Internet marketing changes constantly, and companies are struggling to keep up with these changes. That’s where agencies enter the picture. Agencies help fill that dynamic void.

Clients reach out to internet marketing agencies for a number of different reasons.

• They could be calling on an agency to help explore new web marketing strategies that the client has no experience with.
• The client could have resourcing issues and look towards an agency to help maintain or accelerate their momentum.
• Maybe the client is experimenting with a new marketing method to test the validity of it before bringing it in-house (i.e. social media, or paid search advertising)

In each of these cases, there is an opportunity for an agency to add value to a client’s campaigns.

Although there seems to be an obvious fit, where on one side there is a need and on the other someone to address it. Not all client-agency relationships work out as smooth as both parties would like.

At first the relationship starts out really well, with the client full of hope and enthusiasm. Then a ball or two gets dropped, or results aren’t what was expected. Eventually through the life of the contract the relationship starts to fizzle. Whether it’s the client’s fault, agency’s fault or a combination of the two.

This type of strain can be counterproductive or even ruin the year for the marketing team. Imagine budgets depleted with sub-par results.

How can clients preempt a falling out with an agency and ensure they get the best results from their agency counterparts?

#1 – Choose Your Agency Wisely

Getting the best results starts even before you launch a campaign. Gone are the days where there were only big agencies that did everything. The market is filled with “agencies”…and I put that quotes for a reason. Agencies come in different sizes and niches.

• There are traditional agencies where internet marketing is just one of their specialties along with media buying, web design, print production, etc.
• There are specialty agencies that focus on a few disciplines of internet marketing such as social media, SEO, paid search marketing, web analytics or testing. Or even a combination of these disciplines.
• There are consultants that ban together to form virtual agencies providing expertise in varied disciplines.

So as you can see there is no longer the typical agency mold. As a client you have to know what you’re buying.

Here are a few things to consider:

1. Can the agency scale to your needs? – You might have a small budget now for that social media campaign. But if it goes like gangbusters and you want to expand it to your other campaigns, can your agency scale along with it?
2. Do you have the resources to manage your chosen agency (or agencies)? – Here’s a scenario, you have a campaign that requires SEO, PPC advertising, social media and web analytics with a dash of testing and you’re dealing with 3 different agencies. Do you have the manpower to heard those 3 agencies? Or do you only have the bandwidth to handle two agencies? You might be better off working with single agency that does all 3 in this scenario.
3. Will you be managing the project? Or will your agency? – Project management is essential. If you’ve got the resources to do so, great. Then working with that smaller niche agency might work out quite well. But if you are relying on your agency for this type of service and they are just a group of practitioners, you might want to reconsider.
4. Are they truly experts in their field? – I don’t want to paint all large agencies with the same brush, but larger agencies tend to be able to address a wider field but without as much depth as others in the market.
5. Will the person you are dealing with during the pitch be the person working on the campaign? – This is key. Ensure you get the goods! If you’re dealing with a superstar during the pitch process. Make sure that same person is working on your campaign in a very influential capacity and not just as a supervisor.

This subject warrants its own how-to but essentially to get the best results you need the best people for your circumstance.

#2 – Set the Right Expectations

Setting expectations falls on both parties. But as a client, you too must communicate your expectations both at a strategic and tactical level.

Strategic Expectations

• From a strategic standpoint be upfront about your expectation of results.
• Clearly communicate why your chosen agency won the contract. It sounds quite simple, but this gives the agency insight into you’re selection criteria and to play to their strengths.
• Don’t be coy. If you’re expectations are that your new Facebook social media initiative will yield $1,000,000 in direct sales, it may be out of touch…but be upfront about it. At least it gives the agency the opportunity to assess whether they can meet those expectations or at least set your expectations on a more realistic scale.

Tactical Expectations

Tactical expectations are like keeping your house in order. Set the rules of engagement for this new relationship you are forging with the agency. Here are some tactical considerations:

• Frequency of meetings
• Reporting requirements (frequency, format, data to include)
• Delineation of responsibilities – Make it absolutely clear what you will do vs what the agency is expected to do

Often times a misalignment of expectations are the root of a bad client-agency relationship.

#3 – Set Clear Goals

Agencies can’t meet goals that don’t exist. You’d be surprised how many organizations don’t set goals.

Set clear goals on how the agency will be measured. Here are some quick examples:

• If the agency will be measured based on revenue generated. Will it be on gross total? If so, all channels? Select channels? What about if there are refunds?
• If your goal is to improve your website user engagement, list out the metrics the agency will be measured on. Will it be on time-on-site? Bounce rate? Pages per visit?

The point is that the devil is in the details. Setting clear goals improves alignment between both parties. The agency benefits from a clear understanding of targets. The client benefits from better results from the campaign.

#4 – Assign a Single Point of Contact

Nothing is worse from an agency perspective than not knowing who to go to when you need a decision made or who to contact for those specs you needed.

Assign someone on your marketing team to manage the agency. All requests to the agency goes through this person, and this person is also the conduit for requests from the agency. It makes life easier for both parties.

It doesn’t mean that you can’t pull someone from your team into a conference call or that this person is the only one that attends meetings. But it does mean that this person is accountable for ensuring the ball doesn’t get dropped on the client side of things.

#5 – Acknowledge Agency Wins

If your agency is doing excellent work share the accolades with them. Many times when working in an agency you do all the work without seeing the rewards. The rewards don’t have to be monetary. But a simple email detailing what they did and the outstanding results it provided helps solidify your relationship and re-affirms what the agency is good at.

#6 – Be On The Ball

This is a two way street. Agencies rely quite a bit on their clients to hold up their end of the deal in the form of decisions, deliverables, feedback, input and by just being mentally present at meetings.

Don’t expect stellar results if you are slow to reply to emails, late on deliverables or provide wishy-washy answers or replies to request for decisions.

Remember, you’re not the only one who can choose to end the working relationship. Agencies can also choose their clients. Being a good client can lead to better agency results.

#7 – Be Organized & Communicate Clearly

Most project communications are through an online system like Basecamp, via conference calls, emails, in-person meetings, etc. Basically there are a multitude of channels to communicate with a multitude of opportunities to get your wires crossed. When communicating, be detailed, to the point and don’t make assumptions.

#8 – Be Upfront & Honest

Give your agency the benefit of transparency and honesty. If there’s a hint that the relationship isn’t working out, communicate it to your agency and list the reasons why you don’t think you are getting the best results. It helps re-calibrate the working relationship and saves you the time to hunt for a new agency which also takes time and resources to ramp up again.

And if at the end the working relationship ends anyways, at least both parties can walk away amicably.

I’m quite certain these 8  points don’t cover everything needed to have a smooth client-agency relationship. What have you done to get the best out of your agency? Or if you work for an agency, what are the ingredients for the perfect client?

There are probably a few of you out there that are managing PPC campaigns and SEO initiatives or have contemplated pursuing a search marketing career.

If you’ve worked for a small agency or a small to medium business typically the search marketing specialist is expected to handle both SEO as well as PPC campaigns. They both deal with search engines and keywords. Why not right?

But as you gain more experience and begin to work with larger enterprise PPC campaigns or you begin working with very unique SEO situations (i.e. localized sites, large network of websites, etc.), you will come at a crossroads in your career. You will need to specialize or at least focus your attention on one more so than the other.

The following is a comparison of the two career paths.

SEO Career Path

Being an SEO for more sophisticated clients or as an in-house SEO working with larger websites or network of websites (whatever the case may be), is a full time gig. Assuming you’re an actual practitioner and not a manager of people, you need to stay in touch constantly with:

• New search engine developments and algorithm changes
• Webinars and new techniques
• Learning from  your own experiences

On top of that you have to work with various teams or individuals:

• Managers & Stakeholders – Trying to get buy-in or reporting results
• Web Developers – Training them and supplying them with requirements
• Project Managers – Trying to squeeze in your requirements amongst the other 100 resource intensive requests outside of SEO
• Writers & Content Managers – Training, tweaking and improving the site’s content
• Social media specialists, Marketing & PR – Squeezing as much link juice out of their outward facing efforts

You’ve also got to be very analytical:

• Performing website audits
• Analyzing web metrics, log files and configuration files
• Pouring over code to make sure it follows best practices
• Drafting requirements and proposals
• Performing keyword research

This doesn’t even touch on the “culture changing” hat that you have to wear to try to convince clients or your in-house team that SEO is a worthwhile endeavor.

Who Will Be Successful at SEO?

• As an SEO you have to be able to prioritize and re-prioritize. You are usually working on other people’s schedules and priorities, not the other way around.
• Being a people person is extremely helpful because you’ll need to collaborate with others to execute on your proposals
• Being analytical is a must
• You have to stay up to date with the latest info. So being a self-starter is important.
• Most SEOs I come across are entrepreneurial; meaning they pursue opportunities with their clients or as an in-house person on their own without direction from others.
• Patience is also important attribute as well. It applies to waiting on results or waiting on other people to do tasks.

All this is very dependant on the type of clients you encounter or the size of your organization (if you’re an in-house SEO). But as an SEO, it’s a role that can change from day to day.

PPC Career Path

As a pay per click analyst or specialist, as you move up the food chain and work on enterprise level PPC campaigns with annual budgets dipping into the 7-figures, it too is a full-time career. When you’re spending that much time and money on a collection of campaigns, expectations are high.

As a PPC analyst 80% of your world is data.

Whether that’s analyzing PPC bids, click through rates (CTR) conversion rates or cost per acquisition (CPA); you are knee deep in data on a daily basis.

You’ll likely be working with Excel sheets, using it to create  your PPC campaigns or exporting data for analysis. Excel will be your #1 tool.

Who Will Be Successful at PPC?

• You’ve got to like numbers and be able to analyze them and make recommendations based findings.
• You have to be able to write compelling ad copy with strong calls to action.
• You will also likely be responsible for the optimization of landing pages and checkout processes. So an eye for improving conversions and usability will benefit you.
• PPC is a numbers game, so you have to be relentless at squeezing as much revenue and cost savings out of your campaigns.

If you’re the type of person that likes relatively instantaneous results with successes that can be directly tied to your efforts, then PPC might just be right for you.

One thing that is consistent in both SEO and PPC is that nothing every stays constant. Things always change and for the most part anyone who looks at either career should already know that ahead of time. It keeps things interesting and things don’t stay the same for very long. Hopefully this was helpful to anyone sitting on the fence

The Last Mile is a term used by telecommunications firms to describe how the last leg of sending a telecom signal can be the most challenging. Many rural areas and third-world countries can’t maintain the quality and consistency of the signal delivered up to that point. These challenges are related to poor wiring technology in those areas.

The same  analogy can be applied to online marketing and your website’s checkout funnel.

Some companies are very focused on the traffic generation part of their online marketing efforts and may overlook the usability and efficiency of their checkout process. This is usually the case for both large organizations as well as startups alike. Regardless of the size of the organization this can be an issue.

Although many companies are more than happy to invest in their traffic generation campaigns such as email marketing, SEO and pay per click advertising; they are, for some reason, not as enthusiastic about applying the same investment into their checkout process. This is likely because improving the checkout process isn’t as straightforward as the other parts of online marketing.

Some of the challenges faced by online marketers in regards to improving their checkout funnel are:

• Lack of web development resources
• Rigid functionality in their ecommerce system
• Lack of funding or buy-in from executives
• Website systems administration is the responsibility of their IT team
• More than one team has a vested interest in the ecommerce experience

How Can an Online Marketing Manager or Director Overcome These Checkout Challenges?

Lack of Web Development Resources - Apply some of the internet marketing budget to web development contractors. If you have a $10 million marketing budget, shave off $500,000 to improve the ecommerce experience by outsourcing the web development needed.

Rigid Functionality of the Current Ecommerce System - Build a business case to replace the existing system with a new system or an outsourced shopping cart with better functionality. Your checkout process is the final leg of the ecommerce experience and could nullify any budget you’ve spent to bring the visitor to your website.

Lack of Funding or Buy-In from Executives - Create an opportunity cost analysis, comparing the existing conversion rate with that of an improved conversion rate. Provide a tiered analysis such as today vs. +3% vs +5% vs +10%, etc. This should open the eyes (and wallets) of even the most conservative executive.

Website Administration of the IT Team – A bit of a tougher scenario, but not insurmountable. Attempt to align marketing success with IT success. Work with senior executives to align IT success with online marketing success. Typical IT performance indicators are system downtime, staff responsiveness and projects launched on time and on budget. A new KPI for IT should include responsiveness to online marketing project requests.

More Than One Person Owns the Ecommerce Experience – There’s no easy answer for this situation other than to get everyone on the same page to improve the situation. With some telling analytical work and the right persuasive approach, getting everyone to see that a streamlined checkout process will be beneficial to all will seem straightforward when done convincingly.

The lesson? Don’t forget about the checkout process. Although it is one of the toughest areas to address politically within an organization, your efforts to improve it will be worthwhile in the long-run.

What other scenarios have you come across when trying to improve the conversion experience? And how are you addressing them?