Working as David Lloyds SEO and PPC agency of choice, Make It Rain have been able to produce impressive results on their search marketing campaigns since taking over the account from their previous agency.

At Make It Rain we focus on all areas of delivery with our clients, David Brosse, Head of Digital Marketing at David Lloyd said:

” I have experienced an impressive level of client service and Make It Rain have been proactive in quickly understanding our business.”

Additionally, when it comes down to results we’re very pleased to have helped David Lloyd achieve their goals and beyond:

“Make It Rain have significantly increased our enquiry conversion rate while boosting the volume of new membership enquiries; even more impressively they have driven down our cost per enquiry by nearly 50%. I would highly recommend Make it Rain to any business looking to improve their online ROI.”

It’s always great to have happy clients, and we’re proud of our partnership with David Lloyd in helping to achieve their desired goals from search engine marketing.  So if you need to shape up for summer, whether physically or financially, we’ll be happy to help.

And if you think we really should be following you just let us know!

We’re offering an impartial and honest on-site search consultancy, where we will look at every aspect of your campaign and point you in the right direction.

With many years experience in successfully running PPC and SEO campaigns across clients in all sectors, we believe everything can always be improved.  So much so, that if we can’t find anything to improve based on your goals, we won’t charge you a penny for our time!

With a strategic approach to achieving your goals we will deliver a confidential plan of action tailored specifically for you to start using straight away.

We will come to your offices and undertake a one-to-one session (usually half-day) where we will discuss in-depth your goals and current search campaigns.  Items covered will include:

PPC

• Keywords
• Titles and Descriptions
• Campaign setup
• Page testing
• Conversion analysis
• Tracking and Analytics

SEO

• Keywords
• On-Page optimisation including content and structure
• Current backlinks
• Building new high quality backlinks
• Tracking and Analytics

If you don’t want to take on an agency but would love to know what they know, now’s your chance.  To find out more or book a consultancy please contact us on 0207 627 4441 or consultancy@make-it-rain.co.uk

Remember, if we don’t think your campaign can be improved we won’t charge you a penny!

Make It Rain in-house consultancy services are only available to clients who currently undertake PPC or SEO in-house and do not use an external agency.

1. Market consolidation

Over the past 2 years we’ve seen a lot of specialist search agencies be taken over by corporate investors and larger agency networks, including the four largest, Bigmouthmedia, The Search Works, Latitude and Spannerworks.  With this has come more focus on profits and a need for consistently high growth. Add to this the loss of Google BPF and increasing staff churn and ultimately client service and innovation will suffer.

 2. Full service media agencies and networks

Many experienced search marketers have now jumped into ‘holistic’ marketing within their networks’ PPC/SEO/Social media agency.  While on the surface this sounds good when you tie all offline and marketing efforts together, in reality this never happens.

Having worked for a large media agency for a number of years, the focus will always be on what delivers the most profit for that agency, usually TV and media buying.  Search becomes a poor relation and is often offered for free or as a loss leader for the agency as part of the whole package.  This is never going to be the right environment for potentially talented search marketers to grow and help the industry progress.

3. Conferences 

Conferences like SES and SMX can be great, but after attending many over the past few years, i am still hearing the same generic messages and presentations year after year.  Within a market that’s over 10 years old, no-one seems willing to offer anything new or ground-breaking, but just to re-package the same old stuff.

So is this it, have we reached market stagnation?  No, i think the problem lies in search marketers selling out, due to bigger pay-cheques and conforming to agency rules.

Search has always developed due to having no boundaries or set rules with constant testing of new ideas, algorithm changes and different search engines to deal with.  We’re constantly learning and striving to be better, which is what gives me passion for the industry, it’s edgy and exciting.

Here at Make It Rain, we always believe campaigns can be made better with hard work and insight, not bound by rules or boundaries but just to be the best at what we do.

Think more Led Zeppelin and less Hanson and you’ll be halfway to where we are.

By linking your mobile with Google Latitude you can allow your friends and family to follow you and keep up with them at the same time via GPS on Google Maps.  Steve Lee, Google Latitude’s Product Manager says, “What Google Latitude does is allow you to share that location with friends and family members, and likewise be able to see friends and family members’ locations,”.  It’s currently available in 27 countries including the UK and is compatible with most smartphones.

Basic features:

• Download the app right to your mobile browser or to iGoogle at home
• Set, detect or hide your location
• Opt in to contacts from your Gmail that you want to follow
• Track, find and message your friends
• Easily send an SMS, e-mail or IM to get in contact with your friends

Privacy Features

There are two fabulous features incorporated into the app to help avoid the obvious stalker problems you can envisage with something like this.

• You can set your location (even if you’re not actually there). A godsend for outwitting your over-bearing girlfriend or inquisitive parent!
• Friend segmentation:
  • Allow a close-knit group of trusted friends to know your GPS location
  • Allow a larger group to see city based information (ie. Joe is in London)

Social media potential

It often seems that social networking is ironically becoming very unsocial and un-interactive.  Google Latitude probably doesn’t scream social networking application to you but in so many ways that is exactly the purpose it serves, and it could be a major step forward in bringing the social back to Social Media. Many social networking applications promote isolation and begin and end online.  The great thing about Google Latitude is that it cleverly enables you to find, contact and connect with your friends and is a one of the first to use social networking as a mechanism for facilitating offline social connections.

There is also enormous potential for location-based/geo-targeting advertising revenue for Google to pull in as well as the possibility to mashup Google Latitude with other apps and features like your calendar or Facebook contacts adding a new, fresh and social aspect to how we use social networking!

So what does that mean?  Well, in the same way we use software for social media analysis where we can scrape blogs and forums looking at positive and negative messages or increases in discussions around popular events, imagine being able to do that with all the data on facebook too.  From status updates to wall posts to images constantly being updated across 150 million, it’s a ridiculously easy way to find out what people really think.

Scoble talks about a potential use of being able to only select to receive ‘happy’ stories in your news feed and that they see lots of ‘going out’ and ‘hungover’ messages on weekend status updates.  Hmmm not exactly ground-breaking stuff.  Obvious better uses are seeing the reactions of users to world and local events such the recent US presidential campaign, or the impact on the daily lives of the economy downturn with messages around new jobs or leaving parties.

It’s got endless possibilities in how to dissect this sentiment information especially if businesses were able to use this to see reactions to their products and services which might just give facebook the monetisation stream it desperately needs……

There’s no disputing that aggregators are on the up-and-up this year.  Why? Well more than anything it’s due to the sheer number of sites we follow for news, blogs, photosharing, videosharing and social networking. We are reaching a point where it’s near impossible to remember each URL, login or names for that matter - and that’s where aggregators come in.

According to Wikipedia, “ Social network aggregation is the process of collecting content from multiple social network services, such as MySpace or Facebook. The task is often performed by a social network aggregator, which pulls together information into a single location[1], or helps a user consolidate multiple social networking profiles into one profile.[2]”

Power.com seems to be the latest Social Media darling according to TechCrunch and The New York Times, however, as aggregators themselves are relatively young, and no one has yet to define themselves as a market leader there are a few others that could easily come out ahead and at least two dozen contenders.

Meet Power.com

Power.com is amongst the up and coming social network aggregators offering a single, one-stop shop for everything social, allowing you to sync your MySpace, MSN,  Hi5, YouTube accounts and more into a single login portal.  It includes a summary page of all the action and allows access to various social sites.

Making headway in Brazil, Power.com has also quickly picked up momentum across India so that it now boasts 5 million users.  Backed with a recent $6 million in funding, Power.com is bracing to make a splash in the US this year after they recently became a public beta.

Can Power.com dominate?

Probably the biggest factor that could potentially hinder Power.com’s success is the fact that Facebook has recently sued them for infringement of copyright and trademark, among other things.  Without Facebook on board, it may be hard for Power.com to move forward.

However, the reason why Power.com is a set to be serious contender this year is that they seem to understand that communication is going to be the key to success for aggregators.  Unique IM between all of you contacts and allowing you to send messages to MySpace via your Power interface is one feature that currently sets them apart.

In addition, the interface is well laid out, easy to navigate and new users should be able to get the hang of it as soon as they sign in.

Who is their biggest competition?

FriendFeed - FriendFeed seems to be much more in competition with Twitter than with any social media aggregator by the looks of things.  Supported by over 40 applications including Digg, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter (funnily enough) FriendFeed casts one of the largest nets and unlike many other aggregators, FriendFeed, has many useful widgets and Plugins.

Flock - As an avid Flocker, I certainly think flock is the most underrated of them all. A fabulous marriage of  the Firefox browser and social media aggregator, one of the greatest features is that you don’t actually have to sign in to anything, only open your browser. Flock is easy to use and is supported by many social media networks, news sites, photo and video sharing although surely not as many as FriendFeed, Power.com or many others there is said to many set to join this year.

 What will it take?

The US - FriendFeed has a good presence in the US, with steady growth through 2008. Power.com is just trying to break into the US and it seems to be working. The figure below from Compete.com shows explosive growth for Power.com in US traffic in December. Will this flatline or continue to grow is the question?

Funding - In order to produce the kind of rapid development needed to become THE biggest player funding is going to be a defining factor. Given that FriendFeed received $5 million back in February 2008 and Power.com has recently acquired $6 million the playing field is relatively equal but 10 months in an industry in it’s growth stage means Power.com has some serious catching up to do.

Fine Tuning & Personalization – The tricky thing about becoming a successful aggregator is that one size does not fit all. As mentioned on CNET, when tailoring feeds of news with different purposes and shelf life’s, “After an absence of a few weeks some of the “old” information will still be relevant to you week-old photos of your nephew’s birthday party but other, newer news will be irrelevant due to its age, like a three-day-old blog posting about a stock you’re following.”

Discussion – FriendFeed, Flock and Power.com are all 3rd party aggregators.  As much as aggregators are a means of organizing and consolidating they will increasing so need to define themselves as social media hubs by creating, enabling, and facilitating conversations the same way in which the networks they support do. 

A New Mentality – It seems as though whoever is willing to abandon the old “build it and they will come” mentality in favor of actively seeking new sign ups and work on retaining them once they have will be successful.  Viral marketing such as “Sent by Power.com” messages and offering lighter options for new users to ease them in could be the key to gaining and keeping users.

From Australia to Switzerland it’s interesting to note that in Google Zeitgeist’s shapshot into search there are many global commonalities such as Facebook and Youtube appearing as favorites and the untimely death of Heath Ledger taking the number 5 position in the global fast rising searches.

You can download our PowerPoint presentation on the e-consultancy website or to help make it even easier, here’s an embedded version below.  If you didn’t get a chance to speak with us, and would like to know more then feel free to drop us a line with any questions you may have.

Other than being good for Google’s pockets this has had some negative effects on the industry as a whole. Some larger agencies have been running accounts at little or no cost to the client to win business, and even discounting poor performing accounts with kickback they receive. All of this is a false economy as there’s a lot more to paid search than just who is the cheapest. How about sales and ROI for starters?

Another area of concern was larger spending clients switching agencies every quarter and getting their account run for free or even getting paid from the agency for the privilege as the effect of having them as a client meant the agency would achieve their quarterly BPF target which meant a higher rate of kickback across their entire Google spend.

Now that’s not really pushing ‘innovation and industry growth’ is it?

So, moving on…..The ending of any kind of kickback from Google was always on the cards. It was just a matter of when and not if. If you look at the whole situation, Google has used the UK as a testbed for the past 4 years or so to hone their PPC model of which learnings they would carry to other larger markets such as the US, who have never had any kind of agency funding and to help saturate a lucrative market forcing a high level of dependency.

So what will happen in 23 days? Will there be a big client exodus? Will 2009 be the biggest rally of PPC pitch lists ever?

Lets look at the effects on agencies in particular. Things are happening already. I’ve seen certain agencies downsizing in staff over the past 6 months. I’ve also experienced them raise their minimum spend on PPC accounts they will accept to the extent of turning away business in order to achieve the management fees required to support these accounts. This is already having a positive effect on grass roots industry growth as these smaller clients are being passed to smaller agencies.

So will clients have to pay more in fees?

So far, Bigmouthmedia, the Search Works and Greenlight have all indicated that the disappearance of the BPF will not affect their current clients. Great news for clients. But with the potential loss of a large part of income there must be some effects on the agencies currently receiving BPF right? Well, as i already mentioned, the first signs are downsizing and raising the minimum client level spend for new clients.

There’s two ways to look at the bigger impact, firstly larger agency clients may become unserviceable financially based on negotiating lower management fees from the outset which will be re-addressed upon contract renewal, and hopefully service won’t suffer in the meantime as a result of re-shuffling agency staff. The second is that smaller clients will need to find new homes at a new agency as they’re not needed to make up the pool of spend on Google anymore and management fees are too low for larger agencies to service in relation to overheads.

What will happen to the clients?

Without subsidies and potentially higher fees there’s a little bit of panic obviously. However with a number of the larger agencies promising there will no increase in fees, i think we’ll not be seeing the panic pitching sessions we initially anticipated in Q1, but instead I believe this will be a constant flow of change throughout the year as contracts expire and agencies decide on whether to increase fees or not. Also, very interestingly, I’ve been speaking to a number of large recruiters recently who advise that there has been a large shift in briefs received from clients wanting to take search staff in-house.

I believe the overall effect of this move will fragment the market away from just large agencies dominating the PPC market and spread clients more widely across smaller-medium sized agencies who have never had reliance on BPF. This can only be positive for the industry as every agency brings new thoughts, technology and innovation to the table. It may also improve skills as agencies need to work harder to continue client and agency growth.

What does it mean for Make It Rain and our clients?

Well, being a new agency does have it’s benefits! Make It Rain was set up specifically not to rely on Google BPF and kickbacks. With full transparency and smaller overheads, each client will continue to receive the same high level of service as always. Additionally, we focus on end to end solutions helping clients with all areas of their online business so we’re not reliant on just specialising in PPC. The industry is changing for the better and it’s time to look at things from a new perspective.