Admit it. You don’t have time to keep up with everything that’s going on in marketing. You don’t know what the latest and greatest mobile social app is for the iPhone, you haven’t heard that McDonalds and Farmers Insurance have started advertising in Farmville, hell, you may not even know the latest bulk rate for direct mail!

In this overwhelmed state, it’s easy to fall for an easy answer, or list of big name clients, or a long string of jargon that sounds absolutely spot-on.

But, you know what? You may be getting played.

Here are some ways to tell, when you’re looking for your next agency of record–or even your next project.

An endless fount of jargon. If you feel like your prospective agency is always talking above your head, you may have a problem. Especially if they won’t–or can’t–explain the jargon. Do you know what your CPC should be for your industry? CPS? eCPM? Do you know how important it is that your site will be using the YouTube API and Facebook Connect? If they can’t tell you what and why, run–fast.

Baffling stats. Statistics can make anything look impressive. Once, Car and Driver proved, statistically, that driving is safer than living. Yes. Read that again. Driving is safer than simply living. Of course, when you take into account that many people do not drive after a certain age, it makes more sense. But apply this to Facebook’s dazzling 500 million people and YouTube’s amazing engagement time. What does this mean to you, in the real world? How many people can you reach, really? And how many will pay attention.

Everything always works. Again, if the agency you’re working with can spin a campaign so it seems like it always works, there’s almost certainly a problem. We once encountered an agency that proudly proclaimed the success of a banner ad campaign because the clickthrough was high, at 1.2%. And yes, compared to industry averages, that’s wonderful. However, their actual cost per click from the banner was almost $10–and the company they were advertising didn’t sell anything online. Would you pay $10 for every visit to your non-commerce site? Do you think this is a success?

Small agency, big names. If you’re looking at boutique agencies that like to show a long list of big names (we’re talking people like IBM, Acura, etc), be sure you ask “What exactly do you do for them?” and “Is it ongoing?” They may have simply done a trade show postcard as a one-off. At the same time, don’t expect them to be the Big Name’s agency of record.

Won’t talk results. “Look at all these beautiful pictures!” the agency CD crows. “This wonderful Flash site! This show reel!” Yep, you want an agency that is creative–but you want an agency with focused creativity that can produce results. If they can’t talk strategy, if they can’t craft a compelling message, if they can’t explain how this solves your marketing problem, then they may be covering up a significant weakness.

The magic website. Great, you’ve found a conventional agency that does solid work in print and broadcast–and hey, they can do web too! Or so they say. Who’s actually architecting their sites? Who’s building them? Many conventional agencies want you to think that a site magically appears, but that’s not the case. Make sure they have in-house or close-coupled resources for architecting and building your site–and not simply bidding out their design to the lowest-cost guys in India.

Will only do the big retainer. If an agency isn’t interested in proving themselves with project work, they are either too slammed with work  to be interested in you, or so incompetent they’re hoping to get into a deal where they can’t fire you for a year, no matter how bad they screw up. If they’ll only work under a retainer, they’re hiding something. Run.

More interested in drinks and basketball than business. If every question you have is smoothly redirected, if they’re more interested in taking you out for drinks and dinner, if they go out of their way to take you to that basketball game you were dying to see, then you should be highly, highly suspicious. They’re trying very hard to be your friend. And you can’t fire your friends, can you? It’s great to get the perks, but make sure the agency won’t make you look like a fool for the sake of a good time.

We’ll pause our blogging for a moment to highlight some content that has been stolen from our blog by a competing company. We won’t name names, but you know who you are!

Blogposts stolen include:

5 Reasons to Revamp Your Website
What’s your Why?
Go Mobile, Young Man
The Whys of Social Media: Facebook
Website Packaged Solutions: What You Should Ask
The Whys of Social Media: Twitter
The Augmented Future

So, if you find content that doesn’t link to our site under these titles in a quick Google search, well, there you go. Ours are the originals.

To be clear: the Centric blog is always original content, created by Jason Stoddard, Sue Arellano, or Kevin Cuxil, or the three of us in collaboration. Our competition? Maybe not so much.

Update: 5 minutes after sending an email, the company removed the content. However, this post will remain until the cached Google results disappear, or until they contact us to explain why they thought they could simply steal content.

Continuing on the theme of focusing on the hard work, rather than the latest shiny distraction, let’s take a look at 5 ways to fix your broken marketing.

“Wait a minute!” you might be saying. “My marketing isn’t broken! Everything’s humming along just fine! Sales are up, leads are jumping, we’re raking in the money, and we were just thinking of getting into that social media stuff!”

If that’s the case, congratulations! Now, step away from the social, unless you want to break your marketing.

“Wait, what?” you say. “How can that hurt? If everything’s going so well, why wouldn’t I try the latest, greatest thing?”

To which we say, “If everything is going so well, why would you?” Do you think AT&T is thrilled about the army of people it takes to respond to their Facebook page? Are you ready to staff up? Are you prepared for the morass of half-baked social measurement options your CFO will be clamoring for?

So, here’s the first way to fix your broken marketing:

1. Keep it simple. It’s perfectly OK not to do it all. There’s no reason to run madly into every new marketing trend. Or even every old marketing trend. If you’re a small marketing team trying to do web presence and advertising and video production and social and email and print and broadcast and direct and out of home and outdoor, you’re going to kill yourselves.

Ask yourself: what can you afford to lose? What takes a ton of time, but doesn’t work very well? What is hard to measure? Make a matrix. Rate every marketing tactic in terms of effectiveness, amount of investment ($), and time spent. Drop off the highest-investment, highest-time items. Be ruthless.

Doubtful? Consider this: Apple doesn’t engage in social marketing at all.

2. Measure everything. You can’t make a matrix like we describe above without measuring. Are you measuring all your campaigns? Do you know what the measurements mean? Can you track your results through to final sale or conversion? Do you have a “standard” close rate that can be applied to outreach to extrapolate the impact of the campaign?

If you don’t, do it. Now. Much of your web outreach can be measured with Google Analytics. Offline is trickier, but you can also tie that back to response pages. Some things will always be a little nebulous, like broadcast–but can you extrapolate impressions to sales, based on historical data?

Yes, we know, this is a lot of boring work, when you could be looking at new creative, but this is the basis of your marketing success. And these are the numbers your CFO and CEO will be looking at.

3. Hit hard. As hard as you can. Is your product the only way to do something? The best in class? The one and only? The first? Shout it. Don’t assume your audience is so sophisticated that they’ll come to these conclusions on their own. Don’t expect them to get it by osmosis. Chances are, they’re as busy and harried as everyone else these days, and they need to get the jist, in as few words as possible!

You don’t have a one-and-only, best-in-class message? Then you’d better get cracking and come up with one. Or you’d better find a way in which your product or service makes a meaningful, positive change in someone’s life or career.

Then you need to distill it down to a sentence. As with #1, be ruthless. Your competitors aren’t going to cut you any slack, and your prospective customers don’t have the time for a long, drawn-out message,

4. Stay focused. If you aren’t a multinational company literally selling to every person on the planet (think Coke, think Taco Bell), it’s likely you have a specific audience. These audiences can be extremely concentrated into niches. Where do they hang out online? Find out. Focus your efforts there. We’ve seen dozens of campaigns ruined by going broad, when one online forum may have made the campaign.

You don’t know where your audience hangs out? Google is your friend. Google and Quantcast. Start with the largest sites, hang out there a few days, chase down new sites with Quantcast’s “audience also likes” feature, and make lots of notes. See what the sponsorship opportunities are like. Maybe even dedicate someone to talking to them, if we’re talking about a forum or other social venue.

And yes, this absolutely does work. We had one start-up that could trace 80% of its sales to less than 5 sites on the internet . . . and not one of them accepted conventional advertising.

5. Fix the other broken stuff first. Okay. The hard point. If you’re producing crap, or your customer service sucks, you shouldn’t be looking at your marketing as the Evil Overlord of Slow Sales. Be honest with yourself. Is something else broken in the company?

Are the products not competitive? If they aren’t, good marketing will only kill them faster. Is your customer service the laughingstock of the internet? Well, then, maybe you need to stop blowing your horns until you fix the bad customer service. Or at least stay off Facebook. Or can the social marketing altogether.

“But they can start conversations on Facebook about their poor customer service, and maybe solve people’s problems that way,” you say.

Well, yeah. Or they could just fix their customer service and not have to staff an army of quasi-customer-service-ish-social-ish-marketing-ish people to respond to their Facebook page. We know what makes sense to us.

What makes sense to you?

. . . or, “Why you should stand up in the boardroom and say it’s a stupid idea, before it becomes an even dumber reality.”

First, a preface: I really hope neither of these are the result of a marketing agency. It’s possible that they are. But both really, really seem to be the result of “Nobody spoke up” syndrome. Nobody said, “Yeah, but have you really thought about what you’re doing?”

Case 1: AT&T’s Facebook Page

I received a recent letter from AT&T wireless about, hell, I don’t know–probably some change in their 63-page terms of service or something–which is a subject for yet a different rant–but, at the bottom of it, they had these wonderful, glorious words:

“Let us know what you think at facebook.com/att.”

Now, I know everyone wants to get into the wonderful world of social marketing, but really, nobody stood up and said, “Ahem . . . you guys actually know who we are, right? You know we’re not exactly the poster child of love and light in the corporate arena? Do you plan to have an army of 80 moderators to delete the ten million negative comments you’re going to get, for every defect, real and imagined, in our service?”

And the AT&T Facebook page is pretty much what you’d expect: a non-stop complaint-fest. Yes, there are some compliments. And yes, AT&T personnel do seem to be trying to respond to the complaints. But . . . is this really helping to foster a positive impression of your brand? Is it helping to sell service?

Someone shoulda stood up.

Case 2: Ally Financial

And here’s another one. With this month’s statement, I noticed that my GMAC loan now came from an outfit called Ally. They were quite proud of their branding, too. They had a nice little letter about how much better my life would be due to their name change.

Well, here’s a hint, Ally: you ain’t my ally if you’re sending me bills every month.

Or at least that’s what millions of customers have to be thinking. So again, what happened? Why didn’t someone stand up and say, “Uh, you know, we send bills to people. Big bills. In fact, probably the second-most-dreaded bill of all, after their mortgage. Do you see a problem in implying that we’re our customer’s ‘ally?’ Hey, my first thought would be, ‘Well, hell, if you were really my ally, I’d be getting that car for free!’”

And, you know what, someone might have said that. And some disconnected exec might have said, “Well yeah, we’re their ally because we’re helping them get the car in the first place!”

Yeah. 100% correct. But when the bills are coming, will you remember that?

Maybe the guy who objected should have stood up again.

Are you a victim of putting off the hard work to pursue the next shiny thing?

This is biggest problem we see in the agency business. Sales are down–so let’s charge headlong into social media (even though we’re not staffed for it.) Leads have dropped off–so it’s time to rebrand (even though we did that two years ago.) Our competitors have just launched a new website–so it’s time to start our own episodic video production (even though we don’t have the budget, or the script, or the production expertise.)

Let’s face it. The real solution for slack sales is one of three things:

1. You need new, more competitive products.
2. You need to be more effective in getting the word out about your current products.
3. You need to be more aggressive in sales, and offer incentives to move the stuff.

As an agency, we can help with #2. The rest is part of your own business strategy and process. We may have opinions on the matter, but the chance that we know your business better than you is, well, like, about zero percent.

The problem is, working on your internal business processes is hard and boring. And sooo much of marketing is the same way. It’s all numbers and text ads and optimization. Or so it seems. It’s much better to think about that celeb you can hook up with on Facebook, bringing millions of fans to “Like” your product, and then . . .

And then what? And then those thousands of fans (not millions) will go back to what they were doing: busily talking to their friends. Some will stay on to chatter on your Facebook page, and you’ll have to dedicate a customer service person to talk to them. Net sales result? Probably zero. Net workload? Increased.

Resist the shiny stuff. Do the hard work. And suddenly, the work might not seem so hard anymore.

Can you stand out in social marketing? There are millions of “experts” right now who want you to think you can.

But can you?

We’ve already talked about how social isn’t cheap or easy, no matter how much the self-proclaimed experts say it is. We’ve made the case that great social is about great creative, not a fundamental shift in how people consume marketing. And we rail against consultants who proclaim how every business must get a social presence going right now, even if they have no idea what it’s all about, or how they’ll make their social presence relevant.

Now, it’s time for a reality check. And the reality is:

1. The 500 million people on Facebook aren’t there to hear from you, a corporation. They are there for their friends.

2. The hundreds of millions on Twitter aren’t there to follow your manufacturing company, they’re there to see what their favorite celebs are doing.

And they already have plenty to keep them occupied. With 120 average friends per Facebook user, their feed is a constantly-changing stream of pictures, location notifications, video uploads, link reposts, commentary and blogs, invitations to events, status reports from games, and a hundred other things friends share with friends.

So, you really think your announcement about your new water softening technology can compete with that?

“Well, yeah, make fun of my business all you want, but hey, there’s WillItBlend! They’re doing well, and they’re business-to-business just like me.”

Yep. And they started before Facebook was open to the public.

Stop. Read that again. WillItBlend started before Facebook opened to the public. When WillItBlend blended its first golf club, or whatever it was, Facebook was only open to college students. MySpace was the big social space of the day. And it wasn’t about your feed. It was about showing off.

The bottom line: WillItBlend wasn’t competing for attention with 150MM YouTube users, 500MM Facebook users, 250MM Twitter users, all yelling at the top of their lungs trying to promote their products.

If they started today, would they stand above the din? Maybe. They have a cool demonstration and people like to see stuff destroyed. But also, maybe not. Maybe they’d never rise above the social overload.

And—you have to ask yourself—would you?

Be honest.

No, really honest.

And when you can look yourself in the mirror, smile confidently, and say, “Yes, absolutely, my product and my content will stand comfortably above the din,” then, and only then, start on social.

The numbers are big. 500 million people on Facebook alone. And they’re so tantalizingly interconnected. It’s tempting to reach out to them with a Fan page (er, I mean a Like page, I guess, these days.) It’s tempting to talk to all those people directly, on the social network they use every day.

Until you do it, and you discover: 8 Likes isn’t enough.

So you look at the social advertising options. And there are some good ones. And Facebook lets you target people who have very specific “likes,” and offers a decent ad-building engine and opportunity for step-up programs.

And, you know what? That’s a really great opportunity to micro-target some very specific audiences. But don’t mistake it for a social campaign. That’s advertising, plain and simple.

Because it’s advertising, treat it like advertising:

1. Put the best possible creative you can into it. Yes, it’s tough to do something cool with tiny photos and static text, but if your creative isn’t up to the challenge, find new creative.

2. Start with more than one ad. Facebook automatically rotates your creative and shows which ones are more effective at a glance. Start with at least three approaches to see how they perform next to each other.

3. Rotate creative. Every week, kill the underperforming ad and rotate in a new one to see how it does against the others.

4. Pay attention to the numbers, and what they mean. If an ad has a 0.5% clickthrough (very good for Facebook), but it isn’t converting to Likes or sales, drop it and try a new approach.

5. Create, and maintain, an effective Facebook brand page. Sure you can drive people outside of Facebook with your ads, but you’ll soon find that the response rate is much higher if you stay within Facebook. This means creating and maintaining a Facebook brand page which includes:

a. Up-to-date, meaningful content about your company.
b. Regular updates on your company’s feed.
c. Tabs that allow people to buy direct from you in Facebook, or engage with your company directly in Facebook.
d. Interaction from fans.
e. More than 8 Likes. Shoot for several hundred at least. Thousands are better.

6. Keep it rolling. Social is a marathon, not a sprint. The longer you’re there, the better the results.

7. Or kill it. If the results of your social advertising are lower than the results of your conventional advertising (cost per sale is higher, etc), then just consider pulling the plug. Social takes plenty of time and energy, and if you have other marketing tactics that pay off better, it’s best to spend your time and energy there.

It’s about this time of year that everyone comes out of the woodwork, looking for a bargain in marketing. Last year it was “Hey, I heard social is cheep! What can ya do for me there?” This year, it looks like it’s back to the basics. So, we’re getting a lot of questions about SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. “Hey, I heard SEO is cheep! And it lasts a long time! Can ya get me some good search positions, huh, canya?”

For those of you who have been living in a hermetically-sealed bubble for the past decade and a half, SEO is the process of getting your company, or its products and services, listed in Google (or other search engines) under “natural search results.” These are the results that appear below, or to the left of, the sponsored search results. Which is a whole ‘nother ball game, but since Adwords aren’t perceived as “free,” we don’t get as many questions about them.

The problem is, a lot of people think there is a secret way to get to the #1 position on Google for any keyword in the universe, and we (as agencies) are simply hiding this secret.

To which I reply: “Ha!” If it was that easy, I’d be retired and living in a tropical paradise right now.”

The problem is, there’s no secret to SEO. There’s no simple, easy way to get listed in the top 10 search results for most keywords. There is a process, yes, and there are real, bottom-line benefits you can reap from a real SEO program, but (like everything else in marketing), it’s a long, time- and labor-intensive process. Google isn’t stupid. Google is very, very good at telling the difference between real, helpful content and content that’s just there to shill for your product. It’s very, very good at discerning auto-generated content from stuff made by a real human. And it’s very, very good at telling when you’re blogging just to hear yourself blog, or creating an article by pulling from the wiki, or any of a dozen other tricks that less-competent SEO guys will tell you work for “cheap and easy” results.

Because, when you get right down to it, SEO is about content. Good content. Unique content. Helpful content. Does this describe the articles on your website? Are there articles on your website at all? If not, who’s going to write them? If it’s not someone at your company, it’s your agency. Outsourcing articles to people who don’t live and breathe your culture ain’t gonna cut it. So you’re walking right into some very expensive work: either you staff up, or you pay agency rates.

“But what about inbound links?” you ask. “I heard I could create a billion sites and link them to mine–”

Wrong. Good inbound links count. Good links are from sites with a lot of eyeballs, and a lot of good content of their own. An inbound link from Wired is great. An inbound link from Yagattaseethisyoubetcha.com with a grand total of 12 visitors last month isn’t going to count for a thing. So, if you want to create links, you’re looking at pushing real press releases, and doing real PR, to the gorilla sites out there. Which takes you back squarely into the “gotta pay an internal person or agency” thing again.

And, to top this all off, you have to keep up. Did you know you could do a Google Base feed of your products and get listed in product search? Did you know your product photos could show up in natural search and Adwords? The rules keep changing, and again–someone has to keep up with it. It’s either your staff or your agency. Neither is cheap.

So, what’ll you choose? Don’t say “magic.” Because, when it comes to marketing, there ain’t no such thing.

A while back, we deconstructed 5 really bad reasons for revamping your site, in “5 Reasons NOT To Revamp Your Website.” Now it’s time for a companion piece, where we go into 5 very good reasons TO change your site.

Reason 1: The site doesn’t reflect who you are. If your company has evolved significantly, either in terms of message or in terms of product/service offerings, you have a legitimate, solid reason to revamp your site. Your website is the first extended contact that most of your prospective customers will have with you. If it’s not communicating your core messages, showing customers how you are different (and better) than the competition, and reflecting the best of what you do, you’re losing opportunities. So, when you find yourself explaining to callers that “well, you know, what’s on the site isn’t really what we do anymore,” look at a revamp. Or at least a refresh.

Reason 2: The site isn’t producing sales or leads effectively. How well does your site turn visitors to buyers or leads? Are you getting the kind of sales you’re looking for, or the number of leads you want? Do you know how you compare to other sites in the industry? If your site isn’t designed to lead your visitors down a path to sale or path to lead capture, then again, you’re missing opportunities. Oh–if you aren’t tracking your site statistics all the way through to final sale, or through lead capture, get started now!

Reason 3: Your site is confusing people. Do you get comments via email or on forms from visitors who say, “I can’t find this on your site! Help!” This is a warning sign. The major metric for site satisfaction is how many people are able to find what they’re looking for and accomplish their goals. For more information, deploy an exit survey and see how many people are having trouble. If 50% of your visitors can’t find what they’re looking for, you have a problem–think of all the visitors who aren’t commenting or emailing.

Reason 4: You can’t manage the site yourself. Does changing anything on your site mean a bill from the developer? If so, it’s likely you can’t respond at the speed of your market. Even the most basic sites today should be content-managed–which allows nontechnical personnel to make quick changes on some or all of the site content. Posting up new news items, editing a product listing, updating quantity in stock, or swapping an offer on the home page are examples of things that should be content-managed. And if your developer tells you content-management systems can be confusing, look elsewhere–properly designed content management interfaces are easier to use than Word.

Reason 5: You can’t do what you need to do with your site. Let’s say you need to launch a new self-service offering that requires a stepwise procedure that isn’t supported by your current system. Or you have a committed marketing person who wants to blog, but your site doesn’t support a blog. Or you want to add a quiz with scoring to your site. Or you can’t easily embed video. Or you need to add user accounts, so you can better engage with your customers. Or you have a new product that needs to be configured before you buy it, and the configuration doesn’t work with your e-commerce system. All of these are great reasons to revamp your site.

Remember, this is the first extended introduction a prospect will have with your company–make the most of it!