June 5th, 2009 by John Rhea
On Monday, June 8th our very own Li Evans (Serengeti’s Social Media Director) will be speaking at Search Engine Strategies 2009 in Toronto. She’ll be part of a panel discussing The Ins and Outs of Twitter, along with Mark Evans, Principal, ME Consulting; Mark Jackson, SEW Expert & President/CEO, VIZION Interactive; and Rayanne Langdon, Marketing Coordinator, FreshBooks.com moderated by Cindy Krum, Chief Executive Officer, Rank-Mobile, LLC.
For more information on Li’s panel or SES Toronto as a whole check out their website: http://searchenginestrategies.com/toronto/
May 26th, 2009 by Nan Dawkins
Serengeti’s Take It In House service offerings just got bigger and better with the addition of Li Evans and John Lynch. Li is a well known search and social media consultant with extensive training experience. Catch her at SES Toronto in June presenting on social media. Li runs the industry blog, searchmarketinggurus and participates/moderates at a number of industry forums.
John Lynch also has extensive training experience. He has created and executed search marketing programs for a number of clients in a variety of industries, including high tech and publishing.
We’re very pleased to add John and Li’s expertise to our Take It In House offerings!
April 3rd, 2009 by Nan Dawkins
A recent Jupiter report finds that CMO’s are increasingly dissatisfied with their agencies and are spending more time managing them. Is this just a case of CMO’s looking for someone else to blame for the economy and increasing pressures to demonstrate ROI? Perhaps, but the reality is that agency dissatisfaction has been building for some time. Reardon Smith Whittaker found last year that only 41% of marketers gave their agencies good to excellent ratings. The study also found growing skepticism among marketers about what they could expect from their agencies.
Good agencies do exist. At Serengeti, we know this to be true because we see it, time and again, in the process of conducting digital marketing audits for our clients. The reality is that an agency is only a partner — and as such, only as good as the client (see this concise, although somewhat acerbic post on this topic).
Maria Botta argues that part of the problem is agency structure and predicts that clients may begin to invest more in developing in house capabilities “in order to excercise more control and cut significant expenses related to hiring a full service agency.” Those are certainly good reasons for building an in house program, provided that savings will indeed be realized (which isn’t always the case).
One thing is certain: If CMO’s are spending more time managing agencies, then the cost of the agency relationship has risen (time is money). Why wouldn’t a CMO at least consider the cost/benefit of in house if time spent managing advertising and marketing is going up anyway?
March 30th, 2009 by Nan Dawkins
The latest research from SEMPO, “The State of Search Engine Marketing 2008″ is full of good news for those in the search field. Search spending is expected to double over the next five years. This spending will be funded both by new budgets, and by shifts in budget from conventional, off-line marketing tactics (magazines, newspapers, direct mail ) as well as online tactics (email, affiliate marketing, rich media). Even in a troubled economy, over half of the survey respondents planned to increase PPC spending while a third planned to hold budgets at the same level as the prior year.
What I found most interesting in this survey is the comparative spending of in-house departments compared to agencies:
– 78.9% of the money spent on organic search will be spent by in-house departments compared to agencies at 21%.
– 6.8% of the paid placement spend comes from in-house, compared to agencies at 3% (search media gets the biggest piece of the paid pie)
Two thirds of all advertisers plan to handle the majority of their SEM spending in-house. Oddly enough, only about 12% of advertisers said they would consider bringing more of their SEM program in-house as a way of dealing with escalating paid placement costs.
March 23rd, 2009 by Simon Heseltine
Executive level buy-in:
Big changes can’t happen without senior level support. Without it, search won’t be a priority for the company, which will lead to poor results, frustration, and the re-engagement of agencies.
Peer level buy-in:
Search doesn’t happen in a vacuum. People throughout the organization impact search. If the IT department doesn’t prioritize building in SEO, or the design department keeps pushing the required landing pages further down the timeline, search gets stalled and it shows in the results.
A plan for ongoing skills development and expertise assessments:
Notice we didn’t say “training?” Training is one, single element in creating the skilled, expert staff you will need for in-house search. (See our article on this topic). You will also benefit tremendously by implementing a skills assessment system. This can be accomplished by third party audits.
The right resources and tools:
Does the team have the tools to perform their jobs? (Bid management, keyword research, etc.)
A documented Process:
With a documented process, it’s much easier to bring on new members of staff and get them up to speed on how things are done within your company. It also helps to identify bottlenecks and redundant steps in the process, further increasing efficiencies, while at the same time ensuring that everything follows the same optimized flow.
Identified metrics and reporting:
Management expects an increase in ROI as a result of this effort. Start with a baseline (again, this should be an outside, third party audit that has nothing to do with your existing search firm). Then make sure you have the right measurement infrastructure to track and report on progress. Without this, you will be subject to attacks from naysayers.
