By Bob Van Rossum 

Having an agency (ad, pr, digital, etc.) is great if they are truly presenting you with something unique.  If you are doing tremendous mass advertising and your agency has incredible creative then you are in the right place.  Unfortunately getting an ROI from your agency partner is becoming increasingly difficult and certain pieces of the relationship structure work against it.  The distance between you and your agency presents challenges with communication and speed of execution.  Truthfully only 20 percent of organizations using an agency really need one.  The remaining 80 percent of companies gain a competitive advantage utilizing top talent on a contract basis to insource your agency. 

Top Reasons to Insource your Ad Agency:

1. 35% – 40% Cost Savings:  Why pay your agencies rent in addition to your company’s rent?  Looking at an agency’s overhead and markups, it’s easy to see how you can insource and push money to the bottom line. Or use this to your advantage to do more marketing and increase your top line. 
2. Higher Quality Marketing:  When you hire an agency, you are really hiring one or two people and paying for others you were unable to select, but have a real impact on the work.  As part of our insourcing model, you select exactly who you want for each role.  This provides greater depth and breadth of experience resulting in better work.  If you have someone who is no longer able to provide the level of work you require due to changing needs, you are able to immediately bring in someone new who can.    
3. Confidence:  The CMO who insources their marketing shows tremendous confidence in themselves.  What you are saying to the others on the Senior Management Team is you do not need to lean on your agency like a crutch.  You having confidence in yourself in turn is rewarded by the organizations increased confidence in you.  A natural byproduct of providing additional ROI.
4. Flexibility:  All areas of business are going through massive change that is simply magnified in marketing.  Utilizing on-demand marketing talent provides you the flexibility to turn on a dime.  Giving you the freedom to bring in new resources as your marketing mix changes, your business grows or needs to cut costs or a new area of expertise is required.  It is significantly easier to change out one or two team members as your needs change than to switch agencies and get the new agency up to speed.  In the end you are buying an opportunity to get the work done and saying good-bye to a fixed monthly retainer. 
5. Knowledge:    Imagine a marketing department and agency relationship with zero knowledge gaps.  Completely possible when you insource the agency, retaining the right to bring in the knowledge you need for only the time it is required.  From top creative talent to digital strategy to execution, you can have all the talent you need inside your four walls without the commitment to them as employees. 
6. Velocity:  What a treat to walk down the hall and talk to your Creative Director.  Opening up communication and encouraging collaboration between what has traditionally been your agency and what is your internal staff decreases the time it takes to get great work done.  The inhouse agency will hit the mark the first time more often. 
7. Better Communication:  In addition to increased velocity, having the MarketPro team at your location increases their ability to interact with your team and gives them access to knowledge about your company that it is impossible for someone at another location to have.  This increases the quality of the work, speeds up execution all while saving you about 40%. 

By ALYSE KNORR 

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

If you can’t Tweet, you might get beat — in the job hunt, that is.

http://www.ajc.com/business/social-media-skills-become-crucial-for-job-hunters-102247.html

By Bob Van Rossum

Now is a great time to give your company a Talent Advantage.  At a time when most companies are scared to make permanent headcount additions, you can hire an interim CMO on a full-time or part-time basis for less than you can imagine.  Need someone to set online marketing strategy, no problem.    Top companies are not running scared but using the opportunities available in the marketplace to strategically improve their marketing programs for years to come.

Outside experts bring valuable experience to your company.  Now is the time to move your company forward not sit idly and wait out the tough times.  It is time to utilize contractors / consultants to evolve your business. 

Top reasons to move your company forward with outside talent:
Many companies are finding that they get more bang for their buck by consulting with outside experts instead of hiring new staff people. Here’s the logic:

·    Executive Level Talent without a long-term commitment. Most companies avoid hiring the senior level talent they need due to the long-term overhead commitment.  Bring in an executive to set a new course and when they hand over the new plan you existing staff can execute.  If you are expecting your existing staff to get you any farther than they already have, you are likely expecting too much.

·    Ability to insert an entire team.  Many organizations have an area of their business that is behind the competition.  People on your team are already too busy to fix this, but you can easily insert an outside to completely revamp an area of your organization.  We have found many companies have failed to keep pace with web / online marketing.  Good news is help can be on the inside of your organization in about a week.   

·    Ability to scale up or down at will.  Having contractors on staff is much more like dating, as opposed to marrying a full-time employee.  If your needs change, so can the people you have working for you.   

·    Fresh Ideas.  The new team comes from a variety of experience and backgrounds. All companies suffer from group think and limitations based on what they see.  Outsiders avail you to an entirely new set of thoughts and ideas.  They will provide a unique perspective that will increase the productivity of your existing workforce.   

·    Peace of mind.  Would you like a chance to try before you buy? The risk of hiring someone into your organization is significant.  The reality is you can try before you buy at most any level of the organization.  Hiring an employee into your organization means you have made at least a short-term commitment.  If you hired your CMO or web designer on a contract / consulting basis and they are not a culture fit, making a change is fast and easy.   

The concept of outsourcing your CMO is new, while outsourcing your CFO or CIO is more common.  Ultimately outsourcing the CMO function makes more sense.  Companies with more than $ 1B in revenue must have a CMO, about half of smaller companies are better off with a strong VP and they bring in an interim CMO for 3 months a year to set strategy.  The quality of your marketing will increase and the cost saving is tremendous.  

By Bob Van Rossum 

www.marketproinc.com

Simply having a professional looking and up-to-date resume is no longer enough to help you secure a new marketing position. Web 2.0 exposure is quickly becoming a real-time living, breathing demonstration of your expertise. Social networking sites can tell colleagues and potential employers what you know, who you know, and what you’ve done. But in order to leverage that tool for your next marketing job search, you need to know which sites to concentrate on. Then, highlight your skills and expertise for the whole world to see. You never know who may be “following” you—possibly your next employer!

Whether you’re looking for a job now, or anticipate making a change at some point in your career, now is the time to put your best foot forward in the social marketing arena. Recruiters and prospective employers will be googling your name and seeing what pops up. Years ago, resumes and CVs were the main tool for showcasing your past positions and skills, and while they are still important, interested parties can find so much more information online. They can see how involved you are in your industry, get a sense of your personality, and see if you play (interact) well with others. No matter how far off your next job search is (and do you ever really know?), you need to utilize Web 2.0 to stand out above the crowd.

The best social networking sites allow you to interact with others and make your statement on the marketing world by building your name recognition, highlighting your accomplishments, and building valuable connections.

LinkedIn is one of the top social networking sites in the business world. There you can fill out your profile (don’t forget to upload your professional headshot!), connect with other people you know and trust, and post questions (and answers!) to your group.

Article marketing can help develop your expert platform. Pick a topic you know and write an article about it. Send it to professional associations you belong to, post them on your website or blog, and submit them to article submission services. Don’t forget to include your author box, which is like free advertising for your business. A word of caution though—make sure your articles contain useful information and aren’t overly self promotional or they might get rejected.

Blogging is an effective tool for easily demonstrating your expertise.  Remember to keep your blogs relevant and that quality is more important than quantity. Schedule “write blog post” assignments in your calendar so you don’t forget to update it. A couple times a week is ideal, but no less than a few times a month. And don’t forget that blogging is a two-way street. Comment on other blogs too! Readers of popular blogs may just click back through the comment you left and become new fans of yours. Look into guest blogging opportunities, comment on local news blogs, industry blogs, and on blogs of colleagues with similar interests to yours.

Twitter, a site for microblogging, is a rapidly growing, low-time investment way to keep active in your profession. Short, 140 character updates go out to those subscribed to you. Just like blogs, don’t forget to comment on other people’s posts to build relationships.  The real value of Twitter is in who you chose to follow, if you chose wisely you might just learn something yourself.  Try TweetDeck to keep it all sorted.  

Of course, there are many more social networking opportunities out there and new ones crop up all the time. Look for those that allow you to showcase your expertise, connect with others you respect, and grow your fan base. Don’t forget to update your status and posts regularly, just as you regularly check and respond to emails and keep appointments. Networking with fellow marketing colleagues today may just land you a great new marketing position tomorrow.

www.marketproinc.com  

By Bob Van Rossum 

By Bob Van Rossum 

Gone are the days when throngs of salesmen in penny loafers knocked on businesses’ doors one by one in hopes of introducing, educating, and converting those “blind” prospects into long-term customers. Thirty years ago, there were only a handful of ways prospects could get information from anyone other than your sales force. Now, your marketing department has assumed the role of educating your customers, and your sales team’s role has shrunk to simply converting interested and educated prospects into buyers. Plain and simple, marketing has trumped sales in the corporate hierarchy.

Marketing today is a complicated game. Back in the 1970’s, your company might have spent almost its entire marketing budget on television commercials to run during I Love Lucy, or bought up a bunch of newspaper ads or radio spots. These choices alone would allow you to reach your target audience. Not anymore. Focusing your marketing efforts with laser accuracy has replaced broadcasting. Now your marketing department needs to know where and how they can reach your targeted demographic.

Read more: http://www.marketproinc.com/success/why_marketing.html

Wow, information is accumulating at an amazing rate.  With great opportunities that exist with LinkedIn, Twitter, FaceBook and all the strong individual blogs out there, how can you possibly get hold of the best information and be able to utilize to allow you company to make more money.  Yes, all this social networking is great, but at the end of the day we still have a responsibility to our shareholders.  How do you define if the time you spend in the wonderful world of Web 2.0 is productive or not.  Quite simply, if what you are doing is making you more money than it is a good use of time and if you cannot quantify the value of it then you need to spend your time on something that has impact on profit.  The simple question to ask is:  Did my time help me acquire a customer, grow my relationship with a customer or reduce my cost?  If you cannot answer yes to at least one of these questions, move on to something that does.    

Please do not get me wrong, in the fast food world we live in I certainly understand and subscribe to the importance of blogging, article marketing, etc. and the time investment that this takes.  Ultimately you need to understand intrinsic value of your online presence and how it will impact your business over time.   You also need to understand what others are doing online and make a place for those ideas in your execution of an online marketing program.  But I also know how easily you can get caught in the massive amount of information that is coming at you on a daily basis and lose sight of what is you end goal, money. 

In addition to constantly asking the three questions outlined above, I recommend the following actions:

1.       Stop letting your inbox run your day.  On the average day I receive 200 e-mails that require my attention.  It is easy to become tied to my inbox, but this does not maximize my productivity and profit.  It is easy for me to go to Outlook to look for a piece of information to complete a task and on my way to that data I see I have a new message and get sidetracked from the reason I went to Outlook in the first place.  I have now set limits on when I will check my e-mail.

2.       Organize the information overflow.  Receiving a lot of data at the time you need it least is useless.  If you come across something interesting, save it to a folder for later reading.  What you will find is if you are not willing to spend the time saving and categorizing the data is was never worth looking at in the first place and would have just gathered dust on the corner of your desk.

At the end of the day if you keep focused on your goals and driving the right results, the decisions are easy.  They key is not to lose sight of the goal while data is coming at you at an alarming rate. 

www.marketproinc.com