Marketing today can be daunting. We see clients struggle with trying to figure out what works in digital marketing and how to boost their ROI.

Everyone’s trying to draw that straight line from marketing to sales, and we’re working hard with them to connect those dots! In fact, we’ve learned over time that reducing the cost of marketing involves not just making the sales funnel bigger, but also making it work more efficiently.

As a social media and content specialist at Goldstein Group Communications, I work alongside a lot of great Account Managers and other tech “hyper-specialists.” Anyone in B2B Marketing knows that it’s an ever-changing field made up of a lot of different components. And not everyone in Marketing is a whiz at every one of those components, which is why we have specialists.

Making choices shouldn’t be difficult, but we all know sometimes it’s easy to be overwhelmed by all the options. If you’re in the market for a marketing firm you’ve probably read a dozen articles about how to select an agency. Sometimes, it’s not what the contenders say in their presentations (which often can sound the same), but what they DON’T say. In our newest White Paper, we tell you six things you aren’t likely to hear in a pitch but could have important implications in choosing the marketing partner that will provide the very best fit.  

A friend was beginning a search for a new marketing firm, and he asked me for criteria in picking the right agency. 

How to choose, he asked?  What should I look for? 

Hiring an agency is EXACTLY like hiring an employee. Because of the intimate, mission-critical nature of marketing, your agency isn’t really just a vendor like a landscaper or janitorial service for your building. Rather, they’re a critical expert tied to the very heartbeat of your business – driving your sales funnel. 

A client me asked recently to talk to his team about B2B marketing, and what’s changed. “What are other companies doing that we should be doing? I don’t know what I don’t know,” he said.

Fair enough. Marketing today is particularly difficult for many execs to keep pace with, since it’s rapidly changing. Right now, many wonder what works in marketing, and just where can they find the best ROI. So here are a few observations we feel are common to every B2B marketing effort. If I’m going to build a program for anyone, these are the elements that would go into any foundation.