Month: December 2020

Request for Proposal abbreviated as RFP is a vital aspect of a standard business postulate. Most business in modern days invite suppliers and service providers to join a bidding process to purchase specific service(s) or product(s). The days of writing traditional letters to request for prices of products and service are long gone – giving way to the RFP. With more creative ideas and time-based experience the system has been improved a lot to make it more transcendental.

So what’s in it for you … you as the purchaser have often wondered and felt that it is a plaything that vendors bother about, if you ask … the answer is Everything. A good RFP can help you identify the right vendor for you, determine the strengths and skills and ideas of the service provider and most certainly can help in determining and fixing down your budgetary expectations and time of completion. However, if that is the advantages and merits, it should also be said that it does have some disadvantages like any other. Creating a good RFP is not necessarily child’s play, and can incur a good cost. For a larger project spanning over 2-3 months and more, it could be worthwhile to dedicate a full time person to identify the requirements, ideas, pros and cons. So Why Do We Need to Do It? Here is a easy reason – not doing it can lead up to spending more than you initially wanted to , get tangled in messy emails and phone interactions with your provider, jumping around multiple vendors for doing multiple tasks, end up dedicating more time to a smaller job and the list can go on and on !!

Here in comes the advantage of reading though this blog entry ? We have given the topic of Creation of a good RFP some thought for our customers and partners and also done some amount of research work on Google and Yahoo. This led us to finalize some basic points which are a must for any good Request for Proposals (RFP) and they are:

• Project Summary
• Objectives and Goals
• Scope of Work with earmarked functionalities
• Service Provider Information ( Contact Numbers, Emails, References )
• Budget ( Design and Development , Expenses , Promotions)
• Schedule ( Connected to goals , maintenance , expedition )
• Evaluation Criteria ( If Any)

Do you have a social media presence for your business? You are greatly lagging behind!

Setting up a business is quite straightforward have enough capital, manpower and you can start your own company. But there is a vast and tricky road that can lead the business to successful heights. Needless to say, if you own a business, you have to have some kind of social presence, or otherwise you won’t get the required exposure.

To simply put, if people are not even aware of your business, then how do you expect to grow sales and company reputation. It’s a fact that there are quite a number of great organizations out there but due to the lack of any promotions, there are never in the limelight.

To get you through the full gist of things, some of the most important benefits of having a social media presence for your company are:-

• Reach wider and unique audience: When your company is actively involved in several social media platforms, chances are that it will reach out to a wide number of people; more than what you had intended. Moreover, there is also the possibility to evoke the interest of people who are far diverse to your business.
• Far better promotions: Whether it’s for increasing sales or creating a buzz, social media is a great outlet for it. If you sell some products or services, providing valuable deals and discounts is a great way to promote your brand.
• Better customer service: For customers, social networks are a great way to reach out to companies. Incidentally, companies also prefer this method to provide efficient customer service.

For better or worse, the importance of social media is most likely to escalate in the future which is why you should immediate steps to set up and maintain it if you don’t have it yet.

For instance, you could spend an unlimited amount of advertising dollars to brand your business on programmatic advertising solutions or social media advertising; however, there are only so many converting keywords and searches in a market which caps your potential spend. Depending on the size of your business this may or may not be a big deal. In addition, to get the return on investment (ROI) you want, you also must take into consideration your search placement. Data-driven SEM Agencies, are positioned the best to maximize your SEM budget based on the highest converting factors such as keywords, geo-targeting, and more because they are leveraging the data.

Setting Your SEM Budget
Any SEM Agency should be able to help you set an ideal budget by using the Google Keyword Planner and/or Bing Keyword Planner. If your target budget comes in much higher than you’re expecting, you should ask for details like, How are they arriving at the budget? What keywords are they are using? What are their Cost Per Click (CPC) expectations? Most importantly, what is their management fee and what do they do with the budget if they don’t spend it?

The reason you should ask these questions is due to the concept of diminishing returns and potentially fraud. Let me clarify. Certain keywords will convert and provide value at a higher percentage than others. In fact, some keywords that seem ideal don’t convert at all. If you have some of this data beforehand, take out the junk keywords upfront. Or maybe you can eliminate products and/or services to better target your most profitable products/services.

SEM Management Fees
Clarify your SEM partner’s management fee and budget policies. You’d hate to see a 50% management fee when you can easily find someone who might perform equally or better for around 15%-25%. Actuate Media is a little different, we do a flat fee, which is typically even less. Also, you should be skeptical if they promise higher returns for the higher management fee. Professionally speaking, our team typically outperforms just about any media company. We have less overhead, so we don’t need to charge as much. Finally, you should also ask if they keep the remaining budget if the campaign underspends? If so, what is their incentive to spend your budget and maximize your ROI? They could simply be telling you to spend more than necessary to keep it.

SEM Keyword Strategy
Are they using Broad Match, Broad Match Modifiers, Phrase Match, or Exact Match? Why is this important? Certain strategies require more attention to optimize or may result in keywords that are too broad. Let’s look at the keyword “plumber,” if they are using a broad strategy then your ads will show for: plumber videos, plumber tools, plumber supply, plumber putty, etc. What a waste right? This means you might be spending some serious budget on terms that will not convert. We are not saying don’t use broad match, but if you do add the obvious negative keywords in before the campaign begins or at least understand if/when your vendor will do this and for a report.

SEM Conversion Optimizations
First, you need to make sure you’re measuring everything you want to analyze like form fills, phone calls, e-commerce transactions, and more. Once this is complete, you need to make sure the conversions are imported or set in Google AdWords. Then your SEM partner should be able to quickly locate which cities, keywords, and/or ad groups are performing within the first month or so. If you’re spending a bunch of money on clicks that are not converting something needs to change like the landing page or the text ads. If that still doesn’t improve results, then pause keywords/ad groups and stop wasting money. If necessary, the budget might be better appropriated to higher converting campaigns. In the end, how your partner sets up your account is important for data analysis, something we can discuss in another blog post.

If you have any questions about SEM, setting budgets, or data analysis, we encourage you to ask below or contact us directly.