When choosing a marketing agency, you're really hoping for a long-term relationship, not just a one night stand, says Sally Pritchett, Director of digital marketing agency, Something Big.

Plus, using a different agency for each campaign can mean you're less likely to build on your learnings

Finding that perfect agency partner is very similar to finding your perfect partner in life: there needs to be chemistry. Only you'll know when it feels right but there are a few things to look out for...

In continuation of our Secert Marketer series, we asked a New Biz Director at a leading  whitelabel marketing agency to share his thoughts on where the agency-client gap really lies.

His answers may surprise you...

Obviously, marketing agency search and selection is what our team does, day in, day out.

But we also help foster relationships and subsequently are asked by agency and client alike, what the secret to healthy, happy and productive partnerships really is.

We were digging about the annuls of WARC recently and found a useful article about assessing client/marketing agency relationships. You can read it immediately, here.

In an era of lightening-speed craze creation, marketing agency trends can appear -and disappear- overnight.

However, some can be clearly mapped out, which is why we asked Simone Moretta, co-founder of IMS, a boutique marketing agency and incentive and prize promotion specialist, to get her Mystic Meg on and look ahead to 2014

2013 was the year twerking made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, Andy Murray was finally accepted as British following his Wimbledon win and Jennifer Lawrence found a place in everyone's hearts by getting a bit tequila happy for her Silver Linings Playbook post-Oscar interview.

What is a brand? And how important is the mojo behind it?

Andy Hunt, Managing Director of marketing agency, Quick Thinking aims to find out...

What is a brand?

Ask a sample of the average-Joes and most will reach for one of today’s star brand icons. They’ll probably google a Coca Cola logo. Or point to a Nike trainer flash. Or show you the shiny Apple adorning their i-phone. Of course, these are all correct answers, but only partly right. As any brand marketer will tell you, brands are really a subtle mix of ‘10% logo and 90% mojo’. The lion’s share of any brand sits not in its physical identity, but in the much fluffier and less tangible attributes that surround it. Its real value lies not in its appearance, but the associations and behaviours it excites in people.

That’s why a branding agency will invest so much time (and charge so much money) to understand the ‘mojo’ of a brand before crafting its brand bible. Without knowing the essential back-story it’s impossible to engineer an identity that fits the bill.

Knowing where to look when it comes to SEO and Social Media advice can be a battle, but here, Richard O'flynn, Director of digital marketing agency, 201 Digital, offers his top professional tools and tricks to stay ahead...

Professional tools for SEO and social media Searching Google for ‘SEO tools’ offers almost 40 million hits, and looking for ‘social media tools’ gives you ‘approximately’ 677 million. If even Google can only be bothered to approximate, then that makes searching for the right SEO and social media tools for your business something of a tricky ask, right? Add to that the plethora of social networks that are around and it can be difficult to handle the social networks you choose that are best for your niche.

Fortunately, we’re here to help – here’s a list of some fantastic, essential tools that can really help boost the social media and SEO side of your business.

1. Staying contented

Simone Moretta is the co-founder & new business director of IMS, a boutique marketing agency, incentive and prize promotion specialist. Here she explains how to find solutions to current marketing challenges.

“Did You Just Double Dip That Chip?”

Budget over Money Can’t Buy

After the stresses and strain of the past couple of years we now all know that double dip doesn’t just refer to a person popping a crudité into the sour cream more times than is strictly polite, but actually is the current economic buzz word describing a worldwide recession.

Clients more frequently want something to suit their specific budget whilst retaining that exciting and memorable experience. After over twelve years in the promotional marketing business and founder of my own promotional marketing agency, I can say with confidence it’s now more important than ever to maintain fantastic relationships with suppliers and a little (massive) black book chock-full of luxury contacts.

That is the key to the budget challenge and our personal secret weapon in the double dip society.

You know the drill. Here's part two of our series on common mistakes made by marketing agencies during the search and selection process.

Catch up on part one here.

As always, get in touch via the comment section below, or Tweet us, to share your views.

As agency search and selection folk, we see a lot of marketing agencies make it -and break it- and know what it takes to get hired.

While some will inevitably fall at the first hurdle, others damage their chances with avoidable mistakes during the initial stages or even during their pitches.

We on the FindGood Marketing Blog want you to succeed in all your pitches, naturally, so here is what you shouldn't do, or perhaps some of the reasons you're not winning the work you should be. As always, let our little birds know what you think via Twitter or chat to our blog badgers via the comment section below.

We thought we would inject a little light-hearted content into, what appears to be, a sea of negative commentaries on the Google Hummingbird update. Who needs Keywords when you can invent words for your marketing campaign? 

Much to the annoyance of many SEO and content marketing agencies keywords are now predominantly ‘not provided’ in organic search analytics, making the SEO analysis of your website a cryptic puzzle. 

As other marketing agencies shout their annoyance at this extra workload and plead the importance of keyword targeting, one agency, McCann Melbourne to be exact, have instead chosen to invent and market their own word. And the result is rather impressive.

McCann created an entire content marketing campaign based around a word that essentially does not exist – ‘Phubbing’. As extra evidence of their marketing feat the Australian agency even managed to hardly mention the product they were marketing (which just so happens to be a dictionary) until the final seconds of their video campaign.

The video they produced ‘Phubbing: A Word is Born’ is a factual and emotive story that explains the existence of a phenomenon that has no name. McCann, being McCann (the origin of viral hit Dumb Ways To Die) set out to fill this word void with a name. So let’s take a look at how they went about it.

The situation: