Hiring new contractors, agencies or freelancers to market your business? Put these battle-tested must have's into your next Request for Proposal and find your unicorn with ease.

Strategic marketing plans are so necesarry but so HARD to do well without really clear insights on how the current year is going. Here are 7 critical steps for marketing executives and business owners to take today to make their 2020 marketing plan easier to prepare and more effective than ever before.

Influencers. They're on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook. Writing blogs. Self publishing content to millions of followers and they carry big time clout. There's one, or a hundred, influencers out there for every business's clients. They are the signal that your clients rely on and are influenced by when making purchasing decisions today. It's word of mouth gone wild. These influencers are helping your customers decide what to buy and who to buy from without ever having met. So how do you harness this new power for your brand? It's not as easy as finding the one who looks the type and has millions of followers, shipping them your stuff along with a hefty payment in exchange for them to post a picture of your brand accompanied by #ad. This episode quickly explores the five most powerful factors brands need to consider when trying to identify the right influencers to help spread their brand message.

Testing new marketing tactics, media channels and campaign creative is a critical part of business growth. But 2/3 of those tests will fail, costing businesses time and money. The reasons they fail are surprising and avoidable. Tune in to learn the mistakes you must avoid when running marketing tests.

Whether you're onboarding a new marketing/creative agency for your business or you're an agency welcoming new clients; these three simple yet crucial best practices will ensure that your relationship is valuable and lasting.

Business growth is reliant on successful marketing efforts. But what if there's not enough skill or manpower on your internal teams to scale those marketing efforts? How do you know if it's best to build out your in-house team and hire new employees, contract freelance talent, or bring on agency partners?

There's no one right answer, but there's a very specific place to focus on to get started in the right direction.

We lovingly call it the J.O.E. Report, which stands for "Justify Our Existence" and it's part of life at the end of every year and every project for marketing professionals.

Before you overwhelm yourself or your leaders with meaningless data, here's how to prepare one that will successfully communicate the business value of your marketing efforts.

Less than a 5 minute listen!

Marketing strategy meetings...the name alone sometimes reads: "total waste of my time" to potential attendees. This quick episode gives you two tips you can implement today to make sure your next marketing planning meeting actually creates clarity and progress. No special skills or resources required. Listen, implement, win.

The fastest way to burn through your advertising dollars with no business return is to skip the customer research and profiling step. Need some good analogies to sell customer research up the chain internally or for your next client pitch? This episode has you covered AND shares the two most brilliant advertisements of the last decade that absolutely nail the customer profiling game.

As marketers today we're challenged with the art of telling compelling stories. But you can't tell a great story with an empty heart. Fill it up!