What is Local Search Marketing?

What factors are companies using to determine whether they outsource certain PR/marketing efforts like content marketing, social media, search marketing, etc.?

• Looking to hear from Marketing Directors/VPs and those actually engaged in the hiring or outside firms, not bloggers or agencies, please.

• Answer:

  I'm from an agency, but I spend most of my SEO conversations reminding big companies that they don't need to outsource PR/marketing efforts like content marketing, and social media. The most basic factor you should take into account is if you already have a source for that work internally... and most of them are really the job of a modern PR person. "Content Marketing" should be a collaboration between your head of PR and one or more copywriters. "Social Media" is most likely a more junior PR person, but could also be your main (only) PR person if you're a smaller biz. Search marketing... depends.  If you're talking "SEO," it's really a collection of marketing and site development best practices that any self-respecting website owner should be doing anyway, even if there weren't any search engines.  Most of the work covered here is from your website development team and PR team (plus copywriters, etc.).  Your PR people will do all of the "link building" you'll ever need, if they're worth a damn (I wrote about this and a few other things here, recently: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/36552.asp). On the paid search side, either hire someone really good to manage this internally or send it out to agency, especially if you're spending upwards of $100k a month or more (less if you just have nobody in house to handle).