It all starts with the brief. We work like any responsible marketing or advertising firm would (actually many of us come from extensive multinational advertising backgrounds). We start by asking you about your products, your competition and your goals. We ask what search terms are important for you to have a presence on.

But we don’t just take your word for it. We advertise on and track hundreds of millions of searches every month and have a pretty good idea of what the demand is for a particular product category from a particular geography. We start with the outline of a strategy that we both agree may work for you – and then improvise. Search, we believe, is far better than research at pointing out trends in real-time – and we keep the flexibility to add campaigns in real time to take advantage of the dynamism in search.

With one of our office equipment clients, we were able to look at search and response volumes and suggest a different positioning for the South Korean market – and yet another one for the Australian market within months of starting efforts in each of these markets. They saw how these new approaches worked online – and then promptly adopted it on the ground, reversing the usual way the world does things.

Talking of results, again. We also spend time understanding the results you want. Though Google, Yahoo and gang might not want you to believe it, it’s not just about delivering clicks. Clicks are almost a commodity now, and virtually anybody with a credit card can get an account and get you some clicks from any engine in the world. And we really believe clicks don’t matter that much.

Do you just want to promote awareness of your brand to a particular audience? In which case what we’ll commit to delivering unique visitors from a specific geography (country, region, even city) with a particular search interest. A unique visitor is just that – someone from a unique IP address within a particular time period from a particular geography – so you don’t have to pay for all the click fraud the search engines are notorious for. Our technology allows us to offer these to you so with predictable numbers.

Awareness? Interest? Desire? Action? Perhaps you don’t just need awareness. You need people who express interest in your offering and give you their name, email address and more and ask you to contact them. We’re happy to then optimise your campaign to deliver leads. Or if it’s employees you want, we also have a strong recruitment practice that uses search marketing.

Perhaps the leads aren’t as useful for you as online actions would be: people conducting a fare search on your travel site for instance, or people who come to your site and sit through a video. We’re happy to charge on those bases. Some of you may even be in e-commerce, where you sell your products online. We can take our technology further. With some clients, we actually take on the sales responsibility, representing their products, collecting money from buyers and passing it on.

In each of these cases, we don’t charge you for clicks from Google and Yahoo and take a percentage as our fee. That’s a model that just incentivises us to get you to spend more. We’d rather you earn more.

In every way, we try to get marketing to come as close to being a variable cost for you – the way it should be. Internally, we assign a brand manager and brand team to each brand, and reward them for their creativity and P & L performance on their brands. Don’t you wish all marketing firms worked this way?