When I explain our business to people, I immediately get hit with questions.  And I love questions — it shows people are paying attention, interested and engaged (or at least somewhat good at pretending to be).  So questions are always good.  Sometimes what I hear, though, is somebody really looking for us to confirm a myth for them.  A few of those questions seem to come up time and time again and are easy to spot.  Here my Top 5 right now:

1). Why should we be on Twitter?  I don’t care what you had for breakfast.

Well sure, I don’t care what I had for breakfast either, or probably what anyone else had for breakfast.  Just like any other communications or content channel, there are folks using this channel well and some using it not so well.  We have already published a few posts on good ways you might use Twitter already (Read more on Measuring Social Media ROI, and on Five Ways Professional Services Firms Can Use Twitter) so I won’t go into detail here again.  But, just keep in mind most of the same people who think Twitter is about telling people what you had for breakfast thought bloggers were just a bunch of people living in their parents’ basement and would never have an impact.

2). I should just put my whole marketing budget in PPC search, that will be my most effective marketing right?

Maybe – but it really depends on your marketing objectives, industry, goals, products, services, and everything else.  PPC Search is great for many businesses, but it usually isn’t a magic bullet, but rather part of an overall plan.  Often we find PPC is a testing ground for a more informed Search Engine Optimization (Read more on The Obvious Yet Underused Way to Build an SEO Program)  and that we run the two together, or that PPC search doesn’t meet your goals.  My advice – Never put all your eggs in one basket.

3). Why should we have our marketing team do anything with Social Media?  We have an intern here that can get us up to speed.

I seem to be hearing this one more and more often now.  While your intern may be ahead of you on the social media front because he/she has more friends than you do on Facebook, that doesn’t mean they are the right person to handle strategic marketing.  Having extra help in managing your online presences is great – indeed it can be time intensive — but make sure you have the right strategy and a plan in place that you can then engage people (including maybe the intern) in helping to execute.  And, like with anything else – Make sure you bring in the right help to generate that plan if you aren’t equipped to do it yourself.

4). Why would I use landing pages for our campaigns?  That’s why my website has a home page.

We’ve talked about when you should use a landing page vs. a microsite in more detail before (read Microsite or Landing Page?), but it’s important to understand a landing page can speak to a specific audience and ask for specific actions, while your home page by nature has to be much more general in nature.  Utilize landing pages for campaigns when appropriate rather than pushing everything to the home page and your conversion rates will increase.

5). I just need to reach a bunch of people, can’t I just buy an email list?

(Preparing for backlash from list brokers…awaiting angry emails…OK, let’s go)

In all my experience I have never seen a client have great success with a “bought” or “rented” list.  There are opportunities to engage folks via email, but where I have seen success is in mailing to those that have truly, clearly opted in to hear from you, and from placements in relevant emails that follow this same principle.  Your results may vary, but if nothing else you are tempting fate on a huge spam backlash, blacklisting, etc.  I think you are most likely to be successful with many other strategies and tactics before this one.

What are the misconceptions you run into most frequently?  Feel free to submit your own in our comments section below

About the Author: Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  Follow Will on Twitter for more commentary like this.

As most of our readers know, the Marketing Trenches blog is run by the leadership of Right Source Marketing.  It should come as no surprise that one of the first questions we get is “What is Right Source?” and/or “What does it mean to rightsource my marketing?”

Let’s start with what rightsourcing is not.

Rightsourcing isn’t revolutionary.  Smart, but not revolutionary. (Isn’t everyone a little tired of companies and technologies that are deemed ‘revolutionary’? I know I am.)

Rightsourcing isn’t outsourcing, insourcing, offshoring, nearshoring, or any of those other overused terms.

Rightsourcing isn’t even new.  Companies have attempted to rightsource for years.

To define what rightsourcing IS, let me illustrate with a statement from an intelligent software executive I spoke with today:

“We’re finally at the point in our growth where I want to consider building out a marketing department to support and accelerate that growth.  My gut tells me to build out an internal team and take on more of a managerial/leadership role, but I know that certain functions and tasks are better handled externally.  I need to get a handle on what to bring in-house and what to look for outside help on.”

Refreshing to hear on my end.   A stark contrast to the “hire a marketing manager to coordinate all the stuff I can’t handle and then start interviewing all kinds of agencies to handle 5-6 different marketing functions and hope they make me look good” approach that I typically run into.

One of my business partners claims it takes me forever to get to a point in my blog posts, so let me prove him wrong 7-8 paragraphs in.  Rightsourcing is exactly what this software executive is referring to, and where the average marketing organization fails.

Rightsourcing is:

• Identifying the most effective resources to execute a marketing plan, as opposed to relying only on the resources already available.
• Finding the balance and best fit between in-house resources and external resources.
• Optimizing that balance and structure based on performance tracking.

Rightsourcing, as implemented by Right Source Marketing, results in the following benefits:

• Strategic guidance/planning and implementation of services, something the average consulting firm or advertising agency simply does not offer.
• Specialists in every marketing function, not generalists who are learning on the fly.
• A real single point of contact that serves as primary advisor and project manager.
• A more cohesive, polished process and final product.
• An approach that is based on educating clients, not just providing information.
• Potential cost savings and flexibility in client service models.

Hiring 5 agencies or vendors rarely makes sense.  Hiring a marketing director just to manage those 5 agencies makes even less sense.  Stop following old models and ways of doing things.

Right Source it.

About the Author: Mike Sweeney is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing and co-founder of PR Flex.  Don’t hesitate to drop Mike a comment on this post.  Follow Mike on Twitter for more marketing commentary.