4 Words Your Marketing Company Will Never, Ever Say

"We should be fired."

If your search marketing program is not working, odds are you may not first hear about it from your search marketing company. Good marketers know, no matter the situation, find the silver lining. This is why you're not going to hear things such as "we just don't think we're working out for you" from your search marketing partner.

Unfortunately, important benchmarks are not defined at the beginning of the campaign so that both parties know how well the partnership is working at any time. You can establish a healthy, measurable relationship with your search marketing partner at outset - or even during an ongoing campaign, if you know what benchmarks to set.

Know Your Goals

Know what it is you expect your search marketing program to do, and know how you plan to measure it. Forget about the technology, look at what you expect your site to do for you and create measurable objectives. It sometimes helps to look at your site as you would a salesperson and create goals, measurements, and check-in points accordingly. This is also a helpful exercise to help you to determine whether you are setting your website up for success.

If you establish a CPA (cost per action or cost per acquisition) for your campaign, the process is much more simple. I suggest thinking deeply about your CPA. For example, in some industries it's perfectly acceptable to pay over a thousand dollars (in effort) to get a meeting with a prospect. In other industries it might generally cost less than twenty five dollars to get in front of a potential customer. If you're selling on your site, it's a bit easier because you don't need to calculate the value of a lead, you can simply calculate the value of a sale (and some sales will calculate differently than others).

If you Don't Know Your Goals, Ask for Help in Setting them

Not knowing good goals is very common and easy to overcome. Your search marketing provider can help you create goals and to create the points and means by which goals are measured. Simply ask them to suggest a set of measurable objectives that your campaign should be meeting and the frequency by which these measurements should be taken. If the goals they set seem to be reasonable to you, you're off and running with a campaign that has been de-mystified.

4 Words Your Marketing Company Will Never, Ever Say

We're always here and ready to help. If you are investigating a new search campaign - even if you're not considering us - feel free to give us a call and pick my brain for some advice on how and when to measure the success of your campaign.