Tips to help you select the digital marketing agency that best fits your needs.

Paid search is an ever-changing field. For marketing professionals whose time is already at a premium, finding the time to stay up-to-date with the latest techniques and nuances can be challenging. If you are new to the PPC field, you may feel under-experienced to be running campaigns. Hiring a PPC agency may be the best way to boost ROI and free up your time for other channels.

Agencies often prioritize learning. They understand that to remain effective, the teams that work for them must stay abreast of the latest trends and techniques. Account representatives are experts in their field, and they typically have access to systems that help them increase effectiveness for clients. In the same way that no single marketing strategy fits all companies, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for PPC management. Here are some tips to help you hire the right SEM agency for your business.

1. Have a List of Goals and Objectives

Before you begin your paid agency search, make sure you know what you want to achieve. For example, building brand awareness, fueling your pipeline, launching a new product or service, increasing conversions, or improving online revenue. The more specific you can be about your objectives, the better chance you have of partnering with an agency successfully. Goals are crucial for ensuring strategies developed and the tactics used are in line with your business needs.

2. Identify Which Services You Need

Perhaps you want to run paid search ads or add content to boost your SEO ranking. When making the list of agencies to contact, make sure they have experience with the services you need. You may want to screen out any that only focus on one area, such as SEO. A PPC company that integrates paid search with other online marketing services can work with you to a higher degree and help you understand customer behavior across various digital channels. Over time this can improve campaign results and increase ROI. Services that paid search agencies typically offer, include the following:

· Paid Search (SEM, PPC)
· Content Marketing
· Conversion Rate Optimization
· SEO
· Social Media Advertising/Paid Social
· Shopping Feeds
· Display Advertising
· Remarketing/Retargeting

3. Have a Budget In Mind

You may have an estimate of what you can spend for a PPC company, whether it is a percentage of your overall marketing budget or based on what you have spent in the past. When searching for an agency to work with, ask for their opinion: Is the amount adequate to obtain your objectives? Is PPC the best way to go, or should the funds be spent on a different channel? The way they answer these questions demonstrate whether they can explain it in a way you not only understand, but also believe. If they don’t think you are budgeting enough, does their reasoning make sense? Ask if they recommend an alternate channel where the spend may be more effective.

4. Determine the Fee Structure

When it comes to pricing, the terms should meet your budgetary requirements. There are several options to consider:

· Flat monthly fee
· Percentage of the advertising spend
· Hybrid approach

There are pros and cons to each. But what deliverables are included in the services you’re signing up for? Are there any hidden fees? Will you need to hire additional resources to get the job done? Discussing such questions with the agencies you interview can help you decide which will work best for your business.

5. Discover Whether They Are a Cultural Fit

Finding the right cultural fit is essential for the success of your relationship with an agency. Not because they will work with you or your in-house team on some aspects of the campaigns, but a shared perspective enables effective collaboration. Even if it looks good on paper, if you don’t share similar values, the teams won’t mesh and work well together, which can affect productivity and effectiveness. You want a firm that is motivated and passionate about what they do and takes pride in the quality of work they provide.

6. Learn about Their Communication Style

Before retaining an agency, you should discuss what your expectations are in terms of communication. Is receiving a weekly email with updates enough or do you prefer a phone call? Do you want specific information in the reports? The firm should also make their preferences regarding communication clear. Do they recommend regularly scheduled meetings and updates? Is the whole team involved, or just the account manager?

Discuss what the agency needs from you and their expectations. Will they be partnering with you to strategize and execute or simply providing recommendations for your team to carry out? When both sides communicate clearly, the partnership can proceed more smoothly.

7. Experience and Expertise

When discussing the possibility of retaining an SEM agency, find out who will liaise with you regularly and learn more about who will be working directly on your account. The agency you hire must be able to navigate today’s complex landscape and have the chops to make your PPC campaigns successful.

· Account strategists help you reach your goals by directing the account and setting the overall strategy.
· Tracking experts and analytics specialists set up campaigns, track analytics, and analyze the results.
· Conversion rate optimization specialists continuously test landing pages for improved ad performance.
· Graphic designers ensure your ads and landing pages look great and attract – and convert – the right traffic.

Not every agency will have dedicated teams with all of these positions. Some have senior managers who own several of these roles, while others may use junior talent and freelancers. It’s important to understand the level of expertise you are getting and whether it is commensurate with the fee.

8. Ensure You Own the Data

It’s possible that, over time, you may decide to find a new agency or build an in-house team to work alongside or in place of your agency. Prepare for that in advance by ensuring that the Google Ads accounts, landing pages, and creative assets, are all yours. When you work with an agency, not only should you receive experienced PPC management, but your creative assets should build. Make sure the account is set up using your e-mail account and that you have full access to the paid ad account(s), but grant the agency full access, so they can create and manage campaigns as needed.

Having historical data is crucial to tuning your campaigns; if the Google Ads information isn’t yours, you will have to start over again, which wastes valuable resources. When the partnership with the firm ends, you should be able to take everything with you.

9. Determine your Key Performance Indicators

List which performance indicators are most important to the success of your campaigns. This can help you measure results and how they help you attain your goals. Some of the most common KPIs include:

· Cost per Acquisition
· Return on Investment
· Conversion Rates
· Sales Closing Ratio
· Customer Lifetime Value

10. Look for Transparency

Reporting results can be subject to interpretation. The paid search agency you hire should be willing to share the complete, unaltered information related to your KPIs. In addition, the reports they design should match your internal metrics so that you can get a consistent view of performance. The data they contain should be detailed and up-to-date, not days or weeks old.

11. Ask About Certification

One factor to consider when choosing an agency is whether they are Google Ad certified or a Google Premier Partner. This accreditation is earned by individuals that attend training and demonstrate proficiency in a broad range of Google Ads features. Some team members may specialize in areas that can benefit your campaign, particularly if you serve a small, specific niche.

12. Request Flexible Contracts

Look for firms that offer flexibility in contract lengths. Consider whether they are willing to accept short-term contracts. Professional agencies who offer this option are confident in their ability to provide the best services for your business and that you will want to renew with them. Before you sign, read the out clause and understand what your options are if you want to leave the agency.

The great thing about digital marketing is that it can be done from anywhere. You can choose the best agency for you, regardless of location. This opens your campaigns to a new realm of possibilities that you may not have had the opportunity for previously. When deciding on an agency, look for the best service, cost and team that fits your needs – not location. With video calls and messaging services, location really shouldn’t matter. And hey, if occasional in-person meetings are a must for you, transportation makes that pretty easy too.

Contact Us Today

Pay per click advertising campaigns can deliver targeted, highly qualified traffic when developed correctly. At HawkSEM, we provide a customized approach based on your particular needs. Our passion for results and drive to meet goals ensure we do right by you, generating a higher ROI. Contact us today to learn how we can help dramatically improve your digital marketing results.

Results are everything to our team at HawkSEM, both in terms of the growth that we usher our clients toward and in terms of the personal progress that our entire team achieves. Through our focus areas of social media marketing, SEO, conversion optimization, and PPC, HawkSEM scales revenue and launches every customer to unprecedented heights of profitability.

We love seeing clients rack up results that make them happy, but we’re also excited to share some news celebrating HawkSEM. Clutch, a Washington, D.C.-based B2B research and reviews agency, recently published its listing of firms with the top PPC management services around, and we earned one of the top-10 spots in a field stacked with over 200 competitors.

This accomplishment reflects the excellent quality and strong performance of our market
presence, operations, and industry experience, among other criteria that Clutch analyzes in creating and compiling its rankings. Beyond the hard data that factors into company evaluations, client feedback also weighs in strongly.

“They’ve done a great job. I gave them all the information I could and let them get to work. I offered a little guidance for subject matter that was difficult to parse and they picked up very quickly,” beamed one of our customers, the communications director of a nonprofit. “They have the expertise, knowledge, and time to push things forward on their own.”

“The numbers clearly speak for themselves,” highlighted a second, the marketing director at a public university. “Having consistent management of our campaign has been really crucial to our success. They’re very concerned about our metrics and our costs. They’re respectful of our money and spend it as if it was their own.”

The Manifest and Visual Objects, sister companies to Clutch, also speak highly of HawkSEM.

Business news and insight website The Manifest highlighted our team in its round-up of the top SEO services in Los Angeles, while Visual Objects, a portfolio curation platform, listed our design and development experience in a showcase of firms with superb digital marketing experience.

In a busy advertising and marketing scene, HawkSEM relishes knowing that we’ve distinguished ourselves from the pack with our exceptional strategy and skills. Whether you’re looking for PPC, design, or SEO work, your growth and profitability are ensured and safe in our hands. Reach out to us here to learn more about out the results that you’ll achieve with us – we look forward to collaborating to scale your success together!

Your customer base is the proverbial goose that lays the golden eggs, in that you have to keep feeding new customers into it in order to maintain profits. Yet you’re probably already aware of just how costly feeding that goose can become. If you allow your customer acquisition costs (CAC) to become to too high, you’ll quickly see those golden eggs start to shrink as your goose becomes a bloated, unhealthy mess, incapable of producing the kind of results you need.

Thus, the challenge then becomes being able to grow your clientele by bringing the right kind of customers in at just the right price. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, without a working knowledge of the market strategies proven to achieve such a goal, you risk wading through an unending stream of unsuccessful marketing ploys.

Proven Cost-Effective Techniques

• Optimize and grade your leads: Too often, undecided clients let the sales cycle linger out of control, turning sales reps into marketers. Set clear criteria for your marketers based upon targeted, segmented feedback to determine what qualifies as a lead that can be passed on to your sales team.
• Focus on what works: Monitor initiatives to see which yield high and low conversion rates. Don’t be afraid to abandon those that produce few results.
• Don’t be afraid of customer trials: Market research has shown that consumers value a company’s willingness to guarantee their products or services at their own potential expense. By offering your new customers a trial period, you’re more likely you keep them over the long haul.
• Indulge their need for instant gratification: By offering an incentive to work with your company, you’re engendering within customers an immediate sense of brand loyalty.
• Enter the virtual world: If you’re one of the few holdouts that has yet to fully embrace internet marketing, it’s high time you became converted. Recent years have seen online marketing catch up and even threaten to overtake traditional marketing methods as the preferred choice in the business world. Much of that is due to its cost-effectiveness. Campaigns built around SEO and PPC often achieve better results than most other real-world marketing strategies, and often at a fraction of the cost.

The battle to keep your CAC down can be a difficult one, yet if you remain committed to seeing it done and have the right resources at your disposal, you can successfully keep your golden goose a laying. We here at HawkSEM are one such resource. As experts in SEM, we’re well-versed in all of the market strategies proven to keep customers seeking you out without you having to break the bank. To see just what we can do for your company, contact one of our team members today.

So you’ve finally made the commitment to go all-in on a full scale PPC campaign. That’s great, yet there’s just one problem: so have quite a few others. Competition for keywords drives the prices publishers will charge for them up. Ultimately, you could easily see yourself spending more to generate new leads through PPC than you could recoup through actual transactions.

7 Tips to Keep Costs Low

That’s not to say that there are no ways for you to essentially achieve an ROI from PPC. Such techniques do exist; you just have to recognize them, and have the wherewithal to see them through:

• Start by looking within: Look at your best customers. Analyze the feedback that they give as to what marketing tools brought them to you, and then focus your new acquisition campaign on that content.
• Focus on specific keywords: Analyze search queries and results to see what specific keywords or phrases are uniquely relevant to your company. Too often, companies allow vagaries to limit the effectiveness of their search words or terms.
• What makes your ad “clickable?”: The “clickability” of your ad depends largely on the relevance of the keyword it’s built upon. Connecting keyword relevance to click conversions allows you to enhance your ad’s effectiveness.
• Eliminate strays: While many focus all of their attention on creating new content, you should also not forget the potential of that which you already have. Examine your paid ad for language can be misleading and produce unwanted or unproductive clicks, and then eliminate it.
• Look at what you’re offering: Are you losing customers because you offer too much online, thus giving them no incentive to convert from casual observers to paying customers? Remember to give them what they want initially, yet leave them wanting more.
• Look at what you can pay, not what you’re willing to pay: Review the historical PPC conversion data from other companies within your industry, or your own if you’ve already engaged in PPC advertising. Do you notice a steady conversion rate? Comparing the difference, if any, between your goal customer acquisition cost (CAC) and the actual conversion rate gives you a baseline figure at which you should pay in order to make ensure your PPC campaign’s profitability.
• Optimize: While focusing on a baseline of profitability keeps your head above water, you don’t want to end up simply treading it over the long-term. Look for every opportunity to improve your conversion rates compared to your CAC.

Contrary to popular belief, you can help set the price for your PPC, allowing you continuous and cost-effective customer inflow with a near guarantee of high conversion rates. Yet reaching such an internet marketing utopia requires a fair deal of savvy. Don’t worry, we’ll provide the savvy. Our team here are HawkSEM knows what it takes to mount a successful, cost-effective PPC campaign. Let us put that knowledge to work for you. Give us a call and let’s see if we can help reach your goals.

When looking at a big business from the outside as a small startup, large companies seem to have no worries when it comes to balancing the budget. It almost seems as if they have money to burn on advertisements and do not need to care about increasing the ROI of PPC advertising. This impression could not be further from the truth, which is what many once-struggling businesses discover after they reach a certain level of success.

Cost Per Acquisition: CPA

Google AdWords is one of the most popular and most important marking tools available to businesses of all sizes, and in order to connect with potential customers, companies must have a strategy for cost-effective customer acquisition bidding. This seems straightforward enough: a business bids for the right for their content to appear next to relevant search results. This in turn equals clicks and potential revenue. However, just like any other aspect of economics, it is rarely so simple.

Top 3 CPA Insights

Take these three CPA lessons to heart as you begin your quest to advertising perfection:

Market smarter

Spending your advertising budget wisely is more important than having a large marketing budget in the first place. No matter how much money you throw at SEO, PPC, or CPA, if your content is irrelevant to what your business offers or you focus too much in one area only, your ROI will be mixed at best.

A number one spot does not mean success

Many people strive to reach the number one spot at any cost without realizing that spending the extra money is not always worth it. One of the best aspects of the conversion system is that it can analyze the ROI of using more money for a higher ranking. Sometimes, it is better to sit tight at number two in order to balance costs.

Quality is crucial

One of the most important things to realize about search engine marketing of any kind is that the content and quality of your ads and landing pages directly translates into more affordable CPA. The better your copy, the less you have to pay for getting it onto the top of the ratings list. If your content is poor, you will be required to pay even more to get it pushed forward.

Do Not Let Your Online Marketing Strategy Become Stagnant

Rotating your advertisements and updating your keywords is a great way to keep your content refreshed and without spending more on bids. For the most current and effective marketing strategies like this, it is best to look toward the professionals. Stay on top of rising customer acquisition costs with the help of HawkSEM. To speak with one of our experts, call 800-316-2220 and be prepared to have your current marketing plan perfected, trimmed, and made to be as efficient as possible.

Far too many companies in SaaS only associate PPC with improving Cost per Acquisition (CPA). While you’ll find a wealth of information linking the two, that’s not to say that each is mutually exclusive to the other. Lowering your CPA is a broad-based task, with PPC being just one tool available to you to accomplish this. As you’ll see, there are other digital marketing strategies that you can also employ in order to bring on new business without having to break the bank.

Good Ole’ SEO

With all of the new online marketing trends that are so popular today, many overlook the effectiveness of plain old SEO. These words aren’t meant to downplay the complexity of this style of marketing, but rather to show that you don’t need to overhaul your content in order to make it effective at bringing in new business. By simply understanding search engine algorithms and how to mold your content to better accommodate them, you eliminate the need to throw a lot of time and resources in developing brand new advertising campaigns. By learning to master the intricacies of SEO, you enjoy the following benefits:

• Self-reliance
• ‘Evergreen’ sustainability
• Greater ROI
• More leads and sign ups
• Free or expensive traffic increases

Mastering Your Poker Face

In the world of internet marketing, if SEO is card counting, then content marketing is mastering your poker face. Rather than understanding how the search engine ranking system works and manipulating it to work in your favor, content marketing is understanding your customer base and tailoring your content to them. Yet knowing your customers entails a lot more than just having their names and e-mail addresses on file. You need to understand what really makes them tick when it comes to doing business, such as their:

• Buyer Personas and Backgrounds
• Intent
• Problems & Expectations
• Values

What makes content marketing such a cost-effective method at improving your CPA is that you already possess most of the information needed to improve your content. A thorough analysis of your sales history and the feedback provided by customers will give you a wealth of information on just what content really hooks customers. Add in to that a detailed analysis of keyword trends and their conversion rates, and content marketing allows you a virtual sneak peek inside of customers’ heads without them even knowing it.

Understanding just how to use SEO and content marketing to bring new visitors to your site is key if you hope to see high conversion rates from your online traffic. Combine these two marketing strategies with a successful PPC campaign, and you’ll immediately see your site turn into a powerful sales tool. We here at HawkSEM can help to turn this dream into a reality for you and your company. With our expertise in developing highly successful and cost-effective sales campaigns, we helped countless other clients to strengthen their online presence and achieve a greater ROI from their marketing dollars. We invite you to join those ranks. For more information on our digital marketing strategies, contact us today.

Analyzing year over year PPC data is not as straightforward as many marketing managers think. You have to connect trends in sales and trends in PPC campaigns beyond the number of dollars spent on PPC campaigns and revenue for a comprehensive PPC ROI report.

Step #1: Work Backward and Identify ROI From PPC Campaigns Based on Lead Scoring

You need to acquire meaningful data initially with keyword technology that tracks every conversion. A CRM system with an integrated lead scoring system can identify money keywords and give you a solid idea of what you can expect when highly qualified leads click on PPC ads. Other effective tools in initial and ongoing data acquisition and analysis include value track parameters, keyword conversion scripts, landing page conversion tracking, and a comprehensive CRM.

Step #2: Calculate Revenue From Each Lead

Determine the cost per lead and total revenue generated per lead. The formula is relatively simple: divide the total revenue acquired by the total number of leads in any given timeframe. Lead revenue can be calculated monthly, quarterly, biannually, and annually.

Step #3: Use Technology to Triangulate Data Between PPC Traffic and CRM Sales

Leverage the value of big data with the value of personal experiences from top customers and clients. Instead of only looking at the general connection between PPC traffic and sales, connect specific clients with specific PPC ads. It is important to separate the amount of ROI PPC campaigns are actually accountable for. PPC campaigns that generate highly qualified leads are more valuable than PPC campaigns that generate generic site traffic.

Step #4: Track Year-Over-Year Results From PPC Campaigns

Develop a number of metrics to look at in the long-term. See what returns from PPC campaigns look like over time, and develop a number of meaningful data points that represent ROI, not site traffic. YOY returns give necessary insight to the overall efficacy of different parts of PPC strategy, not just general conversion rates. Track efficacy and improvement in order to change money keywords, lead scoring, and CRM systems to drive ROI.

Step #5: Continue to Track Meaningful Metrics and Analyze PPC ROI Data

Naturally, the last step is to rinse and repeat. After all components are in place, get the most out of the data that provides answers instead of interesting statistics. Continue to drive ROI with PPC campaigns, not generic site traffic.

Contact HawkSEM to Learn More Now

At HawkSEM, we specialize in ROI. Request a consultation or call us at 800-316-2220 today for more information about how you can maximize returns with PPC.