Around this time every year, I am engaged in at least a half a dozen conversations with companies that are looking for a marketing firm to help them reach their goals for the upcoming year. Some know exactly what they’re looking for, and are fully prepared for the selection process. Some don’t know exactly what they’re looking for, but think they’ll know it when they see it. And sadly, some just enter this process with trepidation, because they’ve been burned in the past.

Fear – and in particular the fear of making a mistake –  is a very strong force. For a select few, it can be a trigger for adrenaline and aggressive decision-making. For many others, it can cause inaction, paralysis and conservative decision-making.

For companies that have been burned in their selection of strategic marketing firms in the past, let me offer a few pieces of advice on making a better decision this time around.

1. Know the Difference Between Marketing Strategy and Marketing Services

Marketing strategy should inform and guide marketing planning, which in turn informs and guides marketing services and tactics. Building a new website or distributing one press release each month is not a marketing strategy.

If you have your marketing plan all buttoned up for 2012, you may be ready to hire a marketing services firm to handle one or more of the tactics you identified in that plan. If not, you need to find a firm that can think strategically as well.

Good marketing strategists can not only help you with things like customer, competitor and target market analysis, but they can help you evaluate past marketing performance and use that information to guide 2012 marketing objectives.

2. Get Educated, Set Parameters and THEN Compare Apples to Apples

I see a lot of marketing proposals, and it makes me feel terrible for the people that have to translate, evaluate and compare proposals from different companies.  Even when you cut through the buzzwords and verbosity of the average proposal, you’re often left with dramatically different approaches and price ranges.

Here’s how I solve that riddle when on the buying side:

• Explain the situation and objectives – as you see them – to the firms you’d like to speak with.

• Ask them to come back with a general approach for how they would handle the situation. (This is where you’ll see good firms separate from weak firms.  A good firm ought to be able to explain their approach and how and why it might be different from others.)

• Get educated on the different approaches, and decide which general direction you like best.

• Make that your new approach, and ask for proposals addressing that new approach.

Now you ought to be able to compare apples to apples. You just used this process to educate yourself, get information from some (hopefully) smart marketing firms, and make your decision-making process more efficient.

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Andrea Goldstein is a member of the Towson University Class of 2012 who interned with us this fall. We wanted to give her a chance to share some of what she learned on our blog. Below are her words of newfound wisdom—beginners and veterans alike, we hope you can learn from this post as Andrea learned from her experience with us.

Stepping in to a new company is always quite the adventure.  Even though I knew what Right Source Marketing did before I started, I was excited to be able to get some hands on learning experience in a marketing field that is becoming more important every day—content marketing. While working at Right Source, I was not only introduced to content marketing, but also effective team dynamics, and the wild world of social media when before, I was normally on the other side of the table as a consumer.  Overall, what I learned goes far beyond teachers and books.

Here’s a few top takeaways:

1. The importance of  personal branding. Originally I met Will Davis, Right Source’s Managing Partner, when he came to Towson University to speak on the importance of blogging – little did I know he would be my future employer.  At the time, he inspired me to start my personal blog, and to take more seriously how I was viewed online. Slowly, I began to brand myself and the next time I saw Will at a Towson job fair, he seemed excited to know I had started blogging. One thing led to another, and here I am sitting in Right Source’s office today writing this blog post. Will said a large reason why I got the internship is what and how I wrote on my blog.  It will be hard to forget the first few times I met the Right Source team, somehow they took a complicated concept and made it seem so simple: write online, brand and market yourself, and you’ll get attention from the right people.

2. A small business can do big things. Working at Right Source is definitely not what I am used to after interning at 200+ employee companies.  The work that comes out of the smaller RSM team is astounding.  Everyone has their specialties, and they all complement each other.  We have everything from the business savvy, social network savvy, copywriting savvy, and project managing savvy—and a large network of specialist partners. Right Source works with national companies – because they can.

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Yesterday and today, I joined social media marketers from around the Baltimore area and the country at Social Fresh Baltimore. I’m posting this blog post halfway through the second day, so if the afternoon talks are left out, my apologies–please help me out and comment with your afternoon takeaways.

Here’s the top five things that stood out for me from this event:

1. Measure the impact of mobile marketing before you dive in. As both @seo_girl and @jeannehopkins spoke to for web, and @meladorri spoke to for email, check your web and email program’s analytics to see which platforms and devices people are using to consume your content. If a lot of your traffic comes from mobile devices–and more importantly, as @seo_girl pointed out, if your mobile bounce rate is high–you’re probably missing opportunities for mobile marketing, or doing something wrong.

2. QR codes can be cool, but they can also be wasteful and ridiculous. Whatever you do, provide multiple options for access. Yes, more and more people are using QR code scanners, but that doesn’t mean you should plaster QR codes everywhere. As @thetimhayden covered, first, think about how people are actually using their phones–do you really think people are going to be able to scan a QR code from a billboard? To get around this, when possible, provide a link, an SMS option, and a QR code so people can access your content in the way that’s best for them. For a laugh on this count, check out @unmarketing’s video ranting (thanks to @cc_chapman for providing).

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Welcome Allison Novak:  Right Source Marketing’s New Marketing Associate

Over the past month, the Right Source Marketing team put together our strategic plan for 2012. While we pride ourselves in helping clients with strategy and planning, it was quite an eye-opener to go through this process for our own company.

One of the most important components of this plan is a set of core values that we adhere to, or what we refer to as the guardrails that keep us on track even in moments of chaos or confusion. Those guardrails also guide decisions on the people we want to work with, including full-time staff members, part-time staff members, contractors and partners.

It became very clear during this process that Allison Novak is someone that fits into those core values, because she is talented, likable, hard-working and detail-oriented, all while maintaining a healthy sense of humor. Although Allison has been working for Right Source Marketing for the past 10 months, please join us in welcoming her in her new full-time role as Marketing Associate.

Allison will continue to be heavily involved in our content marketing and social media services, and will take on new responsibility in areas such as client account management and reporting. And of course, as with every other Right Source staff member, she will be a regular contributor to the Marketing Trenches blog.

As always, a quick note on what we learned during this hiring process – patience is an extremely valuable quality, for both the job seeker and the hiring company. In this case, it took time for us to figure out the right fit for Allison at Right Source, and it took time for Allison to figure out if we were the type of company she wanted to work for. Consider this a victory for patience, and one that will reap rewards for both sides, hopefully for years to come.

If you’d like to connect with Allison, drop her an email, find her on LinkedIn, or follow her on Twitter.

When I hear “fresh” I think of Will Smith and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (I’ve probably gotten the theme song stuck in your head now). In the late 80s and early 90s, “fresh” served as a synonym for cool, unique, or just all around great. Even more importantly, the Fresh Prince has grown up–when Will Smith makes a movie it consistently hits the top of the box office list. Fast forward to 2011 and there’s no doubt that whether we’re talking music, movies, meat, or beer born on date, fresh is still the way to go.

Freshness and Search Results

Google may not be as “fresh” as Will Smith or the MC Hammer Search Engine (yes, seriously). But, last week, Google added search results to the best-when-fresh list with a major update to its algorithm. For many sites Google is a kingmaker (or Fresh Prince maker?), and this update certainly affects all SEO, social media, and content marketers. The goal of the change was to give you fresher, more recent search results. On its official blog, Google estimates the changes will impact approximately 35% of searches, or 3.9 billion searches a month (according to September 2011 data). To put that in context, that is almost 3 times larger than the Panda update which impacted 12% of searches, and people are still talking about Panda’s impact. Read the rest of this entry »