Google’s New Third Party Reporting Requirements

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As a small business, if you are spending advertising dollars online and paying an agency or some other third party provider to manage this service for you, it is only a reasonable assumption that you would know what you are spending and what you are receiving in return for that spend.

Google’s recent announcement of a change to its 3rd party reporting requirements is a strong indicator that businesses remain ignorant of the information they should be rightfully receiving from 3rd parties. Though ignorance and information asymmetry may play a role here; simple business common sense also appears to be lacking on the part of the businesses allowing themselves to transact with 3rd parties who offer close to no reporting transparency.

Google’s New Transparency Rules

To highlight the new requirements, this example has been taken directly from Google’s AdWords Help Center:

For those third parties that don’t provide any reporting today, they should, at a minimum, provide advertisers with monthly data on AdWords costs, clicks, and impressions at the account level.

In July, the AdWords account for Joe’s Plumbing accrues 1,400 clicks on 12,000 impressions for an AdWords cost of $700 (the exact amount charged by AdWords).

Joe’s Plumbing – AdWords report for July 2010
Clicks: 1,400
Impressions: 12,000
Cost: $700

There are no bells and whistles here – the 4 lines above are the absolute basic reporting that 3rd parties will be required to provide as of February 2011. One’s first reaction should be to baulk at the fact that there are in fact 3rd parties out there who make a living by literally cheating advertisers out of their money by offering no level of transparency.

Receiving basic AdWords cost data on a monthly basis at an account level only really tells you how much you spent on AdWords in a particular month. The only really useful thing that you can do with this data is make a basic calculation that may have been difficult previously if you were paying your 3rd party provider a lump sum which was then invested into AdWords at their discretion, following a ‘management fee’.

[Total Monthly Search Marketing Costs] = [Exact Monthly AdWords Cost] + [3rd Party Management Fee]

Currently, if you are not working with a transparent 3rd party, the calculation may look like this:

X = ? + ?

You may know what your total monthly search marketing cost is but if you do not know exactly how much the 3rd party is keeping in their pocket versus actually investing in your AdWords account, then it is difficult to ascertain how effective the actual AdWords investment is.

How ‘nice’ of Google to force 3rd parties to share this information with their clients, yet, one must ask, what’s in it for Google?

Google’s Magnanimity?

The simple truth is that the barriers to entry into AdWords advertising are extremely low. Anyone can set up a basic account and be spending money on AdWords within 24 hours. On the flip side, you can stop spending money on AdWords just as quickly, as it takes literally minutes to pause an account or shut it down completely. This is a business concern for Google – no business likes to see its customers walk away.

By forcing 3rd parties to disclose ‘the exact amount charged by AdWords’ Google is trying to create a distinction to the advertiser between the money actually spent on AdWords versus the total payed to the 3rd party. In this way, if the advertiser is not happy with their return on AdWords they do not immediately discount the medium as ineffective but can do the arithmetic that may indicate to them that the problem lies with their 3rd party provider.

If the 3rd party is pocketing a large percentage of the fee, the AdWords system is not to blame for an unsatisfactory return. Thus, the advertiser may opt to change the 3rd party, while still investing in AdWords. With higher advertiser retention, Google will go singing to the bank, while at the same time be the hero for forcing the ‘bad guys’ to ‘fess up and be transparent with how money is being spent for their clients.

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