In this article, I take a look at outsourcing versus insourcing your SEM campaigns.

When it comes to SEM (defined here as both the Search and Display networks in Google AdWords), you have more flexibility to manage in-house. Why? Depending on the size of the campaign, the work requires as little as one SEM campaign manager.

Considering that most SEM agencies charge between 15% to 30% of ad spend, outsourcing is usually cheaper for small to mid-size campaigns. However, if you have frequent and time-sensitive sales campaigns, having an in-house SEM manager is more efficient than having to pass messages to/from an agency. A good example is our e-commerce client, RedMart, who runs frequent marketing campaigns and hence, decided to take everything in-house. What we did was to help them build the campaign structure and targeting.

Apart from cost, the advantage of using an SEM agency is the experience they have from running many campaigns and the combined knowledge of a whole team compared to the experience and knowledge of a single SEM manager. An option is to engage the agency to audit your SEM campaigns from time to time.

Just like in Part 1, employee churn must be considered, i.e. if you rely on one SEM manager to manage your campaigns and if he/she resigns, what are you going to do?

The benefits of outsourcing become clear cut if you’re running a big campaign. With AirAsia’s global search campaigns, we use a hybrid model – Google’s travel team, AirAsia’s digital team and our team of 6 SEM campaign managers, which includes a native Thai and Indonesian each, to run campaigns in the local language.

In addition, we also got our development team involved to create scripts for custom daily reports, and an external Google Analytics consultant to optimize conversions. The teams meet on a weekly basis to discuss new strategies and review the campaigns.

To outsource or insource SEM? The answer depends on which scenario above fits your situation. If you still have questions, feel free to ask me.

The post To Outsource or Insource SEO and SEM? (Part 2) appeared first on Larry Lim's Blog.

In the course of pitching for jobs over the years, I’ve seen my fair share of desperate SEO/SEM agencies who’d reduce their fees to ridiculous levels and even throw in all sorts of promises and guarantees, in order to win. This is an unsustainable strategy and devalues our industry.

Over time, SEO/SEM services will become commoditized. Clients are willing to pay less and in return, agencies have to take on more clients to cover their overheads, thus, compromising on service quality. Clients don’t get the results they expect and put the money somewhere else. Every one loses – you, your peers, the client!

In addition, as an agency owner, you’d know by now that it’s difficult to raise your retainer for existing clients. Yet the cost of running a business increases every year, no thanks to inflation.

When we first started out, we made the same mistake and ended up attracting mostly lower quality clients (cheap, demanding, unrealistic), and having to work very hard for very little money. We even gave free trials for our services, but there were hardly any takers. Although the 6 free classes we did in 2013 helped with brand awareness, it generated close to zero conversions. We quickly realized that this was the wrong strategy.

A useful advice that I got from a friend was instead of pricing based on our cost and the competition, we should price based on the value we bring to the client.

So instead of competing on price, we developed our USPs, worked on branding, and sharpened our selling and networking skills. The networking gave us the opportunity to pitch, the USPs differentiated us, the branding allowed us to charge higher and the selling skills sealed the job.

We raised our fees to a fair value that would allow us to spend enough time and attention on the client, and achieve good results for them. This made the clients happy and they started referring their friends, saving us marketing dollars. We have charged clients as high as USD 12,000 a month for SEO and USD 25,000 a month for AdWords management.

Yet we are not alone. A Malaysian digital agency that I admire is VLT, whom despite being a relatively young agency, have managed to win jobs from the likes of BMW, Hilton and Sony. VLT has more than 100 employees working on only 6 clients – imagine the fee per client!

So if you’re still trying to win SEO/SEM jobs by being the cheapest and by using sales gimmicks, perhaps it is time to consider focusing instead on branding, technical expertise, service quality and results. Because clients do value them and are willing to pay a premium to have them.

The post Digital Agencies Should Stop Competing on Price appeared first on Larry Lim's Blog.

Marketers are always faced with this conundrum – to outsource SEO and SEM, or build your own internal team. Startups especially, often feel that performance marketing should be a core competency and most would build their own team once they have enough funding.

Malaysia Airlines for instance, believes in managing their SEM campaigns internally, with support from Google’s travel team. On the other hand and despite online being their main sales channel, AirAsia prefers working with external specialists like SearchGuru.

There is no right or wrong anwser. I’m going to help you decide by laying out the “real world” pros and cons, for both SEO and SEM respectively.

1. Outsourcing vs Insourcing SEO

With SEO, you’re essentially (if you’re honest enough to admit!) trying to manipulate the search results in your favour, with the goal of getting more visibility and getting more traffic and conversions from the search engines.

The risk of a poorly implemented SEO campaign is your website getting penalized. Before you start thinking this is a scare tactic, the fact is I’ve personally come across clients whose websites have disappeared from Google’s search results. Even big established sites like iMoney, who came to us for help last year, were not spared.

Those familiar with SEO will understand it to be a very manual and costly process. To give you an idea on the resources required, this is what we have at SearchGuru for SEO:

– 1x SEO strategist to analyze, plan the campaign and provide recommendations.
– 1x project manager to oversee the implementation of the SEO campaign.
– 1x writer to analyze, add or edit the client’s on-page content.
– 1x editor to plan, manage, Copyscape-check and review the content for link-building.
– a team of writers to create articles for link-building.
– 2x link-builders to plan, schedule and manage the backlinks.
– 1x analyst to review campaign performance to see if it’s aligned with the client’s goals.
– a private content network of over 200 websites and growing, for link-building.
– various tools for SEO, rank-tracking and reporting, that cost thousands of USD/mth.

So unless you have resources for the above, it makes more sense to outsource your SEO because it is a lot more cost-efficient – i.e. you can’t do without any of the above, but on the other hand, it is an overkill to have all of them for just one website.

Due to the shortage of real SEO talent, hiring and retaining your team is also going to be a challenge. Competitors, other businesses, agencies and startups – with bigger brands and who can afford to pay higher salaries – will try to poach your staff.

iCar Asia (that owns Carlist.my) for instance, took months before they managed to hire their current Head of SEO. And based on what I heard, they had to hire from Australia.

The approach I’d recommend for a bigger company with more resources is a hybrid model, i.e. to have 1 to 2 in-house SEO people but at the same time, work with an external SEO agency.

The in-house guys will be able to work on and monitor the progress of SEO, on a full-time basis. They will also bridge the important gap between the external agency and your development team, marketing team, PR team, and the management. For example, ensure the company’s PR team uses best SEO practices when engaging with bloggers and the media to gain maximum SEO mileage from the published content.

I hope the above has been useful in helping you make your decision. In the next part of this article, I’ll discuss outsourcing versus insourcing your SEM campaigns.

The post To Outsource or Insource SEO and SEM? (Part 1) appeared first on Larry Lim's Blog.