When searching for a marketing agency, it is easy to focus primarily on price—after all, if the price is beyond the limits of your budget, then you are back at square one in your efforts to create marketing collateral. While price is certainly an important factor when outsourcing marketing collateral, it should not be the top/only factor.

You can avoid costly mistakes by asking the following questions when looking for a marketing agency:

• Is the work outsourced?
  Why send your important marketing deliverables to an agency only to have it outsourced to another?
• Is it a full-service agency that can provide copywriting, multimedia, graphics and layout, and PR?
• Does the copy team have the required domain knowledge?
  If your company sells networking applications, servers, solar panels—you fill in the blank—then it is critical that the agency has experience writing about that technology. Having a strong background in your technology area ensures that the copywriter can conduct meaningful interviews to elicit information that best conveys the value of your product or solution.
• Can you perform translations, off-hour interviews?
  If you want to create case studies for all your APAC clients, for example, be sure to inquire about an agency’s ability to conduct off-hour interviews and translation services. Also ensure that they have experience working with clients in a particular geographic area and that they have the proper training related to cultural norms and sensitivities.

While price is clearly an important factor in your choice, don’t let it be the primary determinant. Remember that whichever agency you choose, you are entrusting it with your name, your brand, your reputation. So, choose wisely.

Joyce Fee is the Business Development Manager at NAVAJO Company

There seems to be growing optimism among our clients that business conditions are improving. Still, the New Year and new outlook hasn’t yet translated into a loosening of the corporate marketing purse strings. The mantra “do more for less” continues to be the pervasive directive for many of our friends in the business. That’s okay, because here at NAVAJO we’ve adapted and created new services to meet the challenge. One example is VidCast.

VidCast combines the use of inexpensive, portable video recording devices with internet communications to produce and deliver low cost, tell-it-like-it-is customer testimonials—for a fraction of the cost of full-scale video productions. It’s fun and easy to use for your customers and puts them in the driver’s seat on how they’re being portrayed. Combined with NAVAJO’s decades of experience in developing worldwide customer reference programs, our VidCast service is ideal for YouTube-style viral marketing. Incorporate the same video in sophisticated Flash presentations, and you have a marketing tool that can be used by senior executives or at trade shows. To learn more about NAVAJO VidCast click on
http://www.navajocompany.com/vidcast.html

Wayne Martinez is President of NAVAJO Company

Wait! Before jumping onto the latest bandwagon—clean tech—ask yourself this: what is clean tech? Here’s one definition: clean tech is any technology, product, or company that leaves the smallest possible environmental footprint. From consumer electronics to automobiles, from data centers to supermarket retailers, everyone lays claim to the clean tech label these days. However, simply calling yourself a clean tech company isn’t an adequate branding strategy anymore.

The fundamentals of branding haven’t changed—articulate what’s unique about your company and offering, give tangible evidence of the value you provide, and then create sound bites to which your target audience will respond. At the end of the day, branding is all about projecting the one critical value that will stick in the minds of potential customers. Terms like clean tech, green tech, eco tech or xyz tech are just words—you must back them up with proof points, customer examples, and metrics.

Dee Sharma is Strategic Marketing Manager at NAVAJO Company