In my last article, I wrote about why and how local ad agencies can offer Search Engine Marketing (SEM) services to their clients. To follow-up, I did an email interview with PurpleClick, an industry pioneer in Singapore started by ex-Yahoo guy Leonard Tan. Here are his views and experiencse of running a full-fledged SEM agency.
Give us a little background on PurpleClick.
PurpleClick Media is a SEM agency based in Singapore offering cost-effective, result-oriented search marketing solutions to both SMEs and enterprises. Services offered by the agency include CPC search modules, email marketing and web analytics. Founded in early 2006, the company has acquired rapid growth within a short period to become a leading online media agency in Singapore. Appointed by Yahoo! Southeast Asia as its official reseller of search marketing solutions and the “Preferred Partner in Search Advertising”, it is also an “Authorszed Adwords Reseller” of Google.
PurpleClick covers a few markets in the South East Asia region, including Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines and Indonesia. In 2008, PurpleClick Media Sdn Bhd was established with an office in Kuala Lumpur to better serve the Malaysian market. The agency has successfully launched thousands of SEM campaigns in the region. Clients range from global brands such as Avis and Citibank to local ones such as Jobs Central and National University of Singapore. The company’s strategic partnerships with major search engines and online portals, both local and regional, allow it to provide clients with efficient, cost effective and unbiased recommendation to maximise their campaigns.
Is recruiting staff with SEM knowledge/experience a problem?
Yes, it can be challenging to recruit staff especially when SEM is something so new in this region. Most of our employees have at least a diploma, but all of them must have at least passed the Google Adwords Test to become a Google Qualified Professional before confirmation. During recruitment, passion for the online industry is an essential trait for our job candidates, as we believe that only those who enjoy their work can share our company’s vision and provide the best level of service to our clients. We pay slightly higher than market rate to employ those we feel have the prerequisite to be groomed in this niche industry.
How do you position yourself and what are the services offered?
Our core product is Search Advertising, and we aggregate all the different search engines into one main campaign according to our client’s objectives. For instance, instead of going to Google and then to Yahoo to repeat their search advertising brief, clients can come directly to PurpleClick. We also empower our search campaigns with optimisation and web analytics, so that our client’s campaigns achieve maximum ROI. The focus is always on our clients, as our growth stems from theirs. When they experience increased sales from the traffic brought in, they’ll increase their spending and spread good word-of-mouth about PurpleClick and SEM.
Tell us about your relationship with Google and Yahoo.
We are the only company in the region to be officially accredited by both Yahoo and Google. This speaks a lot about our responsibility towards the search engines, and the level of service to our clients. People often ask, “So what’s the difference between going to PurpleClick and going to someone else who is not officially accredited by Yahoo or Google?” As an “Authorised Google Adwords Reseller” and “Yahoo Preferred Partner in Search Advertising”, our employees get direct training from the professionals at Yahoo and Google. Should there be any new products or product improvements from any of these search engines, authorised resellers are the first few to be updated and trained. Our client service also gets faster trouble shooting response should there be any questions regarding PurpleClick’s client’s campaigns.
What are the challenges in this industry and how do you differentiate yourself?
SEM is still quite new in this region and we are among the pioneers here. A large part of the market is still unaware of this useful tool and for those few who heard about it, there is still a lot of scepticism and misconceptions to be addressed. We need to educate the market, and be genuinely sincere to make SEM work for our client’s business. Optimising each and every one of our clients’ campaigns to ensure they achieve maximum returns is our utmost priority. Only when these early adopters of SEM receive the true benefits of this tool will they continue to use it and recommend it to their fellow businessmen or marketers. As the market gets more sophisticated, we can foresee more competition emerging, not only for our business, but also for our talents! We have experienced bigger agencies poaching our employees, since we’ve always been known to provide comprehensive training to our people. Thus it is even more important that the PurpleClick stays true to its vision and mission not only to our clients, but also internally as a team. When everyone walks into the office each morning with a common goal, it’ll definitely be more difficult to imagine yourself working somewhere else.
How big is the potential for SEM services in Malaysia and Singapore? What are the key challenges?
The potential for SEM is greatly positive here, especially when we look at the Internet penetration rates. Both Singapore and Malaysia’s governments greatly encourage the use of infocomm, and both markets are very open to SEM. Compared to countries such as the US and China, Singapore and Malaysia are considered small and need to depend largely on exports and international trade. SEM is one of the most cost effective and flexible tools for reaching a global market.
One of the key challenges is that while most could accept this new technology and are willing to learn about it, they may not use it. Perhaps they want to see if it really works out well for others before they take the plunge. There are also other industry players who are too focused on rolling out SEM solutions that their clients sign up due to the “trial package price” or “guaranteed clicks” offered without understanding how the entire SEM campaign process works. Sometimes, it may be even more difficult to rejuvenate those who have tried SEM before, either by doing SEM in-house or through other agencies, and have concluded that it didn’t work for them. Perhaps the wrong keywords were used, or the campaign was not run long enough to see results. We need to look into the underlying reasons of why the campaign didn’t perform as well as it should, and be open with clients as to what we’ll do and how we’ll help them move towards their goal.
What are the challenges you face with your clients? What is the attrition rate and why do they usually stop advertising?
The first challenge mentioned above might lead to some clients asking for a shorter campaign duration than usual, which we don’t encourage. More than 70% of our non-renewals are due to this reason. Before they could see results, the campaign has ended, and they conclude that SEM doesn’t work for their business and stop advertising. We need to run the campaign longer, review and test the keywords and descriptions, optimise it further, before coming to a solution. There are some clients who simply ask to buy whichever keywords their competitors are bidding, and try to outbid them. We need to maintain our professionalism in such cases, explain and suggest strategies that can meet their objectives in other ways, such as aligning the campaign to their companies’ core competencies and ranking words to maximise conversions instead.
SEO and PPC – which is more popular and do they cannibalise one another?
We should say that they are complementary. If the client understands the value of the traffic brought by the search engines to their businesses, both SEO and PPC are equally important to them. We have many clients who tried PPC first with us, and when they see results, started asking about other products that can help them bring in more traffic, such as SEO and web analytics. We often use this analogy to explain SEO and PPC. It is always a good idea to combine both SEO and PPC, similar to combining marketing and public relations efforts in a campaign. PPC is fast and covers as many keywords and target markets as the marketer would like in a given feasible budget. SEO, like PR, takes longer to build up the contents and links (just as it takes time to build up relationships with journalists in PR). One of the suggestions we often give to combine both is to run a PPC to find out the performing keywords then focus on optimising these keywords to achieve good organic ranking in the long run.
Thank you Leonard. Look out for my next article, where I’ll be writing for those on the other side of the fence – the advertisers.