January 27, 2009
Vacillating about hiring an SEM Agency? Would you build your own house?
Just because you can swing a hammer doesn’t mean you should build your own house.
That’s right, we use builders for a reason. Building a house requires knowledge and skill, not to mention time and coordination. To top it off, the State is changing building codes every day to keep you guessing. Ok so maybe every day is bit of an exaggeration and maybe you’re damn good with a structural drawing – but you get my point.
Dear Reader: Note that this is a bit of a rant. As the Director of Business Development I’m always a bit amazed at how agonized some prospects are when deciding whether they should hire an agency or continue to manage SEM on their own. And so while I get a little worked up about it, hopefully this message resonates enough to be taken to heart. With that said, I contend:
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
If you think about it though, isn’t managing your own Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Campaigns a little like trying to build your own house? Sure, Adwords management is a little cleaner than construction, and you’re not going to live in your Adwords account (or so you think), but you can just as easily end up with a horrible mess and a lot of money up in smoke.
To get right down to it, the problem is accessibility - the same element that’s contributed to Google’s smashing success. It’s so easy to get started with Adwords and see it working that anyone can do it. And before long they’ve convinced you that you’ve got wicked skills. You’re putting up a campaign and your ads are appearing! Upon inspection though, you realize you’ve got all your product keywords in one Ad Group, you’re using Broad Match where Exact should be and the Cost Per Sale is higher than any of your products are worth.
Managing a task that you would have normally thought absurd to take on yourself seems well within your grasp. Would you have thought of producing your own television advertising? But so many organizations have simply tacked SEM Advertising on as another component of an existing job. That was OK when you were spending $2000 per month on Search. But now that you’re spending $20,000 or $200,000 per month, it’s no longer acceptable to treat search campaign management like an afterthought.
So what should you do? The way I see it, you’ve got two choices.
1. Send Yourself or Your Online Director to Building School (Study SEM Management)
If you’re going to be successful and compete, you’ll need to know what you’re doing. Get immersed in how to properly setup an account, determine what your keyword strategy should be, track what your competitors are doing, test how you’re differentiating yourself, refine your bidding strategy and be a vigilant harbinger of the trends in Search Marketing. Heck, after several years of doing this you might even think about becoming an SEM Agency.
2. Hire a Builder (Hire an SEM Agency)
Find an agency to do all of this for you. Run due diligence, ask them tough questions, review their case studies, read their books, check out their blog, talk to their references and negotiate an honest contract.
Realizing, of course, that you’re reading a blog for an SEM agency, you understand that I’m going to recommend that you hire an agency. And quite honestly, if you’re spending a significant amount on SEM and view this as a primary marketing channel, why wouldn’t you want to get the very most from it? Now you might be looking at the first option with a subtle “how hard can that be? I’m smart and have a team of people that can figure all of this out!” rise to your eyebrows. And sure, you can do it (this discussion is not about your intelligence or your team’s ability). There’s land available, the plans are yours and you can buy your own skill saw, nail gun, and ladder – go for it! And I’m sure that after you graduate from Building School you’ll have all the confidence you need to make sure you’re handling everything correctly. You’ll spend a few weeks pouring the foundation, some dinner hours doing trim work. Plenty of people have built their own house successfully.
But here’s the thing, you’re not a builder. You’ve got a marketing organization to run!
While you’re busy interpreting the impact of the latest change to Quality Scores, who is answering the press inquiries? What about the product roadmap? Has someone trained the sales team on the key differentiators? That’s right, your business is always running and if you’re like a lot of managers out there, these pressing items are always seeming to trump being a truly effective manager of your own SEM Campaigns. So you move SEM into the “fix it tomorrow” category. This quickly becomes a once a month situation when you’ll jump into your accounts during the weekend to make sure you’re not bleeding. And that’s when you started carpeting the roof.
I’m not speaking theoretically.
I talk to online marketing managers often and am amazed at the pushback many are getting from their management. “They’ve told me that it’s my job” is what I hear. Then comes the admission that they do what they can, but know their SEM Campaigns are far from optimized. With one organization we work with, a reluctant CEO gave her director the ok to hire us, but wanted a short leash. A year later the same online director has been promoted and SEM is now the premier element of their marketing program – and with a 1500% ROI and revenue up 38 times where it was before we took over, it should be. Needless to say, our conversations with the CEO are on a much different level these days.
Unapologetic disclaimer
Now I said it before and I’ll say it again. I work for an SEM agency. Yes, this is biased and there are exceptions to this argument. If your SEM efforts are purely for your brand and you only buy your brand keywords like “Closed Loop Marketing”, then you probably won’t spend enough for it to be worth the time and cost of hiring an agency. If Search Marketing isn’t a primary marketing channel for you (which it should be, but that’s another post all together!), then why bother. But for the rest reading this, put down the hammer and hire a builder already. You’ll be thanking yourself when it starts to rain outside – wait, did you just feel a drop?
Sorry, but building a house takes real skills. SEO and SEM takes no skill whatsoever, just some knowledge about how search engines work.
Anyone can do SEO after reading a bity on the subject. Not everyone can buold a house after reading a book on how to build one.
So would I prefer to spend $3,000/mo on an SEO firm or would I prefer to read up on it and do it myself? Hmmm, hard choice right there.
Laurence,
I must respectfully disagree with you completely. To state that SEO and SEM
“takes no skill whatsoever” is simply baseless. And no, reading a bit on the
subject is not the “I’m an expert now” check box you’ve implied.
More significantly, the question one should be asking is whether the ROI of using
an agency vs. managing in-house adds up. If an agency can pay for
itself by a) freeing up a client’s time to focus on their core business, and
b) driving improved results - then it may well be worth paying them
$3000/mo. But to underestimate the expertise required to run an advanced
campaign and focus only on the cost component is not only short-sighted, it
has the potential of putting your company at a competitive disadvantage. If
your competitors are using a good agency who is driving a 50-300% better ROI
from PPC than you’re able to do on your own (which is our experience) and yielding substantially more volume from this channel, then you’re going to lose market share. That may be OK with you. Maybe Search isn’t a strategic channel for you. Maybe you have a dominant market position already. There are a number of legitimate reasons not to invest heavily in Search and manage it “on the side.” If you’re doing it for the right reasons, then fine. But if you’re managing in-house because you think Search is easy and you can’t conceive of someone else being able to do a better job, you’re potentially doing yourself and your company a disservice.
It’s pretty well-accepted now that companies shouldn’t make their own TV ads (think used car dealerships). The same concept applies to Search.
Scott
Hi,
I am doing SEM, SEO for some of my clients from quite a long time.
I must say this this Mr. Laurence Flynn, that SEO, SEM on on one hand can give your business greats profits and on other hand it can just eat your whole budget you deploy in it with out giving you any results.
For safe guarding against the second situation you have to take help of a professional SEO and SEM expert.
Internet Marketing
You’ve got some good points, but the house analogy is weak.
If you were going to be building houses for the rest of your career (like you’ll be running SEM campaigns for the rest of your career), wouldn’t you think about whether you or someone on your team had the aptitude and ability to learn how to build one?
It’s definitely not for everyone (a majority of companies don’t have someone who can dedicate enough resources to it), but to suggest that people are crazy to consider doing it in-house is overly self-serving.
It’s definitely not easy, but the information and learning tools are available to anyone who’s got the motivation to figure it out.
Cheers,
Rob
Rob,
Thanks for your comment.
True, if you were going to become a contractor (using the house analogy), you would think about whether you or someone on your team had the skills and knowledge to do the job right. And then you would be a contractor and not a Marketing Manager (insert any full-time job here) who also happens to build houses. My point is that there are still a lot of people who think that managing SEM is something that can adequately addressed “on the side”.
I certainly didn’t mean to imply that people are crazy to consider doing SEM in-house. There are many factors that go into decisions around whether you add head-count or outsource. There are also many talented and downright awesome in-house SEM management teams. But my rant (I did call it that from the start) relates to the company decision to simply tack SEM onto an already busy person’s job description. “Sally does a great job managing the website, let’s give her SEM as well. Sure she’s busy, but she’s not happy unless she’s doing mach ten with her hair on fire, and how much work can it be?!” In this circumstance, the demands of Sally’s existing job will compromise her ability to be an effective SEM Manager. The use of the analogy is in pointing out that it is a little nuts to expect Sally to do everything. Just like it is a little nuts to think you’re going to build a house successfully if you’re also holding down a full-time job (unless your definition of success is a house built on weekends over the course of several years).
Indeed, the information and learning tools are available for those motivated to figure it out – it’s how everyone in this business, in-house or agency, got started. Do I believe that we could do a better job than a lot of in-house teams? You bet. Is that self-serving… it probably appears that way on the surface, but it depends on how you look at it.
Scott
Hello,
The consultation and advice from a Search Engine Marketing Professional can be extremely valuable for Paid Search. An SEM agency is usually going to have several team members, or an expert that strictly works on Paid Search every day, to review and tweak campaigns. They will understand keyword selection, ad writing, user behavior, tracking ROI, and many more variables that go into setting up and managing a paid campaign correctly.
It’s not to say that you can’t manage it in-house, but Paid Campaigns can begin bringing you revenue and leads right away, and I would want to have an SEM Professional to help maximize those efforts.