Various new PPC agencies have popped up on the landscape trying to sell value added pay per click advertising. One of these companies is Reach Local. Reach Local targets companies that are trying to sell products and services in small geographic areas – hence the name.
Local advertisers are a significant slice of Simple Smart Marketing’s customer base, so we run into Reach Local quite often.
Most often, Reach Local will try to take clients away from us by offering their services at a reduced rate, and by touting their tracking tools. This is business, and sometimes we lose to Reach Local, but many of those customers have come back to Simple Smart Marketing after trying them out.
So what’s the difference between Reach Local and us? And which company is right for your business?
Backing
Reach Local is a large venture backed company – one has to presume they are in business to make money for their investors. Simple Smart is a small privately owned company, we have no outside investors – we don’t have to answer to anyone and our growth model is not subject to pressure from investors. More about that later.
Sales
Reach Local won’t point out that someone has to pay for their aggressive sales efforts. Reach Local IMC’s (Internet Marketing Consultants) work on commission and can make up to $150,000 in 12-16 months (source: ReachLocal.com job listings, December 2009). A minimum of 2 years sales experience is required, but internet marketing experience is optional.
Now, seriously, do you want to put your business in the hands of an internet marketing consultant – working on commission, without any internet marketing experience? Someone has to pay for these IMC’s. Simple Smart Marketing does not hire an expensive sales force. All our business is from word of mouth, and we pass the savings along to you.
Tracking
Reach Local will tell you that their tracking systems are the best in the business – and they are – there is no doubt about that! But they won’t tell you that there is no point in tracking a click AFTER you have already paid for it, and the cost per click is much higher to cover tracking costs. Simple Smart encourages clients to use of free tracking tools such as Google Analytics. We also offer free tracking scripts for basic call logging.
Most businesses have tight marketing budgets. Every dollar counts. So we believe it’s best to maximize spending on generating new business, not tracking. Of course, you must track all marketing, but keep the tracking costs down (unless you have cash to burn).
Why spend money on tracking when you can use it to generate more leads?
Contracts
Reach Local requires minimum contract lengths – from what we have seen, 4 months seems typical; Simple Smart Marketing does not require minimum length contacts – we’re comfortable that you will want to stick with us, and we don’t need 4 months to try and make a campaign work.
Optimization
Reach Local will tell you that their algorithms will automatically optimize your campaign. But they won’t tell you is that for computer based optimization to work really well, you need to have a significant traffic volume – and that’s often not possible at the keyword level for small geographic areas and/or
(relatively) small marketing budgets.
This is where skilled campaign manager can make all the difference in getting your campaign optimized as fast as possible – yet another reason why we don’t need to lock customers into restrictive minimum length contracts.
Costs
Reach Local won’t tell you the actual cost per click. The cost per click they charge you is already marked up by some unspecified forumula. Simple Smart Marketing will tell you exactly how much each click costs, and how much you pay in campaign management fees.
Campaign Ownership
Reach Local campaigns are owned by Reach Local. When you leave Reach Local you can’t take your campaign with you and hire a new campaign manager. This means that you have to start any new campaigns from scratch, without any history, and that will cost time and money – even if you know all the keywords. With Simple Smart Marketing you have the option of owning your campaigns*, in your own accounts – so you can see exactly what’s going on.
Campaign Structure
Reach Local tends to use generic ads for all product groups. Simple Smart Marketing writes unique ads for each product group. This makes a big difference in ad response, and it also affects the cost per click.
For keyword selection, Reach Local seems to be broad in their keyword selection and hope that their algorithms will eventually weed out poor keywords. With Simple Smart Marketing, every keyword is reviewed by an expert.
We believe that the benefit to you is a campaign that is better from the start, and you do not spend cash for optimization that should have been done by an experienced campaign manager. The theory of automated optimization sounds great, but our opinion is that the technology isn’t anywhere close to being able to beat a capable campaign manager.
* Campaigns for franchise systems excluded
