Search engine marketing is a fast-paced, technically complex system that can be invaluable to your overarching marketing strategy – when it’s implemented correctly. SEM, especially paid search elements, are best left in the hands of experts, be it an in-house professional or an outside agency. Agencies offer an attractive proposition to businesses; multiple experts, each with their own individual specialties, are working to plan, create, execute, and monitor your campaigns, allowing you to “set it and forget it”. However, not all PPC agencies are created equally.
1. Flawless Account Management
Every SEM professional knows there is no such thing as a perfect account; some campaign ideas don’t work the way you expect them to, or a competitor suddenly pops onto the scene and drives up the cost-per-click (CPC), or maybe even the expert made a mistake in the account. However, just because perfect accounts don’t exist doesn’t mean that perfect account management isn’t possible. A good agency will have multiple quality assurance checkpoints to catch mistakes or to evaluate campaign ideas. To you, it will look like a smooth, perfect system. And a solid agency won’t look for praise just for these account management tasks – they’ll simply think of them as a requisite part of their job.
2. Innovation
If a campaign is doing well, the CPC is low and the ads are high-performing, you might get the impression that you can sit back and relax a little. Wrong. A successful agency will know that most campaigns have a hard shelf date – usually 2-3 months at most. A great agency will be constantly looking for ways to improve campaigns or build off of a great-performing campaign to maximize the return on your SEM investment.
3. “We’re in this together” Attitude
Your agency shouldn’t act like an agency; they should have the mindset that they are a part of your company, and should be concerned with aligning goals and understanding what a company needs in order to increase revenue, hit PPC goals and marketing goals overall, and to incorporate your corporate vision into the campaigns. Your agency should understand your business fully – the space you occupy, who your competitors are, what they are doing, and what you hope to accomplish. Knowledge is power, and this level of insight helps create the most successful campaigns.
Finding an agency that exhibits these characteristics and delivers consistent results can be tough; inSegment strives to deliver not just great results, but a great client/agency relationship as well in all of our service sectors, PPC included.
