This point is SO OBVIOUS that it deserves repeating one more time! Everything in business and marketing must start with your goals. Ask any good marketer and they will tell you that marketing plans are created to help a company realize business objectives and define goals. It doesn’t matter whether your goals are to increase [...]

When you develop a marketing campaign, a careful consideration of the available marketing outlets must be part of your plan. Every media outlet comes with its own individual pros and cons. A great marketing option for one company may not be good for another – even in the same industry.
In the article below I [...]

Pros: Event marketing can forge relationships, offer complete creative control, and well executed events offer many opportunities to garner additional press and media attention.
Cons: Event marketing requires a substantial planning investment, time and extensive marketing are required to build a loyalty, and results can be very difficult to quantify and evaluate.

Pros: Trade shows provide an engaging and personal selling environment, allow for hands-on product demonstration, provide an opportunity to watch your competitors, and they provide great networking opportunities.
Cons: Trade shows can be very costly (fees, travel, preparation), require staff training and planning, and trade shows can be very fatiguing events to attend and staff.

Pros: Press releases can establish solid credibility, they often lead to reprints which extend the story life, can be used as marketing collateral, and they can often drive traffic to a website.
Cons: Press releases offer no guarantee that your story will be syndicated, often require a long lead time, and they do not provide total [...]

Pros: Telemarketing can be more cost effective than door-to-door sales, permits accurate results tracking, and telemarketing databases can often double as direct mail lists.
Cons: Telemarketing is one of the more intrusive methods of marketing, can often do more to hurt branding than help your image, and it requires professional callers and well executed scripts to [...]

Pros: Roadside billboards provide a great medium for increasing brand awareness, permit geographic targeting through placement, and they are very cost effective given their reach.
Cons: Roadside billboards must have a very brief message to permit reading from passing vehicles, rely on the memory of consumer for locations and phone numbers, better for brand awareness than [...]

Pros: Direct mail is a precisely targeted medium, can be personalized, keeps marketing information away from your competitors, permits split run testing, and it takes very little creative investment.
Cons: Direct mail pieces require a long read time by the viewer, involve extensive mailing list management, typically require follow-up letters or calls to be effective, and [...]