What's New in Marketing - Issue 49, June 2006

http://www.wnim.com

The Top 10 SEO Success Factors, Part 2.

Introduction

In this article on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and the previous one last month (http://www.wnim.com/archive/issue0506/index.htm), I explain the 10 most important factors to improve your results from the natural or organic search engine listings. These factors are based on a recent report from E-consultancy (2006) for which I was lead author and involved extensive research and review with leading SEO practitioners (both client side and agency side). In total, the report identified hundreds of actions marketers and their agencies can take to improve results from SEO, but here I summarise the Top 10 factors which should be part of your SEO strategy.

What are my search trends?

In my last article on SEO we showed how you could use tools (Chaffey, 2006) from the search engines to see how many searches there are for your brands, products and services. Well, in the fast-moving world of search innovation, there is now a new tool from Google for showing the trends in this consumer behaviour.

In May 2006, Google released Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends which enables you to visualise:

· search volume (when the volume is greater than several hundred searches per month)

· for a specific keyphrase

· for a specific country

· through time

· compared to other keyphrases (separate by commas)

Tip

Use this tool to see peaks, periodicity or long-term trends in how your users search for you or your products.

Try this example:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=ipod& ctab=0& geo=all& date=all

How many factors determine ranking in Google?

My Top 10 groups together many success factors. In previous versions of their recently updated webmaster guidelines (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters), Google stated that there were over 100 ranking factors that affect SEO.

But a recent May 2006 presentation by Alan Eustace (http://google.client.shareholder.com/Visitors/event/build2/MediaPresentation.cfm?MediaID=20263& Player=1), the Senior VP of Engineering at Google said that Google uses over 200 ‘signals’ to assess the relevance of a page for a particular query! Of course, he didn’t illuminate us on what these were, but it does indicate the extent of the challenge for SEOers.

The challenge has always been that only the inner sanctum of Google search engineers knows the factors. Everyone else involved in SEO determines these factors based on published papers, experience and testing. The challenge is made worse by frequent improvements to the search engine algorithms to improve the quality of results.

Tip

When asking agencies to pitch for SEO, ask them how they keep up-to-date about changes to the search engine algorithms and how they monitor for the impact of them. And expect to pay fees for this service – SEO isn’t a one-off expenditure unfortunately – it’s an ongoing commitment.

The importance of ethical SEO

Significantly, Google Senior VP of Engineering, Alan Eustace, did mention the efforts Google takes to remove or decrease the visibility of spammers within the index and this is such an important issue to our next five points that we need to briefly walk into the world of white hat and black hat SEO.

When selecting an agency it is important to review how they balance ethical SEO with the need to maximise search rankings, particularly for competitive keyphrases, through exploiting understanding of how the search engine ranks position.

Some affiliates and some search companies practice what is known as ‘black-hat’ SEO, which means pushing and often overstepping the limits of the terms of service and guidelines of the search engines, in order to gain the best result possible.

These black hat techniques are sometimes referred to as ‘search engine spamming’. One example is repeating an important keyphrase many times on the homepage. Another is using text that it is the same colour as the background of the page, so the keyphrase is visible to the search robots and algorithm, but not to the human reader. Engineering pages for robots is a practice known as ‘cloaking’. You may have heard how Google barred BMW Germany from its index early in 2006 until it removed cloaking achieved through a Javascript redirect. You can see the details about the spamming explained here by Matt Cutts of Google:http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ramping-up-on-international-webspam/. Another type of spamming mentioned by Alan Eustace of Google in his talk are link-farms. These are a network of sites that link to other sites for the sole purpose of gaining improved rankings in Google – they tend to contain links to unrelated sites.

Tip

So you must select a search agency who wears a white hat rather than a black hat – which is easier said than done since there are no definitive definitions of which is which, and many of the best search optimisers wear grey hats…

In the first article on SEO I reviewed these five SEO success factors.

1. Goal setting Setting Best Practice

2. SEM Strategy Best Practice

3. Site inclusion Best Practice

4. Document meta data Best Practice

5. On Page optimisation Best Practice

The next five best practice approaches are:

6. External linking Best Practice

7. Internal linking Best Practice

8. Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) effectiveness Best Practice

9. Landing page Best Practice

10. Integrated SEO Best Practice

Since 6, external link-building is the most important and the most involved, we focus mainly on this aproach.

6. External link building best practice

One of the reasons for the dramatic growth of the Internet is the ease with which related sites and pages within sites can link to each other. This is a natural process and with good quality content, many sites will naturally receive links from other sites whose owners believe the linked content is a good resource for their visitors.

The developers of Google realised that the number of links into a page and the quality of the links were a great way of determining the relevance of a page to searchers, especially when combined with the keyphrases on that page. This was really THE key factor that helped Google deliver more relevant results than its competitors when it launched in the late 1990s. Although the Google algorithm has been upgraded and refined continuously since then, external links are still very important. Indeed most SEOs would agree that improving external links is THE most important of the 10 factors we have described in these articles, particularly in competitive sectors. However, it does need to be coupled with on-page optimisation for best results.

To understand this factor, we also need to understand the history of Google’s development. When Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin first developed Google at Stanford University, a key feature in their approach was to use backlinks or links into a page from other pages as an assessment of the quality of sites. They called this approach PageRank™, after Larry Page. If we ignore the science behind PageRank, essentially, more links from sites which themselves have high PageRank will help increase the ‘link popularity’ of your site. PageRank is presented in the Google toolbar from 0 to 10. It is not a regular scale; it is widely believed to be a logarithmic scale, similar to the Richter scale for earthquakes. The average business is in the range 4 to 6, with larger businesses and organisations in the range 5 to 8. Media owners and publishers like the portals and the BBC are in the higher echelons of 8 to 10. Of course, what is important is how your page rank compares to your traditional competitors and those media owners who rank well for search terms used by your potential customers.

Tip

Assess the PageRank of your sites relative to traditional and online competitor using the Google toolbar or one of the major page rank checkers. You can also get an indication of the number (but not quality) of links into your site and competitors by googling link:< www.yourdomain.com> (a sample of the more important links) or < www.yourdomain.com> -site:< www.yourdomain.com> (all pages with a reference to your page).

Think link-quality not link-popularity

Today, Google assesses not just number of links into a page, but also uses the concepts of hubs and authorities to assess the relevance of a page about a particular topic. This approach was originally described by Google engineers Bharat and Mihaila (1999). A hub page (actually referred to as ‘Expert page’ in the paper) is a page which contains many quality outbound links about a particular topic. An authority page, referred to as a “target” in the paper contains many inbound links about a topic. Expert pages (hubs) are given more weighting to identify authority pages.

The context of the linking page is also very important, with the search engines needing to determine hubs and authorities based on an assessment of the context (or theme) of the link for the page based on the phrases it contains.

In the Bharat paper there is a direct indication of the factors used to assess the theme of a page. They suggest the importance to good ranking, of a searchers keyphrases occurring in:

· The page title phrase (part of on-page optimisation described in last months article)

· Headings within documents (again on-page optimisation)

· Hyperlink anchor text (the words making up the hyperlink)

Tip

The importance of hyperlink anchor text isn’t always realised by content authors, with many sites having hyperlinks which read click here or read more rather than referring to the target document’s content. This is often a constraint/feature of content management systems, but body copy links can be used to refer to the target document using a meaningful link such as, “read more about search engine optimisation best practice (http://www.e-consultancy.com/publications/seo-guide/) which is also better from a user experience point-of-view.

Six Best practice approaches to link-building

In the E-consultancy (2006) Best Practice guide, we detail six approaches to gaining external links:

1. Natural link-building through quality content –- through creating ‘must-have’ resources and Guides

2. Requesting inbound-only links - Run a link-building campaign

3. Reciprocal linking – Check partner links, develop existing

4. Buying links – Directories and link purchase exchanges (not ethical)

5. Creating your own external links – On blogs and in community forms (not ethical)

6. Generating buzz through PR - Optimise and distribute your press releases

Different types of agencies provide services in these areas, but some aspects of link-building can be resourced internally.

Tip

Ken McGaffin’s Linking Matters (http://www.linkingmatters.com/) gives a great summary of a commonsense approach to link-building which covers some of the approaches above.

7. Internal linking best practice

Many of the principles of external link-building can also be applied on your own sites. There you have the benefit that you have control of the linking, although the impact is less than links from external sites. The most important principle is to include keyphrases used by searchers within the anchor text of a hyperlink to point to relevant content. You can apply this concept to these different types of content:

· Links from standard navigation

· Links from ancillary navigation (e.g. page footers)

· Links from document listings (including publishing search results or lists of news items)

· Sitemaps (useful for both human visitors and search robots – Google recommends creating these)

· Body copy and image links

Tip

Review the sitemap on your website to see how well the anchor text in the links reflects the searching behaviour of users. Is it product-centric or customer centric?

8. Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) effectiveness best practice

In last month’s article we described the importance of document meta data for on-page optimisation and improved rankings. Another benefit of paying attention to document meta data, is that you can control the marketing messages in the search engine results pages to communicate your proposition better to your prospects and to encourage them to clickthrough to your site – it’s a call-to-action. It is widely predicted that Google and other engines use analysis of the click behaviour of searchers to help assess the relevance of the content and so use it as a positive ranking factor.

So, what determines the effectiveness of your call-to-action within the SERPs?

Tip

To run a quick check on the effectiveness of your SERPS effectiveness for a particular category, Google: < product name> site:< domain name> , e.g. http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=mortgages+site%3Awww.hsbc.co.uk

Do the titles and document descriptions encourage searchers to click through?

In the best practice guide, we take this example, using the top result for this query:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=email+marketing+site%3Awww.e-consultancy.com

There are four main parts of your SERPs listing that determine its effectiveness. These are:

1. Hyperlink call to action, e.g. Email Marketing Secrets: How to use e-mail to promote your ... Determined by < title> tag.

2. Description of page, e.g. E-consultancy’s latest research, reports, case studies, etc.

Determined by < meta name=“description” content= “phrase”> . Where we see this can also be determine by entry in www.dmoz.org or snippets from the site. Snippets are often displayed where the meta description have been omitted or is short because of the half-truth that ‘meta tags aren’t important anymore’.

3. Page address or URL, e.g. www.e-consultancy.com/publications/email_marketing_secrets/ Determined by page address. Best practice is to use hyphens rather than underscores and to use a directory and document name which show the value – gives a reason to click.

4. Other information. This may include stock prices or a recent innovation is a mini-directory of links taken from links on homepage. It is very difficult to control this since it is based on a combination of factors that cannot be readily isolated.

In May 2006, Google launched Google Co-Op (http://www.google.com/coop) which, through a tagging approach, allows user to narrow down their search.

For example, for the photography category (http://www.google.com/coop/topic?cx=photo_video_devel) users can do a search and then narrow down the results to types of document, i.e. Reviews, Price comparisons, Troubleshooting, Negative reviews, Shops, Manuals, Sample photos, Current deals, Accessories.

If you try these categories, the word selected, e.g. ‘Reviews’ tends to occur in the < title> , meta description, or snippet, so if you want a page on your site to feature in ‘Reviews’ for example, it seems obvious to include these words in the document meta data.

9. Landing page best practice

The best SEO in the world can be let down if the site itself isn’t effective. So we need to review the user experience and persuasion effectiveness of our landing pages. Landing pages, landing pads or microsites are variously used to refer to specific page(s) for campaign referrals designed to achieve communications objectives i.e. conversion AND familiarity. I have written about these in a previous edition of WNIM: http://www.wnim.com/archive/issue0306/index.htm. Basically, we’re talking about increasing conversion rates, to lead or sale, and reducing bounce rates (the percentage of visitors to a page who visit and immediately disappear) when visitors are referred from the natural listings. The guidelines we reviewed in the previous article were:

1. Deliver relevance

2. Integrate with referrer

3. Provide supporting detail / meet objections

4. Start the user on their journey. Make it easy

5. Use the right page length

6. Use meaningful images and graphics

7. Remove menu options?

8. Consider fluid layout

9. Remember SEM

10. Remember the non-responders

11. Consider page longevity

12. TIMITI!

TIMITI is a term coined by Jim Sterne, author of Web Metrics, it stands for Try It! Measure It! Tweak It! i.e. online content effectiveness should be reviewed and improved continuously rather than as a periodic or ad-hoc process.

10. Integrated SEO best practice

Bringing together all the approaches to search engine optimisation we have looked at in the last two articles, you can see that effective SEO blends technical skills with marketing skills. It also involves looking at your own site and relationships with partner sites. So finally, here is a checklist for different activities that need to be managed as part of your own search strategy.

Technical activities

· Work to improve and maintain index inclusion

· Revise site architecture

· Revise page coding

· Internal linking strategy

External marketing activities

· Understanding consumer search behaviour – keyphrase analysis

· Understanding competitor activity – gap analysis

· External link-building

· Optimisation of press releases

Internal marketing activities - Site design and content effectiveness

· Improve page template effectiveness

· Improve SERPs effectiveness

· Improve landing page effectiveness

· Refine SEO for homepage and other key pages

· Creation of new themed pages for target keyphrases

· Refine document meta data

· Refine on-page optimisation for existing documents

Well that’s all there is to it, good luck in the ever-changing, always important world of SEO!

Next month

In a later article, I will give you another Top 10, for paid search marketing, since today paid search is an essential part of every search marketing strategy, partly because of the complexity of SEO. I will also take a look at web analytics tools and techniques for measuring the effectiveness of search marketing and web marketing. But before then, we will move from tactical to strategic, where I will give my view on another Top 10, this time, the Top 10 strategy issues for e-channels.

References

Bharat, K. and Mihaila, G. (1999) Hilltop: A Search Engine based on Expert Documents

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~georgem/hilltop/

Chaffey, D. (2006) Keyphrase analysis tool compilation (http://www.davechaffey.com/SEO-Best-Practice)

E-consultancy (2006) Search Engine Optimization SEO Best Practice Guide 2006, Published April, 2006. (http://www.e-consultancy.com/publications/seo-guide/)

About the author

Dr Dave Chaffey is workshop leader for a range of one-day e-marketing training workshops from the CIM:

• E-mail Marketing (www.cim.co.uk/0766)
• Running Effective E-marketing Campaigns (www.cim.co.uk/0767)
• Improving Your Results from Digital Marketing (www.cim.co.uk/1138)
• Marketing Research Using the Internet (www.cim.co.uk/1135)

Go to http://www.cimtraining.com/ for course details and online booking.

Dave Chaffey is trainer and consultant for Marketing Insights Limited (http://www.marketing-online.co.uk/). He is a prolific e-business author whose books include ‘Total E-mail Marketing’, ‘Internet marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice’ and E-business and E-commerce Management.

Read Dave Chaffey’s blog (http://www.davechaffey.com/) for E-marketing Essentials – the 5 “must-read” articles about online marketing from the hundreds Dave reads each month.

Marketing performance should be measured by results

There is nothing new in business. Old knowledge is forgotten, rediscovered, and then reissued in different packaging “As new”. Measurement for management had been around for a long time since the advent of “time and motion” studies in the 1930s. Yet Marketing is the last area of business to come under “time and motion” scrutiny. Marketing people often seem to have been reluctant to have their activities measured and monitored as in the other areas of business such as finance and operations. The general view, is that Marketing is more of an art than a science, and therefore not conducive to useful measurement. Marketing, which encompasses all of “business getting” activities of a company in generating profitable revenue, requires considerable investment in money and resources, and is at the heart of every business. It is therefore not good management practice to allow Marketing activities to continue without proper measurement of both the investment, and the results. If all Marketing is investment, why would companies not want to assess the returns on their money?

Applying measurement and analysis to Marketing activities is not something to be avoided, especially by marketers. Increasingly Chief Executives and Financial Officers are looking to ensure that measurement of the return on investment is used across the whole business area, including Marketing. For marketers, Measuring Marketing Performance provides an opportunity to give quantifiable proof of the value of their contribution to the business.

A survey in late 2005 by The Chartered Institute of Marketing revealed that just 11 of the UK’s FTSE 100 companies have a Marketer on the main board. If Marketing encompasses all the “business getting” activities of a company, it seems strange that it has no Board representation, alongside that of finance and operations in the majority of companies. Perhaps the reason is that Marketing is frequently perceived too narrowly in terms of advertising and sales, and lacking the quantifiable accountability of Finance and Operations, is unable to prove and justify its contribution. The question that arises is, “Do marketers only understand the individual elements of Marketing activity, rather than understanding the management of all the “business getting” activities of Marketing as a whole? If Marketers are not able to quantify the contribution of Marketing to a business, then their credibility as managers will be insufficient to merit membership of a Board of Directors. As Peter Drucker said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”.

Although measurement in Marketing is being talked about, it is usually limited to specific marketing activities, advertising, CRM, sales, market share etc. The new ideas of “Marketing Due Diligence,” seeks to link marketing activity with shareholder value. Nonetheless, marketing activity is for one purpose only, which is to generate profitable revenue for the business, meeting the requirements of the business plan in pursuit of the business’s strategic purpose and mission statements. Every business comprises three elements, shareholders who supply finance, employees who do the work, and customers who supply the revenue. All three elements must be kept happy if the business is to remain in being. Thus Marketing’s responsibility must be to maximise profitable revenue by satisfying customers, and thereby providing profit for the shareholders and salaries for the employees.

Recently, while making a presentation on the case for measuring marketing performance to a regional meeting of the IOD, the question arose, “Was there any common problem in marketing Management?” My perception is that a lot of management especially in Marketing relies on assumptions rather than hard fact. Successful management requires searching questions and factual answers. Marketing in common with other areas of business continues to develop a language of its own. This in turn encourages people to assume that others understand the terms, but frequently this is not the case. Other people may use the same terms but have a completely different understanding of the meaning. One has only to ask for the meanings of Metrics, Benchmarks and ROMI, to understand the variety of definitions which are assumed to be correct. In 2005 the American Marketing Association and Aprimo Inc. identified no less than six additional interpretations of the term ROI. What is obvious is that if Marketers are imprecise in their terms and definitions it is open to question how they can quantify the contribution of Marketing with any certainty.

Marketers are getting better at measuring the performance of specific marketing activities. However, except for specialist response advertising, most advertising campaigns cannot be linked directly to specific sales. Brand awareness, market share and other measures all have a certain importance. Nevertheless, the various marketing activities are not generally independent but are mutually supporting, so that it is not usually possible to ascribe specific marketing actions to specific marketing results.

The job of the Marketing manager is to maximise profitable revenue, while minimising the costs involved and the assets used. To achieve this, the manager must understand all the activities involved in getting and maintaining business. The manager must ask difficult and searching questions, avoid assumptions, and seek quantifiable proof of performance. The ultimate question is, “Does Marketing collectively make a financial contribution to the business in terms of profitable revenue, and can the marketing manager prove that it does so cost effectively?”

About the Author

Nicholas Watkis of Contract Marketing Service, (Specialists in Measuring Marketing Performance and Return on Marketing Investment.) For more information please visit:

http://www.contractmarketingservice.com/

http://www.businessperformancemaximized.com/

Making Values Work

One of the biggest challenges faced by any organisation is how to translate its corporate strategy into something that the individuals who represent it can understand and act upon on every day. This is where the concept of Values can help.

Most organisations have a set of corporate Values, which, in theory, helps to both define and shape the unique internal culture. This in turn, is a powerful driver of business performance.

Defining a clear set of corporate Values is a component part of developing a high performance culture, which helps to secure sustainable competitive advantage in markets where all other things may be equal. A Values based culture is not something that can be easily or quickly replicated by the competition, and with momentum and given time, becomes an established part of life in the organisation. Values-related action at work should be as natural as discussing last night’s television or tomorrow’s weather.

Every business needs some distinctiveness and personality in the market place. The Values vocabulary is relatively limited, and can tend towards truisms, but if its interpretation can be individual and dynamic, it can create an environment that (for instance) promotes acceptable levels of initiative and appropriate degrees of risk taking amongst employees.

Values in action

Our practical experience shows that once they have been defined there are three key stages in making Values work: Consensus, Communication and Reinforcement.

We start from the premise that an organisation has developed, or wishes to develop, a set of Values to reflect and describe its strategic ambitions. Bringing them into the public (or semi-public) domain serves no purpose unless it makes a real and discernible difference to the organisation as a whole: simply making the Board feel better is not enough.

The process of installation must remove any ambiguity and inconsistency about what is desired: organisations that apparently have a different set of internal and external Values can hardly expect to achieve a cohesive approach. Consistency of the message and the manner of delivery is also important.

Consensus

Consensus as a position reached by the relevant group of people, rather than one that is imposed upon them. Creating a sense of enthusiastic ownership on the part of as wide a representation of the whole employee base as possible will go a long way towards ensuring the desired outcome.

The most common and effective methodology we have found to create this consensus is via a series of workshops in which employees discuss the company Values in relation to identifiable aspects of their own working lives. If it’s not practical to have all staff attend these workshops then the process can still be a democratic and robust one, with attendance perhaps determined by a combination of management and peer group nomination.

Communication

Whatever the consensus reached, it should be confirmed and communicated as a reference point, using appropriate technology and media. People who subsequently join the organisation will need to be acquainted with the Values and their practical application as quickly and as simply as possible. One might expect a smile of recognition, as the new recruits will have been selected partly because of their skill sets, but also partly because they exude the qualities and behaviours that are consistent with the Values that the organisation is seeking to reinforce.

All staff need to be convinced and regularly reassured that their job is worth doing, and worth doing well. Values are the organisation’s way of formalising and structuring its approach, but they only make sense if their aim is understood and accepted. There must be unity between the Values themselves and the way in which they are represented.

Reinforcement

The organisation must place a visible premium on identifying exemplary behaviour in support of the Values, endorsing it promptly and publicly. Otherwise the exercise may soon become ‘just another initiative’ rather than ‘the way we always do things round here’. This is a central strand to developing the right behaviour into the right habits and natural actions: it means translating the exemplary behaviour into something that relates to ‘your reality’ and ‘your job role’.

Any debate this initiates within the organisation is a good thing. If people can discuss and agree what needs to be done to gain recognition and approval, then half the battle is won. The remainder can be secured by simple guidelines on practical implementation through what individuals can actually do, and by measuring and monitoring their actions. As well as providing a basis for commendation and recognition, and keeping the Values in the public eye, such measurement generates powerful management information about performance by location, by job role, by function, even down to a manager’s direct reports.

Peer recognition is an important element in reinforcement: many ‘good deeds’ are performed out of sight of managers, but they are rarely unseen by colleagues as well. I know when my colleague has demonstrated dedication and teamwork, because I was the beneficiary. The enlightened employer will provide a way of making this public, so that my colleague’s actions can be publicly recognised and appreciation recorded.

In summary, a few tips for making Values work:

Do

• Put time, effort, energy… and budget into making Values meaningful
• Ensure they are championed at the top… but arrived at through consensus
• Ensure they are evident in those with management responsibilities and those who are successful within the organisation
• Communicate them with vigour, but not intrusively – the screen saver and mousemat may be a step too far
• Reward Values-evident activity… promptly and publicly
• Facilitate peer nominations for Values related reward
• Build your Values into your recruitment process

Don’t

• Put some posters up and think “job done”
• Impose a set of words because the board likes them
• Have a vote because it is quicker and we need to get on with some real work
• Use them as a stick to beat people with or allow them to stifle initiative
• Expect a culture change overnight
• Allow the cynics (there are always some) to undermine what you are trying to do

About the author

Rik Burrage is Managing Director of Grass Roots, an international provider of motivational and performance improvement services.

Agency Workers of the World Unite and Take Over

There are changes happening in the agency world that both in-house marketers and agency staff should note.

It was not very long ago that the big agency names dominated, ruling the agency world like primeval dinosaurs. But a few years back the smaller players emerged. Young ambitious agencies started to take root and challenge the old order.

Hungry marketing agency staff learnt the skills of their particular discipline. They became good at what they did and they began to believe they could survive and prosper in the harsh climate of the agency world.

But could they really survive in the untamed and competitive world of the marketing agency? The answer was yes. Many fell by the wayside but many grew from one or two ambitious staff to a team and a place in the hierarchy.

Things are changing again. How do I know? Ask recruiters if they can easily attract the experienced marketing, PR, design and advertising staff for agencies. The answer is that it is not as easy as it once was. Why? It is because the new breed of freelancer has emerged. The micro agency will evolve and become a part of the landscape. Fewer agency staff are attracted to working for anyone but themselves.

But if you have kept up with my Jurassic Park metaphors and you are interested as an agency worker or in-house why it matters I will drop the Darwin inspired terms.

For the in-house marketer it means choice. Over used as a term I know but it really does. There is a place for the marketing behemoth, the BDHs and Saatchi and Saatchi. But not every marketing executive and their company will be suited to working with the biggest agencies and the biggest agencies will not always be suited to them.

Big agencies are often very good for big clients with big budgets. There is no doubt that smaller agencies can often be great suppliers for big companies as well. However, the bigger, and medium sized, agencies generally want the larger fee payer. Sometimes the client chooses them because a big name satisfies the demands of a company’s ego. Sometimes, and very often, it is the result that a marketer does not know the agency scene and just goes for the names they know, irrespective of how suitable they are.

I urge in-house marketers to shop around. When you buy a car do you pick the first one you see or have heard about? There would be no point buying a Ferrari because it is the most impressive and expensive car if your requirements need to take account of a family. In the same way you should chose the agency that meets your needs based on: cost, specialist skills, sector experience and most importantly, eagerness to work with you and general attitude.

With the emergence of the micro agency and smaller players, the choice to shop around has increased. Do not overlook this resource. They are just as often as good as the bigger agencies and often better. They can also be much cheaper and more enthusiastic. They need your business. They cannot afford to lose an account like some can without even a shrug of the shoulders. And most importantly they need to impress you so they can grow by recommendation.

And now to refer to my catchy title. Agency marketers you do not have to be at the mercy of agency politics, redundancy and slave conditions. (If you are good agency boss please excuse the last sentence). Sure, it is really difficult to work for yourself, but it can be done. You will have a new set of problems. Yet, every big agency was small once. I am not saying drop everything and do a marketer version of The Good Life. If you just find yourself without a position because of redundancy, family commitments or you are returning to work, it is worth considering. Or you just want to try to work for yourself rather than someone else and have the time and the cash to give it a go.

There is a market for the micro business. Small and medium sized companies can benefit from affordable experience and skills, as indeed can bigger companies.

There are many brilliant agencies, both large and small. There are many freelancers and micro agencies to consider.

So before you buy marketing or PR services again know that the first or biggest name you hear is not the only name to contact. Things are changing in the agency world, take note and take advantage.

About the author

Rob Baker set-up Artisan Marketing Communication this year to give enterprises of all sizes, and especially smaller players, more choice and affordable PR to grow their businesses. Rob welcomes your comments, even from marketing dinosaurs and his details can be found at http://www.artisanmc.co.uk/