One of the more challenging aspects of running an online marketing agency is mashing our process into legal agreements. Out of the legalese we typically cover in our documentation (fee structure, NDA, Term, Termination, Indemnification, Arbitration, etc…) none is more delightfully daunting than the obligatory “scope” exhibit.

Because our work is always data driven and research based, it can be tricky to make legal promises that set realistic expectations based on fact-sets as yet undiscovered.  We take the approach of building contracts with language that surrounds our process. This article shares sample scope from our “end-to-end social media research and pilot” contract, which includes organic social and social PPC.  The verbiage is self-explanatory without further introduction. We hope you find portions of the documentation, as well as insight into aimClear’s process, useful.

Exhibit A: Scope Of Social Media Services by aimClear is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Exhibit A: Scope Of Social Media Services
Services will be mutually allocated and/or as directed by Client based on recommendations of aimClear. The objective is to plan and execute a strategic social media-marketing plan, deploy first-steps organic social, social PPC tactics and facilitate Client’s future ability to migrate programs in-house, post-deployment.

Interview Client for deeper briefing on product, goals and big picture. Audit existing paid and/or organic analytics, Facebook Fan Page(s) histories and associated case studies. Meet and integrate with client’s in-house creative, marketing, PR and technical human personnel as applicable by phone, email and chat.  Assess Client’s human resources and technology readiness as pertains to building internal direct marketing team(s).

Adapt and augment existing demographic research focused on identifying market segments. Conduct social interest & KW research. Deliverables are .xls files segmented by master interest/keyword segments.  “Master keyword segments” means keywords sorted to sufficiently delimit categories and sub-categories, suitable for future SEO & Social usage, but not segmented enough for responsible deployment in AdGroups.  The focus for this phase is:

• Perform Competitive Intelligence to research competitor’s previous and existing paid, organic and social marketing campaigns to see what was effective and their spending patterns.
• Identification of Google keyword inventory for main service lines & map relevancy in various social channels including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and other niche’ topical communities we discover to be relevant.
• Identify Facebook PPC & organic interest segments. For clarification, organic “interest segments” are FB groups, events, people, fan pages, applications, etc…
• Identify Facebook PPC segments. These PPC segments are used to place ads on Facebook right sidebar ads and take users to the same or similar landing pages as Google PPC. Facebook PPC is simply another PPC channel for direct sales and branding.
• Landing pages can also be within Facebook, which is sometimes a reasonable or great choice.
• Identify mainstream YouTube paid search segments susceptible to Client’s products, messages & brand.
• Review data gleaned from the research and choose select organic social, mainstream organic SERPs Universal SERPs and paid social targets from the service lines for first promotional efforts. aimClear suggests there be a face to face meetings as provided for herein, given the depth and detail of this project.

Set Strategy & KPIs (Marketing Plan Goals)

• Work with Client to establish reasonable KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and controlling strategy to guide channel tactics.
  • Overall Strategy
  • Branding KPIs
  • Direct Response KPIs
  • Projected Costs & Recommended Vendors
  • Identify obvious and inexpensive opportunities to migrate Client’s existing public data to YouTube, SlideShare and/or other sites. (Help Docs, FAQs, other digital assets currently on or offline)
  • Define frequency and granularity of client-bound reporting and execute

As we mutually deem appropriate, evaluate and target organic and paid social: Facebook Social PPC, Facebook organic, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn paid & organic, etc… other mainstream and/or niche’ topical niche’ communities. All channel decision will be based on applicability, projected ROI and time available in scope.  The objective is to pick low hanging fruit first with the greatest return for the least investment.

For these mutually agreed upon first social and social PPC targets, further sort demographic segment-defining keywords to a deeper level of segmentation so as to be industry consensus best social PPC practices.

Deliver research to client. Deliverable is a tabbed.xls file of keywords, for the service areas, divided by market segments, Facebook segments and estimated PPC test spend. At aimClear’s discretion portion of the deliverables may be presented by WebEx online via .ppt.

Client will design, develop and host landing pages as advised by aimClear. Any delays the project incurs surrounding Client’s landing page production & associated analytics installation, provided aimClear is fulfilling it’s obligations as contained herein, shall not be considered aimClear’s material breech of this agreement.

Deploy first-target social campaigns, both social organic and social PPC. Conduct multi-variate ad-message/landing page testing.  The objectives are to determine best grid of channels, keywords, text ads and landing pages to meet Client’s traffic and conversion objectives. Work with client to select additional organic social, social PPC segments and interest group targets.

Recommended social PPC Test budget for the initial 2-month period is “not-to-exceed” $___K. It may be less. If aimClear does suggest that Client allocate additional budget, it will only be because pockets of profitability have been discovered to leverage. Any social PPC expenditures are fully at Client’s sole discretion. Social PPC expenditures can be handled either by Client’s direct credit card entry in Ad platform accounts or pre-payment to aimClear.

Continue testing. Determine cost & ROI of ongoing program including recommendations for scaling the program to other organic social and social PPC channels. Scale programs as time allows and reasonably prudent during initial 4 month engagement. “Reasonably prudent” means ROI positive, for opportunities that have actually been identified and with the management cost-feasibility calculated based on Client’s future self-maintenance.   In other words, aimClear’s fees will not be included in the calculation of ongoing profitability. The Cost feasibility analysis will be based on Client’s internalization of the programs.

aimClear’s, at it’s discretion, can cap the aggregate hours spent fulfilling scope in this agreement at ___ hours. Scope, should be viewed as “the proper order of steps for Client to undertake to optimize their near-term (__-__ months) ability to internalize organic social and social PPC direct marketing and branding programs,” as outlined herein.  aimClear will strive during term to reach as many goals in this agreement’s scope as possible. It is our hope that all the objectives outlined herein can be met within ___ months and, in our experience, they can be.  However because some of the objectives are contingent on Client’s cooperation and capabilities, both Parties understand that an additional engagement/agreement may be appropriate.

credit: zenobia_joy

In yesterday’s post, guest blogger and CEO of BlitzLocal.com, Dennis Yu, tackled some important concepts of the local ad firm- specifically the fact that it is sure to kick the bucket in 2010 if industry professionals don’t take proactive steps as soon as possible. Part two of this story will address changes the future has in store for local ad agency fiscal models and a closer look at the crucial dynamics of this evolution.

How will the financial model of local adapt over time?

Firms can take a 50% margin until the market gets smart. Consider the current VC-funded, growth-oriented approach of a pretend composite company… we’ll call it SuperLocal, Inc.

Let’s break it down:

• SuperLocal has 250 employees and 5,000 clients that spend $1,000 a month.
• Assume that 150 of these 250 employees are in sales and each agent is able to manage 33 clients.
• That amounts to $400,000 in annual revenue per employee (33 clients that spend $12k per year, ignoring churn).
• If we assume that the firms allocates 50% of the client’s budget to actual spend, that’s $200,000 per gross margin per year per employee.
• However, the firm must also cover sales commissions at 15% ($60,000) and operations at 20% ($80,000), general overhead at 10% ($40,000)- leaving 5% as a profit margin.

Although this is a skinny profit margin, it is partially offset by scale and other efficiencies. Let’s examine each one in detail to see what the most efficient model could look like:

Economies of scale
The cost of operating a PPC platform should decrease as the number of clients you have in the system increases, as you can allocate over a larger user base. We can assume that operations, which consists of software expense (internally engineered or licensed technology), client support, credit card processing charges, and product development is perhaps 60% variable and 40% fixed costs. Thus, economies of scale will lower operations from 20% to a threshold of 12% (60% multiplied by 20%) at high volume.

Sales expense
Eliminating high-pressure sales tactics and having a greater reliance on word of mouth causes several cascading effects. The influx of ex-Yellow Pages salespeople who are making $100k+ a year is helping current firms achieve their acquisition targets, but at high per sale expense and high churn. Assuming an industry average tenure of five months (50% of clients stay for five months) for SuperLocal, Inc., the revenue per client is five months multiplied by $1,000- or $5,000. A 15% commission on that is $750. Should SuperLocal be able to deliver upon the product, it would seem quite feasible to double average lifetime value.

Thus, you could pay the sales agent half the commission rate while keeping their earnings the same. In fact, if you paid the agent based on retention and allowed them to interact beyond the initial sale, you would give them incentive to keep the client longer. Let’s assume that via product improvements, we can safely drop the commission to 10%.

Platform improvements
Even if we hold the percentage of spend constant at 50%, improvements in how campaigns are built, optimized, and automated should be able to squeeze out 50-70% percent improvements at the same budgets. This is based on our experience with clients that have come to us having been unsatisfied with larger market players. The secondary effect of automation and efficiency improvements is that the average employee can handle more clients.

SuperLocal employees should be able to handle triple the number of clients, given that they are not calling to complain as often; we are educating them on our processes, we are transparent in our reporting, and we set up alerts to notify them of performance improvements we’ve achieved. A 3x improvement may seem drastic until you consider what share of current client interaction stems from unhappy client calls.

The positive spiral effect of platform improvements is that the cost per sale decreases due to tenure improvements (clients stay longer), analyst coverage ratios (they can handle more clients), and automation of non-PPC functions not currently offered. Given higher performance, the company can now service clients who, at $500 a month, were previously not serviceable. Further, existing clients will spend more per month when they have greater ROI. Let’s assume that cuts operational expense in our model from 12% to 10% of gross spend.

Greater client satisfaction
One unnoticed side effect is that clients are less likely to go out of business. The current players are putting small businesses out of business, as these firms are unknowingly putting their last dollar on the roulette wheel and hoping for the best. Cigarette companies face the same issue with potentially killing their customers when they overuse the product. But great client satisfaction will not only help clients stay in business in a tough economy… it will encourage word of mouth effects. Consider Amazon.com- they don’t do any advertising—instead, they offer product marketing via free shipping and other consumer incentives.

Local lead gen companies can eliminate sales expense altogether when the leads come in from happy clients. If you conservatively assume that half of SuperLocal’s clients could come through referrals, we cut sales expenses from 10% to 5%. We can also lower operating costs if we create a social gaming system such that anybody is able to set up clients on the platform, thereby creating a local army of resellers.

The resulting new model is local lead gen

Let’s review what these implemented efficiencies do for SuperLocal and how it changes the model:

Holding media spend constant at 50%, we cut sales expense to 5% and operations to 10%. Even holding overhead fixed at 10%- we allow SuperLocal to inflate executive salaries and buy a shiny office tower– the firm’s gross margin still grows to 25%.

Further, since client tenure (how many months they stay on average) has doubled, the revenue per client is $10,000. The existing sales staff of 150 can now handle 15,000 clients, which is a three-fold improvement over the existing 5,000- this is due to operational improvements and no longer losing customers as fast as we gain them.

The company now has annual gross revenues of $180MM with only 250 employees, just about what ReachLocal has with 900 employees and just above MarchEx. We can even assume that as the company has expanded, they’ve been able to reach down to service lower price points, so let’s drop the average monthly spend to $750. And then assume that they increase percent of spend from 50% to 60%-  effectively sharing back part of the efficiency with their client base.

The gross revenue is reduced to $135MM and net margins fall to $20.25MM… still respectable.

The decrease in price points with automation and efficiency improvements is something our team at Yahoo! predicted 4 years ago- since initially, an improvement in efficiency will decrease spend, as clients are getting the same number of leads for less money. When advertisers are getting ROI, they tend to shift budgets into online channels after 3-5 months. Thus, spend follows a U-shaped curve when we implement efficiency improvements.

Finally, SuperLocal, Inc., has switched their pricing model to cost per call based on a ratecard of geography and category. This has caused them not to gain share from competitors- as there are no dominant players in local yet- but to grow awareness in the market, shed light on unethical business practices, and help force the bad actors out. When that happens, local lead generation will become safe, transparent, and effective- and the overall market will be able to grow healthily.

Transparency in the marketplace is something local online advertising companies should embrace now, rather than wait for the economic realities to force it upon them.

If there were a “Local Bill of Rights,”  this one would be ideal:

• Devote 70 cents of every dollar from clients to buying traffic.
• Show clients the same reports you see.
• Don’t have a direct sales force that hands off to an operations call center; your clients should talk to a trained analyst before and after the sale for greater efficiency and better service.
• Drive measurable performance—calls you can see and even listen to recordings of—as well as organic rankings you measure each month.
• Treat client’s money like it’s your money- so everyone in the company is paid based on client retention and feedback from your rating system.
• Grow the company with your own money- not venture capital- so you can grow at the proper pace and focus on the product, not sales growth.

Transparency leads to efficiency, which leads to the accrual of value in the hands of local resellers and maximum percentage ad spend for the client. The pending convergence of local, social, and mobile will create powerful products for local businesses that don’t cost an arm and a leg.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily aimClear.

Borrell Research released a report on the Economics of Search Marketing for firms catering to local—ReachLocal, Yodle, MarchEx, WebVisible, and others.  Companies in this space churn up to 90% of their clients every 6 months, meaning that they lose clients as fast as they can gain them.  The Kelsey Group confirmed this trend last year, citing the inability of these companies to deliver leads.

Clients will stay on a few months in good faith, giving the lead gen’ company time to make the phone ring.  At a certain point, pleas to allow the system more time to “optimize” and concessions not to leave break down, leading to more churn.

The first segment of this two part blog will tackle burning questions local ad firms must understand and address, namely why their industry is in jeopardy of going down the tubes, how they can fix their current situation, and where their market will be headed in the future.

Why are local search marketing companies failing?

• Low media spend: These firms allocate 30 to 50 cents of the client’s dollar on buying clicks, given the 15-20% sales commissions they must pay, plus a fat profit margin.  MarchEx reports a 55% gross margin. Thus, how much is left to actually spend on Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and other sources? For obvious reasons, these firms will not tell you how much of your dollar is actually going towards spend versus commissions and profits.
• An uneducated client base: “Get found on Google” is a great sales pitch and most small businesses know they have to do something about their web presence.  However, how likely is the local dentist, cosmetic surgeon, roofer, or personal injury attorney going to ask, “So what percent of spend are you allocating to my campaigns?  And how exactly do you manage my paid and organic campaigns?”  Managing a web presence themselves is daunting and agencies play into that fear.
• The need to grow: Fueled by venture capital, these firms are forced to shoot for billion dollar exits.  Venture capital looks for a 10-to-1 return on their money and an exit within several years. This often leads to imprudent growth, aggressive sales tactics, and “overheating” of the company’s engines. Yodle.com reports having 5,000 customers at the end of 2008, but was on track to hit 50,000 customers by the end of 2009.  ReachLocal in their December 2009 S1 filing discloses 15,000 customers.
• Lack of technology: The game is about sales—hire more salespeople and sell more accounts, as opposed to cautious growth, hiring experienced search professionals who have hands-on search experience, and optimizing the process of delivering efficient and effective campaigns.  To engineer a platform to build high quality paid search campaigns, create websites that organically rank on important keywords, and properly train staff is a major undertaking.  Canned search campaigns driving traffic to canned landing pages is not.  We also need scalable process and technology.
• A “winner take all” mindset: Firms choose to “floor it” instead of taking time to work on the engine in the shop before going up to the starting line.  They are counting on sidestepping the performance issue by mention of “proprietary” technology— enough to satisfy unwitting investors and customers.  Behind the façade, many agencies have low wage staff offshore manually configuring search campaigns.

Clients are stuck between a rock and a hard place—low fee packages that are self-serve versus packages that do provide service but are out of their budget. And it’s not just the direct sellers that are churning customers, the $10 a month fee guys are, too, as indicated in this Kelsey report.

What will it take to fix the current environment?

• A shift to transparency. Local search marketing firms should voluntarily adopt a code of ethics, which includes:
  • Transparency: Clients should have the right to inspect their PPC accounts to know what keywords are being purchased and at what price.  Consider how the FDA requires food companies to disclosure how many calories and how much sugar their products have.
  • Campaign portability: Wireless mobile providers have been forced to allow customers to take their phone numbers to other carriers.  The same should be true with search agencies.  Should the client choose to leave their current provider, they should be able to take their campaigns with them.  Current practice is to hold the client hostage—if the client leaves, they lose their campaigns as well as landing pages.
  • Open disclosure of advertising methods employed: While the agency may be driving leads, the client’s own site has not developed organic search power.  Traffic has been sent to a subdomain owned by the agency—not the client’s site.  Should clients leave, they are left with nothing; this dependency makes the decision to switch agencies extra difficult for the wrong reasons.
  • No long-term contracts: 12 month contracts are common, as agencies seek to lock in the client in anticipation of them wanting to leave preemptively.  Yellow page publishers have one year contracts because they print the book once per year; as this theme does not carry over to search, agencies should allow clients to leave if they are losing money with their current provider.
  • Sales compensation models: A common complaint among clients is that once they sign a contract, they never hear from the rep again. That rep is already on to the next prospect, ready to sell, sell, sell—hit the aggressive quota or be terminated.  To our knowledge, no other company in the industry pays their people according to retention and client satisfaction.  Agencies should agree to compensate staff based on client performance, else we face a repeat of the long distance telecom switching battles witnessed in the 1980’s. The social gaming model will potentially transform the Farmville players into an army of local resellers.
  • Guaranteed service levels: When a client logs a ticket, they should expect a timely response.  For example, general inquiries should be answered within 72 hours.  If their site is down, they should expect a response within 3 hours. Clients don’t know who to talk to when they aren’t getting leads—the agency’s outsourced call center agents in India are unaware of how to service the issue, while the overeager sales rep is nowhere to be found.
  • Industry certifications: In the wild west of local advertising, anyone can claim expertise.  We recently met an agency claiming to be the only certified agency to do search in all of Asia— no such certifications exist.  The closest to having standards in the industry are SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization) and Search Engine College. But these standards are not yet formed nor are they adopted by a wide enough audience to be deemed legitimate.

Where is the market eventually headed?

Pay for Performance
As the client base becomes more educated, the current sales tactics will no longer fly. Over the last five years, the market has evolved from CPM (cost per thousand impressions) to CPC (cost per click) to CPA (cost per acquisition).  New agencies will emerge that will charge based not on long-term contracts of fixed dollar amounts, but Cost Per Call, such as Yext.  As a dentist, imagine being able to pay only for calls, as opposed to a fixed monthly advertising figure. This reduces the client’s risk—yet this model requires that the agency actually be able to perform instead of sell.  This increases transparency, but not to the levels needed.

Performance Reporting
As a corollary to the Cost Per Call model, clients will be able to log in to view exactly what the agency is doing with the campaigns—how their company is being marketed, what types of traffic is being purchased, what is being spent, and how many leads are coming.  Current agencies seemingly show some of this reporting, but build their fees into the reported figures, so that clients are unaware of what is actually being spent on what keywords.

Robust Service Offerings
Pay Per Click campaigns driving traffic to canned landing pages is the “quick fix” to show immediate results.  However, the longer-term, more effective approach is to help the client rank organically in search results, as opposed to having to pay for every single inbound click.  Ranking organically requires:

• a comprehensive process to list the client in Google Local Business center and other directories
• helping the client place content on their website that reflects their unique selling proposition
• setting up email auto-responder campaigns (so that leads to the client’s site can be nurtured into paying customers)
• systematic training of the client (so that they can easily manage the site from a non-technical standpoint

This robust service offering goes far beyond what current vendors are offering, yet will soon be offered in the marketplace at significantly lower cost than the PPC only players who have been first on the scene.

Part two will be published tomorrow, so stay tuned for more on how the financial model of local will adapt over time.

photo credit: dvs

photo credit: craigCloutier\

Most larger Internet marketing agencies and in-house shops are configured as departments of specialists. It’s no wonder! In today’s complicated world PPC, ORM, social media, link building, affiliate networks, analytics, content creation, video, public relations, SEO, vendor and account management (whew) all require experienced and nuanced practitioners.

aimClear takes a different approach than most agencies in that literally every employee in the shop is trained long-term to strive for functional fluency in all departments and specialize in several.  We build complete”marketers here, trained to independently analyze clients’ objectives, determine appropriate marketing-mixes of goals, strategy, channel-tactics while crafting key performance indicators (KPIs).  Everyone here can research and deploy integrated campaigns spread across mainstream and niche’ distribution networks of various models.

When hiring we look for super-smart people, passionate about marketing and possessing a willingness to unselfishly take on labor-intensive tasks. We covet candidates’ potential to someday-train others, contribute entrepreneurial energy, grow in thought-leadership, build personal brand and speak in public.

We seek those excellent few who have a fanatical desire to be more than a one-trick-pony. In exchange we make it our goal to help everyone become as valuable as possible, to us now and for the rest of their careers.

In-House & Affiliates As Models
I come from a small business in-house background, working in the late 90’s for my own e-commerce endeavor and then a < 10 million in revenue .edu.  Hurtling into Y2K it was less of a big deal to handle all aspects of a search engine marketing operation. Crazy-wonderful days and nights were spent moving adroitly (most of the time) between channels and tasks. Yes…those were heady times indeed as a millennial industry was born.

The “full service” concept grew out of necessity then, as there was simply nobody else to help. The known marketing universe was exploding, as we post-BBS pioneer-geeks took over the world.

As the decade progressed, this hybrid-guerrilla mentality bubbled-mainstream in audacious next-gen affiliate marketers–mom and pop basement operators who made millions D.Y.I.  Now small-business in-house and independent affiliate marketers, to my mind, remain the most complete Internet marketing sharks in the world. In such a complex environment, the classic hybrid approach takes a special individual indeed.

Decisions, Decisions…
When we founded aimClear, to build out my personal practice, we thought long and hard about narrowing the scope of services offered. There were 2 primary considerations. 1) It’s much easier to brand a more focused product.  “Northern Wear” is easier to brand than “northern, southern, eastern & western wear.” 2) HR: Realistically it’s much easier to hire employees possessing singular skill sets.  Clearly to duplicate the work I’d been doing on my own by team-building in Duluth, Minnesota would require months or even years of training.

We recognized that a decision to build complete marketers is a decision to grow more slowly and deliberately.  We believed then and know now the reward: special employees and candidates seem to recognize the amazing opportunity at hand when driven to strive for “completeness” in their trade.

Demographic Research: The Thread that Binds
The first skill taught to our first employee (and everyone since) was keyword research. After listening to hours of Jim Collin’s “Good to Great” series of audio books driving back and forth to visit Minneapolis clients, I had it in my head to build aimClear on a foundation of skills that had a chance to be best in class.   Keyword research (and now buzz pocket mining) was and will always be the most fundamental front-end skill for SEM.

Absolute study of verbiage people use to ask questions, along with the ability to research and document what interests folks chatter about, are timeless keys to all marketing channels. No matter the media or method, the art of marketing is about honestly working customers’ perception of brand in demographic segments where the true value of products lines up with actual demand.”

No Channel is an Island
Every SEM discipline is inextricably interrelated and no channel exists in a vacuum. For instance we believe it’s impossible to create integrated marketing strategies in social media without considering SEO & PPC, even if it’s to rule out certain channels as not viable. Serving PPC Ads in social environments like Facebook can sure have socio-viral implications. So far as reputation management goes, the entire Internet is one big ORM puzzle for which PPC, social and SEO can play tactical roles.

These overlaps and many others illustrate why it’s so crucially important that specialists in every channel learn to identify how their favorite channel-tactics are symbiotic in how they affect other nodes.

Mad Men Talking
In 1994 I asked a retired 80-year-old sliver-haired ad agency-owner Mad Men guru, the difference between public relations and advertising.  His answers astounded me.

“There’s no difference,” he purred “ with a sweet age-induced vocal resonance. “Both involve the art of working customers’ perception of brand in market segments where the true value of products lines up with actual demand.”  “It’s important that every shop employee, from administrative assistants to CEO, understand the interconnectedness of all channels to support strategic objectives.”

In clarification he explained, “Both PR and advertising are forms of marketing.” Each includes “channel with idiosyncrasies,” costs, areas of strength and weaknesses and great for different tactics.  While PR appears to be free and therefore more desirable than buying billboards or television commercials, in fact “nothing is free.”

He understood that public relations is more about “socializing” messages, by bringing “events” to life on many nodes to the public’s attention. If they like it they’ll “pass it along” to others and the message can become self-perpetuating.  “Son, PR is a channel just like radio, direct mail and TV. PR is a channel,” he used to chortle.  I learned early that the entire marketing universe is made up of channels working together.

Search & Modern Mad Men
So it is the same today in search. Google, Yahoo and Bing organic SERPs are channels.   We know they’re not free because it takes resources to get there. YouTube, LinkedIn, AdWords, Facebook (PPC & Organic), Email and shouting out the front door of our office building are all channels.

The things we do in MySpace & Flickr are channel tactics. The objectives pursued with channel tactics are sewn together by a strategy. There needs to be a strategic reason to pursue any channel that can be quantified by goals. Everybody in the shop operating on any node of a campaign needs to be functionally fluent enough to work in accordance.

The essence of marketing has not changed much since Mad Men days.  Advertising, public relations, broadcast or Bing SERPs, it’s entirely about matching customers who have somehow demonstrated they might care our products’ true value. Demographic research has improved the near absolute level.

While many shops are tooled to distribute specialists who come together,  each of our goals is to become a complete marketer, a hybrid who grows to aspires to understand the larger picture.

For years now our search-specialized marketing shop has worked with “traditional” advertising agencies,  who’s clients ask them for services we provide. While ad agencies have discovered their digital-metamorphosis involves an intense learning curve, trial and error and experience-most figure  out their appropriate place at the search table after training.

However, since their clients need help right away, it often makes sense to seek out interim and long term search partners to augment immediate creative and production. Professional search-fluency requires a very serious commitment of human resources and dollars. It’s hard to keep up without a dedicated search team.

That’s where we come in. Depending on the situation our support ranges from turnkey handling of projects, production components for the agency to use as part of larger campaigns and training. Sliced any way, we strive to empower our advertising agency partners because there’s more than enough work to go around and nobody needs to feel threatened.

A huge part of this process involves teaching an Ad agency exactly what we do! What are the SEO, PPC, ORM, social and other deliverables? What standard operating procedures go into cranking out beautifully optimized copy or feed installation? How do search marketers think about and execute demographic research, PR or study consumer behavior?  Here’s 30 recommended (and common) ways we interact with ad agency clients, including associated deliverable formats and work flow processes.

It is our hope that the deliverable-components featured herein are a good starting point for any agency considering outsourcing and/or training. Use ala-carte’ services to attain cutting edge search-savvy to augment traditional marketing & branding values.

Up Front Planning
Invite your search marketing consultant to the table early. Whether organic, PPC or social, if ever there was a crucial point in every online project’s life cycle initial pre-planning is critical.  For just a couple of hours investment, an ad agency can capitalize on the search marketer’s years of experience and deep understanding of the vernacular. The deliverable is a search expert sitting at the conference room table to contribute. The format is participation and a short white paper with after-the-meetings input.

Demographic Research
There are a myriad of keyword and buzz research tools out there. Choosing the correct database, UI and methods are far from one-size-fits all. Also “stemming” (thesaurus function) is very important, especially where KW research is influenced by chatter patterns in public social communities like Twitter.

Getting from “catering” to “food service” to “gourmet food delivery Minneapolis” takes a shrewd research artist.  The deliverable is a tabbed spreadsheet, segmented sufficiently for AdWords AdGroups and organic production.

Competitive Analysis
Tools to dissemble your competition’s online marketing are so excellent that they can best be described as politically correct (and fully legal) industrial espionage. It’s bad form NOT to spy.  Deliverables include lists of competitors’ external and internal link graphics, PPC buys, targeted organic keywords, social strategies and much more.

Business Plan Support
Ad agencies often have startup clients. From naming the business or product to evaluating demand by geo, search marketers have this market niche’ cornered.  The deliverables are a SWOT report, keyword research, competitive analysis, cost projections and other business plan modules.

Technical SEO Audits
Most websites have at least some nagging last-gen’ technical problems which can hurt its chances of being crawled and indexed properly by search engines.

Having a staff person who is fully equipped and up to date regarding always-evolving best practices for content management is too specialized for all but the largest traditional agencies.

Call on your search partner to diagnose canonical problems, duplicate content, poorly conceived site architecture and other technical SEO issues.   The deliverable is a .ppt deck outlining issues and solutions.

Research Niche’ Social Media Opportunities
Sure everybody knows about YouTube, Facebook & Twitter, but how about Hug.com or Sphinn? Search marketers are best equipped to research and report regarding the actual value of participation in certain communities. The deliverable is a spreadsheet of communities sorted by various values.

Optimize Newly Completed Or Existing Site
We get this one a lot. Ad Agencies come to us after a site already exists, wanting to optimize it.  We either build title tags, descriptions, alt tags, interlink etc…or provide the agency with suggestions.

It’s very useful for us to crawl the content for phrase density and loop the keywords through AdWords inventory or Keyword Discovery. That way we can see what the content is “really about.” This is a great use of your search agency’s time with great ROI.  The deliverables range from making changes to the live site to a Word.doc for every page in the site.

Daily or Weekly Analytics Sweeps
Making web analytics actionable is not a job for a designer or copywriter. It’s a specialized skill. Even if it’s only for a few hours a month, consider outsourcing analytics reviews to a specialist. The deliverables are short white papers outlining salient user behavior, site growth and problems as they arise.

Set Goals & Implement Conversion Tracking
These days tracking users through conversion funnels until they go kaChing…or not, is an incredibly important ethic search marketers bring to the table.  No matter the channels, call on your friendly search industry pal to make double-dare sure those conversion events are well-defined and tracked properly. The deliverable is a dashboard, alert emails and white papers.

Community Manager Training
Often the key to integrating social media into the marketing mix is about not hiring immediately, but rather sharing CM duties cross departments. There comes a time in many a’ company’s evolution where it makes sense to bring in partner to grow a corporate culture of community management.

Twitter Training
I’ve met many people who think Twitter is stupid. Others are more like me and believe that Twitter’s channel-concept is revolutionary, to the level anthropology overtones.

Either way nobody disputes it’s a raging viral firestorm. Like any art, holistic participation (to the benefit of users and marketer alike) can be taught. Bring in your search marketing firm for group and private Twitter lessons.

YouTube Training

YouTube is the second largest search engine by query volume in the world.  Therefore mastering its  “organic” SERPs is crucial. However it’s not just about keywords because arrays of participation and engagement metrics matter to the organic prominence of your video. As you set out on your YouTube strategy, take a minute to learn how social tactics impact YouTube success.

Community Building
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, Delicious, StumbleUpon (yes still) yada, yada, flavor of the month etc… USING these channels as part of an integrated cross channel program is indeed a cool challenge. A good social media company can cut years off your ad agency’s evolution. We’ve already made a lot of the mistakes , you don’t have to.

Link Building
As anyone in the space knows, link building is a freaking hornet’s nest. Since links traditionally have played a large part in search rankings (PageRank), there have been tons of “plays,” ranging from very healthy to total crapHat.  Expect that links will remain important, though not as much as before. Search engines have many other clues as to ranking. It’s actually artificial intelligence with bullshit detectors.

It turns out that so called “link building” looks a lot like the way we used to do PR before, from the heart of corporate and personal relationships.  Ask your search marketing firm to lead a series of conversations with your ad agency account representatives and PR folks.  Amazingly it’s old school skills that get the right kinds of links these days.

Analyze A Site’s Inbound & Outbound Link Graphs
Sites link out. Sites get links. Both are important. See the next 2 items.

Link De-Crap Projects
When search engines think they’ve been gamed, they sometimes react by somehow reducing the ranking of your pages.  When buying an old URL or deCraping a new client’s existing one, evaluating the inbound and outbound link graph can be an important task. Get ready to figure out how to LOSE links. Note that it kind of sucks that Google won’t let us disavow bad links.

They say they’ve got it figured out. Yeah right. (BTW, there are only a few tools to do inbound bad neighborhood evaluations, and no good ones we’ve seen that are automated. SO… we need a new one. I’m looking at you, Rand.) Your search marketing firm can either do this project or teach someone to.

Re-Purpose Internal Links
When only “good links” remain, link builders evaluate the anchor text. Anchor text is the word the link is made on. When search engines look for clues on a page, the anchor text on inbound links provides semantic insight about what the destination page is about.  Often we contact the person that gave our client the link and ask them politely to change the anchor text. Sometimes we take them out to dinner.  Your search marketing firm can either do this project or teach someone to.

Internal Link Building
Whereas quality inbound links are hard to get, linking within your own site is easy. Good news: it matters a lot to search engines for clues as to what the link destination pages are about. Internal link building is low hanging fruit.

Take note however, it’s possible to crap out internal linking and create a spammy mess. All the same rules apply.  Also the internal linking should be in addition to global navigation, inline content blocks and as unique as possible throughout the site. Your search marketing firm can either do this project or teach someone to.

Feed & Blog Building
A surprising amount of businesses have absolutely no idea that nearly half the websites in the world have blog-like tools to connect with others, RSS aggregators, social communities, the media, and modern link building communities. Open source software like WordPress makes this relatively inexpensive and easy.

However installing, extending and integrating WordPress in new or existing sites is a task for search marketers. Your ad agency can make terrific ala carte’ use of WordPress content management system skills (literally) every day. Here’s a list of associated tasks for outsourcing or training.

-Install software
-Configure & register feeds

-Interlink with new or existing site
-Install plugins and confirm that all SEO attributes are available
-Optimize themes

Publication Management & Blogging
Once your feed is properly configured, many search companies offer publication management and blogging services. In order to avoid blogging to nobody, consider outsourcing in order to grow your publication’s authority. We can teach you to plan, schedule and execute content publishing content by methods designed to engage community.

Inventory and Recommendations to Leverage Digital Assets
In the brave new world of hybrid SEO, photos, social videos, news, audio and other rich media are an important components to multi-channel discoverability for your website.  We can help you inventory and assess the usefulness of digital media assets and evaluate their usefulness as part of a greater suite of strategy and tactics.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Planning & Set Up
It is reasonable to say that hundreds of millions of dollars are wasted each year by unqualified users building out bloated PPC campaigns [author’s opinion]. Run don’t walk to utilize your internet marketing partner to pilot PPC initiatives. Your client will thank you for it by not hiring us directly .

Landing Page Tests
No task in all of search is seemingly more challenging than creating and testing landing pages. Not just limited to PPC, landing pages can be anywhere marketer sends traffic where a conversion goal is set. Does the agency’s client, the agency or the search company handle landing page development?

What are the tradeoffs in terms of URL, server model, dynamic attributes and other common needs-which-can-become-barriers? Your search marketing firm can answer these questions, do the project or teach someone to do it.

Day-to-Day PPC Management
Best-in-class PPC management takes a lot of time and expertise.  Don’t try it at home unless you are completely committed and equipped. Yup, we’ll just do it. However, be prepared to measure our success. We’ll make you.

Job Descriptions, Employee Hiring & Training
As an advertising agency gains momentum in the search space, it soon makes sense to internalize certain tasks. From a community manager job description to building a reputation monitoring dashboard take advantage of your search partner’s experience building staff and departments. The deliverables are job description and even handling interviews.

Monthly Ad Agency Staff Briefings
Search changes at the speed of imagination.  I attend between 8-14 mainstream and niche’ conferences annually and read for 1.5-2 hours every night. Our team interacts with some of the coolest practitioners in the world in any given channel.  We’re more than happy to include periodic briefings in the suite of deliverables we bring to our advertising agency partners.  Consider us your eyes and ears at the table.

aimClear is approached by traditional advertising agencies, often with rich history and too-often in stagnation or slight decline, seeking advice for growing online reputation as experts. Whether marketing regionally or nationally, it’s seriously powerful stuff to be perceived as an expert.

Though at least somewhat multi-faceted, many agencies have more experience in certain categories. Examples include health care marketing, travel, b2b, retail package design, education, web design, video production, outdoor products, etc… Your agency’s historical specialty is natural territory to stake out for thought-leadership.

There’s no secret sauce whatsoever. Successes stem from actually being an authority, a devoted willingness to share and a fanatical drive to build community by unselfish participation. There are no shortcuts.

Your website is a publication, not a brochure. Get ready to work incredibly hard, because this assignment is no less than becoming the definitive publication in your area of expertise. Having several thousand or more followers in any tight niche is an extremely powerful tool.

A website becomes a publication when the publisher (that’s you) holds content creation and scheduled release thereof, completely sacred- for months or even years. To pull off reflecting your inner thought leadership to the web, you’ll be posting content a minimum of 3 days per week until further notice. Half measures will avail you none.

Commit to daily category research for study and rebroadcast. Hands down the best way to become a go-to resource for readers who might become customers, is to have the edge of always being fully current.

This is not an endeavor to be taken lightly or relegated for 9-5 treatment. Start by making a list of dozens or even hundreds of definitive blogs, posts and authors to follow and share. The research serves double duty: keeping your knowledge totally current and caching great material to share with others.

Identify channels with obvious ROI for networking, sharing and essential learning opportunities. Learn the vernacular by weeks of consumption and lurking. When ready participate, share what you know and rebroadcast content you’ve uncovered. Let the friend making begin! Next week in part 2 of this post, we’ll share specific tactics to identify conversations, relevant to your expertise, in networking channels.

Spend any significant time on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Reddit, Delicious, StumbleUpon or hundreds of topically specific communities and you’ll note a common pattern. Users don’t just talk about personal items. They share content with the group in exchange for receiving reciprocal recommendations.

He/she who brings most useful and stimulating content to the dialog wins.

This is where your daily research comes in because that’s the content you share! Exchanging information is the foundation for socio-professional networking. Learn to walk the walk in order to gain respect as a leader in your space.

Give to others unconditionally (until it hurts) and then give some more. At the end of the day true thought leadership is about keeping up to the minute, as regards industry dirt, and having the depth/persona to add extra value by extrapolation.

Publish properly by recurrent content disseminated by feeds and advised by best SEO practices. WordPress is a terrific publishing platform choice and is open source so it won’t break the bank.

There are a number terrific of” how-to-blog blogs” out there so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Check out ProBlogger, CopyBlogger, TopRank and early SEOmoz for classic tactics to serve, delight, bait and engage users in community building tactics.

I’ve been in the advertising business in one capacity or another for the better part of 20 years. Without question the most versatile, hardest working, sharpest and committed bunch I’ve ever witnessed is made up of professional business bloggers. Feed based publication killed the newspaper God. Capture a bit of the mojo for your enterprise.

Share proprietary thinking and processes. Our company’s philosophy is built on the principle that anyone who’s really capable of competing with us will figure out what to do anyway without our help.

Therefore we might as well empower, inspire followers and have them ask us to be friends. Today’s follower is tomorrow’s customer, employee, vendor, fellow conference speaker and friend. Our blog’s readers bring us cool clients, job and friends.

Confident bloggers link to complimentary and non competitive resources in order to serve readerships. Power bloggers link to their competition. That said, don’t give away the store. Todd Malicoat told us, in a 2007 interview, “teach people to fish without giving away the fish bucket.” The Tao of unconditional sharing without sharing too much, is an acquired wisdom.

Brand by exclusion to stake out a niche’ that’s totally yours. If ever there was a time to shed the jack of all trades identity, this is it. Keep in mind that branding has as much to do with specialties excluded from the package.The old adage is that a clothing line specializing in northern, southern, eastern and western wear, is much harder to brand than only northern wear.

When I started aimClear, I made a decision to retire from my life-long personal and career passion: music. It helps that I love the online marketing industry as much as I do music, but the decision was deeply emotional. Measure focus by what you’re willing to give up. The returns can be incredible.

Evolve: The Ad Agency to Thought Leader
Be an actual authority by committing to research. Identify worthy channels, as indicated by possible return, for unconditional giving in your niche’. Publish properly, keep SEO in mind and spend time reading bloggers who are adept at inciting engagement by technique.

Don’t be afraid to really share valuable insight for readers. Exclude peripheral skills from your brand in order to achieve focus, or at least create the perception thereof. Above all get ready to some incredibly hard work along with the reciprocal return.

There’s noticeably cache’ of additional content these guys (in the androgynous) cranked out, which we’ll share over the next week.  In the mean time, there’s plenty of terrific coverage out there– including my favorites, SEORoudtable and TopRank. There always seems to be a huge amount of during-conference-buzz surrounding Search Engine Strategies gatherings, especially SJ.

It’s incredibly hectic here in Duluth, in a happy way. It’s time for a little R&R up here along the shores of majestic Lake Superior, gateway to the Canoe Wilderness Boundary Waters. We’ll be fired up for next week.

Common channels include television, radio, print, and now search and social media. As nearly every media channel folds into the dashboard, search marketing firms have grown indigenous capabilities which overlap and even exceed many traditional advertising agency’s capabilities. This totally blurs the lines of who does what.

The best advertising agencies lead their clients through rigorous analytic evaluation and conversion tracking to quantify ongoing success and justify marketing investments, especially in these times of quasi-recession. Account executives, creative directors, art directors, designers, production artists, copywriters and keen technical minds craft the message and delivery mechanisms. PR buckaroos prognosticate about lighting up buzz pockets.

Gee, that sounds a lot like what search marketing firms do.

Advertising Agencies & Search Marketing
In the early 90′s “search” was nascent and a mostly technical endeavor. Born to military brainiac parents, technologies like Internet Relay Chat (IRC), newsgroups, email, and early web browsing facilitated individual connections online. Yahoo personals made it easy to get a date. Mid-decade, visionary companies were beginning to figure out the allure and promise of a networked planet. Advertising agencies had NO idea what to do.

IT fiefdoms (not marketing departments) ran the show. Advertising agencies’ first impressions of the Internet were that the medium was yet another place to post brochures and pretty branded pictures amidst snippy catch phrases. Most had a difficult time wrapping their arms around the basic premises of search. To many of us the circa 2001 ad agency Internet perspective seemed empirical, uninformed and akin to an ostrich burying it’s head in the sand.

Unfortunately the Internet’s economic clout grew at a somewhat slower rate than hype and actual revenue, resulting in the .com crash. Many inflated-IPO paper millionaires lost their mojo, even here in Duluth, Minnesota. Our local advertising agency friends were temporarily safe in their house of cards. Media buyers bought local television, radio, billboards and account executives gleefully called for expensive printed brochures. Things were about to change.

Wikipedia defines advertising agency as:

“a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising (and sometimes other forms of promotion) for its clients. An ad agency is independent from the client and provides an outside point of view to the effort of selling the client’s products or services. An agency can also handle overall marketing and branding strategies and sales promotions for its clients.”

Call It What It Is
Our tasks on behalf of clients include deep and absolute market research, strategic brand consulting, public relations, and media planning. Ad placements including video, radio, search engines, online yellow pages, newspapers and social channels following creative and campaign design.

We lead our clients though intensive evaluative analytics to justify the success of their investments. Our account execs’, designers, strategic thinkers and PR team proffer advertising messages highly targeted to individuals, communities, and mass markets.

Let’s call it what it is. The Other Word For Search Marketing is “Advertising Agency.”