‘Build it and they will come' has work for Kevin Costner in the movie Field of Dreams. But, has things changed ever since? That's the saying when the Internet was first establish with the evolution of the Internet today things have change. Having a website doesn't guarantee visitors, if it does why do business invest billions of dollars in search engine optimization (SEO), hoping that their website will be listed first on search engines when user searches for information so it will guide them to their website.

Another issue that faces businesses today is that with technology advances, effective business measures and competitive rivals, companies need to look for the competitive edge of their business. Often this will include utilizing their resources to their full potential – getting their money's worth.

As billions of dollars are used for advertising each year, the projection is that it will increase from year to year; businesses are more money conscious about their spending and increasing their judgment on the returns from their spending. Thus in the recent years, the popularity with contextual advertising has evolve and stood out amongst other forms of online advertising. Simply because contextual advertising meet ends, showing your ad to the right people at the right time will lead to a purchase. It can assist in optimizing ad relevancy and improve the click through rate (CTR) of your advertisements making all the differences in conversions.

The key to contextual advertising is placing your ad on websites that is ‘in context' to the product/service you are promoting. This creates many benefits; firstly you are delivering what the user is asking for , with providing the visitors with the specific information that they are looking for in a timely manner most likely the user will turn into a buyer or a repeat visitor to your website. Secondly, contextual advertising creates an association to your product or service. When the visitor goes searching for widgets and your company keeps appearing on the websites the visitor is visiting, the next time when the user thinks about widgets they will think of your company. Thirdly, contextual advertising provides highly targeted advertising as a result spending your advertising budget cost effectively and efficiently. Since your ads are being placed on relevant website which aims at your target audience you are spending less to reach your audience in the most effective way. Finally, it offers an effective way to measure how well you are sending your message to your target audiences . Since your ads are displaying to the right audiences you can measure how effective the ad is sending its message. You are able to display more than one advertisement and track the results as well as change the advertisement in real-time to compare results.

As you can see contextual advertising provides many benefits and growing in demand. With the effectiveness and efficiency of reaching your visitors in an economical way, it's your choice to stay with the trend or be left behind!

As you can see contextual advertising provides many benefits and growing in demand. With the effectiveness and efficiency of reaching your visitors in an economical way, it’s your choice to stay with the trend or be left behind!

A successful marketing plan relies heavily on the pulling-power of advertising copy. Writing result-oriented ad copy is difficult, as it must appeal, entice, and convince consumers to take action. There is no magic formula to write perfect ad copy; it is based on a number of factors, including ad placement, demographic, even the consumer’s mood when they see your ad. So how is any writer supposed to pen a stunning piece of advertising copy -- copy that sizzles and sells? The following tips will jumpstart your creative thinking and help you write a better ad.

KNOW THE BASICS

All good advertising copy is comprised of the same basic elements. Good advertising copy always:

Grabs Attention: Consumers are inundated with ads, so it’s vital that your ad catches the eye and immediately grabs interest. You could do this with a headline or slogan (such as VW’s “Drivers Wanted” campaign), color or layout (Target’s new colorful, simple ads are a testimony to this) or illustration (such as the Red Bull characters or Zoloft’s depressed ball and his ladybug friend).

Promises Credible Benefit: To feel compelled by an ad, the consumer must stand to gain something; the product is often not enough. What would the consumer gain by using your product or service? This could be tangible, like a free gift; prestige, power or fame. But remember: you must be able to make good on that promise, so don’t offer anything unreasonable.

Keeps Interest: Grabbing the consumer’s attention isn’t enough; you have keep that attention for at least a few seconds. This is where your benefits come into play or a product description that sets your offer apart from the others.

Generates Action: This is the ultimate point of advertising copy -- it must make the reader react in some way. This doesn’t necessarily translate to buying the product immediately or using the service. Your ad could be a positioning tool to enable the reader to think about you in a certain light. Speak to your audience, or the audience you’d like to reach, and you’ll be surprised how frequently they come to you in the future.

KNOW THE MEDIUM

How you write your advertising copy will be based on where you will place your ad. If it’s a billboard ad, you’ll need a super catchy headline and simple design due to the speed at which people will pass. Online ads are similar; consumers are so inundated with Internet advertising that your ad must be quick and catchy. Magazine advertising is the most versatile, but this is solely dependent on the size of your ad and how many other ads compete with yours. If you have a full page ad, feel free to experiment; more page space gives you more creative space. If the ad is tiny, you’ll need to keep things as simple as possible.

KNOW THE STYLE

Advertising copy is a unique type of writing. Its point is to balance creativity and readability into something persuasive and entertaining. Keep the following points in mind when you write your copy:

Be Succinct: There are few things more damaging to an ad campaign than messy wordiness. Use short sentences with as many familiar words as possible; save the thesaurus for a thesis or dissertation. Always make sure to use precise phrasing (why use five adjectives when one good action verb would do?); and eliminate any redundancies, such as “little tiny” or “annual payments of $XXX per year.”

Talk To Your Audience, Not At Them: Though you are announcing the availability of a product or service, avoid being clinical or overly formal. Write as if you’re talking to your ideal customer; use a style they’d use, words they’d be familiar with, slang they’d probably know. But be absolutely certain that you’re using these terms and phrases correctly. A recent McDonald’s campaign attempted to reach a certain audience by using the phrase “I’d hit it” in reference to a cheeseburger, unaware that the phrase is almost always used as a sexual reference.

Avoid Clichés: It’s easy for writers new to advertising copy to fall into this trap, but it’s a trap that can severely damage the writing. Clichés fail to ignite the imagination; and consumers so numb to the phrases will often skip right past them, effectively ruining the succinct element of your ad. If you find yourself tempted to use a cliché, think about the message you want to convey with that cliché and try to rephrase it in a more imaginative, personal way.

Always Proofread: It’s an obvious point, but you’d be surprised how many ads run in a magazine or on a billboard with an error of some sort. Go through your advertising copy carefully to make sure that every word is spelled correctly, the grammar is impeccable and the punctuation is dead on.

Sometimes your business might need a "shot in the arm" to get going. You might have tried promoting on your own and have not had any good results. If you have come to the conclusion that your business needs outside promotional marketing help, then you have just taken one of several steps. Next you have to figure out how to choose a promotion marketing agency. This is a big decision. Hiring a promotional marketing agency is not something to take lightly, so consider following these steps and tips when making your selection.

First of all, when choosing your promotion marketing agency, you need have a short list of candidates. Dust off that old phone book, or visit your local search engine online and do some research. Find somewhere around two to four marketing agency candidates that are "promising", in a location you like, and seem to have the knowledge you are after. This will be the pool from which you will be choosing your agency. So make sure you put some time into this search stage.

Next, when you are looking for a promotional marketing agency you actually need to know your own strengths. If you know what you are strong in, then you already know where your company does not need help. Knowing your strengths will also shed light on your weaknesses. Your weaknesses are what you are trying to get someone to help you with. So identifyin them is a good start. That way, if you find that some marketing agency candidates on your list specialize in a particular area or offer specific functions then you can find which are more suited to your needs and which can address your weaknesses. There's no point hiring an agency to do what you are already doing well. Save your time and money and focus on the things you actually need help with.

Another factor to consider when choosing a promotional marketing agency is their location. If you think you are going to want to have face to face meetings, then make sure you choose a local company. I usually prefer to talk face to face and interact with a real human being rather than a computer screen if I were to hire someone to help me with my business. I feel a lot safer knowing there's a face beind the hands that will drive my company forward. But you might be different. If you are okay with faxes and emails or virtual meetings, then perhaps you can go with a company that is farther away. The choice is obviously up to you, but you have to know what you are looking for, location wise. Local companies may even offer you discounts and free services.

Choosing a promotional marketing agency can involve a lot of time and effort. However, if you make sure that you have gotten yourself organized, you will have a better chance of making your search successful. Make sure you have a preliminary list of what you are looking for, a location idea, and that you know what you are already in strong in and are weak in. Once you have those things in order, you will be able to find the promotional marketing agency that is right for you and your company

What’s the easiest way to kill a great ad campaign before it even begins? Take it too seriously. Advertising is not rocket science. You shouldn’t need a degree in the physical sciences to create or understand an ad.

And you should never, ever, under any circumstances, kill an ad because it is not literal enough. On the contrary, if you find your ads are too literal, you should destroy them all and start fresh.

Are Volkswagens flawed pieces of junk? No, but an ad with the headline “Lemon” gets your attention, doesn’t it? It makes you want to read the story, which goes on to explain how the particular car shown in the ad would never be driven because VW cares so much it weeds out the lemons so you never get a bad car. Think what an opportunity would have been missed if the folks at Volkswagen had taken that headline too literally.

Think about it from this angle. Why do people read an ad or watch a commercial? The majority do so because they find them entertaining and informative. If your ads are all information and no entertainment, you’ve wasted your budget.

This is not to say that an ad should be created purely for entertainment purposes. Again, a great ad is both entertaining and informative. The entertainment value should be derived from a feature of your product or brand. In other words, what you’re selling should be the star of the show. Sounds simple enough, but it is often hard to strike the right balance. That’s what makes advertising so fun.

How much information does your audience really need? What kind of story will they find entertaining? These are questions that should be asked and answered early on so that when you finally are presented with an ad or a campaign, you can judge the work according to these preordained guidelines.

A good campaign will reach your target audience and talk to them on a personal level. This has a valuable effect on your sales and reputation. A great advertising campaign will do more than that. It will create a buzz outside of your target audience.

Apple Computer’s “1984” commercial ran only once. But it is still one of the most talked about commercials because it was rebroadcast on every major news show and written about in every major newspaper for weeks and months. And none of this cost Apple anything more than a single TV buy.

It’s worth noting that Apple’s Super Bowl commercial helped make the company a household name and created unbelievable demand for the new Macintosh computer-yet the ad never showed the product or explained any details about it.

BMW’s Mini Cooper was one of the first cars to be introduced in the United States with no TV advertising. Blasphemy! Instead, they bolted the Minis to the roofs of SUVs and drove them around major cities. They created tongue-in-cheek billboards, interactive print ads and great guerrilla promotions. Most importantly, they created a waiting list of customers who couldn’t wait to get a Mini.

Companies that think bigger become bigger. It’s a self-fulfilling cycle. If you just think like a local operation, you might miss the opportunity to expand regionally, nationally, or even internationally. Your advertising campaign should reflect the direction of your company—even if you’re not yet there.

Challenge yourself and your agency to think bigger.

This article introduced the third of twelve steps. Challenge yourself, your staff and your advertising agency to revolutionize your ad program. If you missed a previous step, contact the author for a complimentary copy. And, remember, every revolution begins with just one step.

Jeff Berney is a freelance idealist, brand evangelist and writer.

Today, the advertising job has become so complex that normally, no business firm chooses to handle the function directly. They employ advertising agencies. And the advertising agency has become a major institution in the field of advertising and marketing.

The advertiser- advertising agency relationship is a very crucial aspect of advertising management. Only when the advertiser and the advertising agency work in close contact and collaborate with each other can the advertising function can be carried out effectively and successfully. The collaboration cannot be limited to the mechanics of developing the advertisements; it has to pervade the entire task of marketing communications.

The firm and the agency must work together in media selection, theme development, message construction and copy development. It is essential that the agency have all the relevant information about the firm, its products and markets, the consumer, the competition and the channels. The agency must become an ‘insider’ and right at the ‘fact finding stage’; full collaboration between the firm and the agency must be established.

The agency should also have a correct idea of the marketing and communication objectives of the firm; how the particular product/brand is positioned or proposed to be positioned, and how the other elements of the marketing mix, such as distribution and pricing, are conceived and handled by the firm.

In the modern context, knowledge of just advertising related matters is not sufficient for an advertising agency to succeed. It must have a comprehensive appreciation of all the aspects of marketing. The advertising agencies have to acquire more and more professional expertise, again, not merely in advertising-related matters, but also in all aspects of marketing. They have to appreciate that advertising is a method of marketing. Their advertising effectiveness would be proportionate to the extent that they are aware of the overall dimensions of marketing.

In order to get consumers (whether they are retail or service customers or business- to-business audiences) to notice an advertising message, many companies resort to loudness and one-upmanship. Neither of these tactics works in the long run.

If your competition is talking loudly and you decide to yell louder, what do you think they will do? Yep. They’ll start to scream. Nobody wins a shouting match when it comes to advertising. And usually you’ll find you even lose a few customers in the process because they can’t stand the noise.

It’s the same with one-upmanship. If you have to compete on more and better coupons or more and better discounts, giveaways or incentives unrelated to your core product, your revenue per sale decreases as well as your number of sales.

Customers see these types of games as gimmicky, fake and disingenuous; and they leave. The ones who do stay now view you and your competitors as commodities with no difference except your price. That is a dangerous place for a company to find itself.

The answer to clutter is not more clutter; it’s finding who wants to hear you and speaking to them. So how do you compete if you can’t out shout or out discount your competition? You get rebellious and radical with your advertising.

Do those words scare you? That’s okay. Remember, you’re being courageous now. You can handle it. Besides, rebellious and radical aren’t dirty words. They will help you draw attention away from your competition without resorting to screaming and insulting your customers.

It’s not about being outrageous just to get attention; it’s about being remarkable. An advertising campaign with a strong rebellious strategy is, by its very nature, different from anything your audience will find from your competitors’ marketing efforts. It’s unexpected. It’s surprising. It’s effective.

There are two keys to creating a successfully rebellious advertising campaign. The first is the big idea. This idea comes from a strategy that is derived directly from your customers and their relationship with your brand. You arrive at this idea through a discipline called account planning. We’ll get into the details of both the big idea and account planning in later articles.

The second key to a successfully rebellious advertising campaign is attention. You can’t gain attention if you don’t learn to identify and then steer clear of the norm. It doesn’t matter how great your product or service is or how large your potential market, if your target audience doesn’t pay attention to your message, your ad budget has been wasted.

Think about these two keys while you flip through the newspaper or a magazine. Ponder them while you watch TV. You should notice something almost immediately. Most ads today don’t seem to be based on any big idea. Many are so boring that you flip right past them without noticing them. Others get your attention but the ads don’t have much to do with the product so you quickly forget the brand the ad was supposed to sell you. What an opportunity for your brand!

Yellow page publishers spend an average of $15 per ad design by in-house ad designers. In most of the publisher’s ads there is little difference in the graphics or written content from ad to ad. The publisher’s ads are free to the advertiser, which is the most expensive free going. A yellow pages graphic design firm will generally charge $500 to $2,000 for an ad, depending on the size, but will be guaranteed to generate substantially more calls then the publisher’s ads.

Yellow pages design firms offer as many unique ad designs as the number of firms out there. I have designed ads for thousands of businesses over the last 20 years. Always there was an increase in calls and sales from their yellow page ads that my firm designed. What has amazed me is the dramatic increase in calls generated by cartoon ads.

Many of the largest advertisers on television use humorous ads with success. To prove this point all you have to do is remember the ads that appear on the Super Bowl Sunday. Most of the commercials that you see are humorous. People enjoy humor and remember humor. I saw a Fed EX ad yesterday of a caveman that kicks a baby dinosaur and he is then squashed by an elephant. There were six of us laughing. If humor works on TV why not in the yellow pages?

Consumer surveys also tell us that very few people read the information in yellow pages ads. 85% of people that look into a yellow pages heading have already made up their mind to buy the product or service. The advertiser has to separate himself from all of his competitor’s ads and a cartoon is a great way of doing that.

Countless studies have proven whenever people make any purchase it is always based on an emotional response. Providing a humorous situations in an ad as opposed to showing a picture of a truck will certainly stimulate an emotional response.

Far more women call the largest headings (number of ads) in the Yellow Pages. These are headings that solve an emergency situation. Examples of this are appliance repair, air-conditioning repair, and plumbing. It is the woman that is often home during the day and will make the call if the air conditioner is broken. Women, in consumer surveys of yellow page ads, select the cartoon ads three to one over non-cartoon ads. Man in the same survey are 50-50 in selecting cartoon ads or non-cartoon ads.

To accentuate your business brochures you need to think professionalism. Believe it or not if you are too professional and a small business and you have spent too much on your brochures making them look corporate and slick some customers are afraid to do business with you because they think the prices are too high.

Isn't that funny how people think, however you may have thought the same thing your self. Now then, if you run a small business and you have super professional corporate looking brochures it might be wise to put a notation that you have free price quotes available or perhaps put some of your prices for some of your services or products actually on the brochures.

There are ways to make your small business look professional and accentuate your business brochures without looking too glossy and corporate. It is smart to consider ways to make your small business look professional and humble, but also pleasing to the eye and friendly.

Some corporations spend the millions of dollars with advertising agencies to come up with corporate slick brochures, but sometimes they need to be accentuate further to make them happy and friendly and so often large corporations miss the boat and many times the small businesses have a leg up on the competition because of this.

When accentuating your business brochures you need to put your mind in side the head of your potential customer and consider what they're thinking and what they want and who better to ask than yourself. Think of this in 2006.

While every business has, or should have a business card, often it is neglected as a part of an overall strategy. If you take the time to devise even a simple marketing, public relations, or sales strategy, your business card should be an integral part of your plan.

Location! Location! Location!
If you sell product, consider including your card with the product when it is delivered to your customer. Same goes for services. For example, if you are an auto mechanic, consider slipping your business card in your customer's car visor, or create a sticker business card that will adhere to a discrete area of the customer's car windsheild. If you provide regular on-site services, consider a business card magnet to be prominently placed on a refrigerator, or filing cabinet. Keep in mind, you don't need to actually sell product, or deliver service to ensure your business card gets and stays in the hands of others. Include your business card with every piece of correspondence: quotes, RFP's, letters, even photocopy your business card and include it in fax transmissions. When mailing out information, include it in the mailing by stapling your card (if possible) to the bottom or top corner of your letterhead.

Easy Access
The best thing you can do with your business card is not only carry it around with you, but have other people carry it around and pass it around for you. Having other people carry your card allows them to provide it to their friends or associates when they are looking for a product or service. It is a proven and inexpensive marketing technique.

Keep a small stack of business cards everywhere you can store and access them: in your car, your jacket pocket, your briefcase, your purse or wallet, in your day planner, at home, etc. You'll always want to have some on hand when you meet a prospective customer and you never know who might be your next prospect.

Getting creative with your business card distribution
If you look at your daily routine, don't overlook the opportunities which lie in front of you to distribute your business card and be pro-active in your business marketing. Nothing is over the top. If you conduct or attend seminars, or trade shows, make sure to drop your card in a "fish bowl" or card collection box. Tack your business card to bulletin boards at supermarkets, restaurants, retail stores, schools, libraries and other public spots that have a well placed bulletin board. With in-person distribution, consider giving out two cards at a time, one for your customer prospect and one for her/him to give away, or at the very least, reduce their chances of losing the only business card you gave them.

Finally, ask businesses in your neighborhood if they will display your business card near their cash register, or checkout (reassure them there is no conflict of interest). If you start to build relationships with business that offer complimentary products or services, even in your immediate neighbourhood, you will realize there is strength in numbers. Many larger organizations will form strategic alliances to further accelerate business development and mutually benefit from each others sales channels. Based on the same methodology, small businesses can adopt a similar, and certainly less political approach. Jointly agree to mail the business cards for other companies in the same position as you. If you agree to include them in your mailings or other promotional activities, they will do the same for you. A small business network, or circle of businesses can quickly grow to become a large and high effective business co-operative.

Your advertising plan should be a vital part of your marketing plan. You have an excellent service or a useful product and you need to let people know what you have to offer! People learn about your business through advertising. Because successful advertising is creative and innovative, the creative person has a distinct advantage in developing an effective strategy.

Advertising can be expensive, so you must be specific in identifying the objectives of your plan. Each home-based business is unique, but the fundamental objectives for advertising should include creating a public awareness of your business, reaching new customers, increasing sales and profits and being cost effective.

The first step is to define potential customers in the geographic area served by your business. Do some preliminary surveys and some interviews to determine which means of advertising will reach them. What newspapers do they read? Which radio stations do they listen to? Do they use discount coupons? Do they respond to direct mail? Tailor your advertising efforts to your market.

When you know which audience you want to reach and where you want the information to appear, you must look at the various methods of advertising available to you. Advertising methods differ according to medium, complexity, target audience and cost. Some forms of advertising are more effective for a home-based business than others.

1. Newspaper advertising can be effective for a small business. A relatively large number of people can be reached through a classified ad. Display ads are more costly and should be placed in the newspaper section read by your market. The cost of your ad will vary according to the circulation areas and the frequency of publication.

2. Direct mail while initially expensive can be economical in the long run because it delivers specific information in a personal way to large numbers of people. If you operate a mail-order business, direct mail advertising is especially appropriate because you can target your advertising. Direct mail can be used to distribute letters, promotional give-aways, discount coupons and brochures.

3. Brochures can be expensive but they are essential for any business for which the prospective customer needs detailed information about the qualifications and expertise of the owner and the services and products offered. More information can be supplied in a brochure than would be practical for a classified ad. Brochures can be mailed, distributed door to door or given out at community events and trade shows.

4. Yellow Page directories should not be overlooked as a means of advertising. Every person with a telephone has a copy of their local phone book with business Yellow Pages. Directories are one of the most widely used forms of advertising. The telephone company advertising staff will give you help in designing an ad that will present your business in an effective manner. Be aware that directories are published at various times of the year. Call the phone company to determine the publication deadlines. A home-based business may wish to omit the address from the ad. Phone calls can be screened and clients can be scheduled so the neighborhood is not disrupted by an increased flow of traffic.

5. Business cards are another inexpensive way to inform the public about your business. They are easy to distribute at meetings, upon the completion of a job or during networking. Think of your business card as a "mini-billboard." It should contain the name of your business, the name of a contact person, the complete address, the complete phone number and an appropriate slogan or description of the business.

Burton Upon Trent as many other towns is losing its roots mainly because Coors has taken over the world reknown brewer Bass. The same as HP being taken from Birmingham to go to Europe. When will it stop? I started to see it with pub companies planting the same pubs in every town in the UK and the same with department stores. Every town starting to look the same. England and everytown within it has its one underlying attraction - tradition. This is soon disapearing and this really gave me a blow to the ribs when they have even taken our British beer Bass away from us. We need to encourage UK businesses, firstly from leading by example by not selling our national iconic businesses to other countries. For more information on Burton Upon Trent visit

There are so many business finders on a national scale, offering lots of information about businesses but actually no information that can really be used effectively. Why because none of them are local, lots of them are out of date have no real idea about the local area and the businesses in them. We are losing the local feel of towns and cities in this country, one reason is because of the Internet. All of the big companies can get to the top of the search rankings and make more money on a national scale but where does this leave the local businesses? Local businesses need to be advertised as well and the best way for them to do this is to collaborate together on to one site and get noticed on their collaborated page on the net. This is what I am doing in Burton Upon Trent because if you type Burton Upon Trent in the search engine no local business is ranked there. If you have any questions and want to join me bringing locality to Internet advertising

So often small business owners will attempt to tell the public and reader of a publication, yellow pages or Internet portal site, how great their company is, when they should be telling the company what they can do for them.

For many years I had run a franchise company and we had specifications of what advertising we would and would not allow to insure that our brand name was not jeopardized and to insure the advertising pulled for the franchisees. In fact often we paid half the cost of the ads or reduced royalty fees to help pay for them.

One thing I learned in franchising is that our franchisees, much like most of our competitors were small businesses and extremely proud of their businesses. This would come to life and become quite evident by the types of advertising I would see and by the types of advertising my franchises would submit to me via Facsimile for a 24-hour approval turn around.

I cannot tell you how many times our franchisees would attempt to embellish their ads and say things like 5-trucks to serve you, when I knew they only had three and one being built. Meaning even stretching it the true number was four not five and probably not 5 until the start of the next peak season.

You see I realized that it was human nature to embellish, but there is a point to this story and that is that it does not matter anyway? The customer could care less how many units on the road you have they care more about how good of service you will provide and would be quite happy if our competition or our own franchise was a single unit owner/operator and they could deal straight with the boss and not an employee sent out on one of their many units you see?

Please if you own a small business it is better to say “We Love Our Customers” or “We Guarantee Super Service” rather than bragging in your advertising that you have some huge company. Because if you are that big, often the customer thinks you do not need or want their business and you have wasted your advertising on the wrong message. Please consider this in 2006.

One has to be fairly careful when advertising in trade journals because the costs can get prohibitive, yet if you are selling to the industry, the percentage of readers who might be interested is large. If you have a company, which is not selling to the industry but rather participating in it, it is not always smart to run ads that allow your competition and invite to solicit you as fake customers to scout you out.

Indeed, many companies in an industry sector are members of large associations and they advertise in order to get favored articles written about their company, which they can use as reprints in brochure packages or on their websites. Personally, I think this is a mistake as it tends to end up as an unspoken game of extortion, in that the more you advertise the more articles they do on your company. I can tell you that our companies have always had good fortune in industry trade journals, without ever advertising in them.

Although even an article will incite immediate shopping by your competition and your sales departments will notice this the week of and the week after these articles come out and are mailed throughout the industry sector. What can you do? Well be sure to only have specific people interviewed and never anyone on your sales staff for them to contact.

Additionally, make it clear that you do not sell to the industry, but you buy from the industry in the article. This will bring you the competitions sales teams and their information without you handing out all of yours. Be wise where you advertise and be very careful around industry trade journals as your competition reads them more than your buyers ever will. Unless you sell to the industry, think on this in 2006.