Sometimes people get "marketing" and "advertising" confused. While advertising is an important part of marketing, it is just one of the many steps taken in marketing. And good marketing always measures the effectiveness of advertising. In social media as well as traditional advertising, the measurement is always about the Return On Investment-- ROI for short. In social media you have to track and assign a cost to your labor hours while in traditional advertising, the emphasis has always been on your hard costs: I got 4 new customers from spending $250 in newspaper advertising. $250 divided by four people means it cost me $62.50 to get a customer. The main reason to have expiration dates and require coupons is to have a hard document back to analyze the ROI. Expiration dates just time the campaign and keep the data from getting skewed.

Social media tracks very much the same only since places like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are free, you have to assign a cost to your time. If you can Tweet and update Facebook in a half hour a day five days a week, that's a work week of 2½ hours labor. If your time is valued at $25.00 an hour, that's $62.50 of labor. If you get four new customers a week from social media, then you know your cost per customer is $15.63. You can track and compare the cost of social media to traditional advertising.

What about the cost of goodwill? That's an old argument and it goes around and around but avoids the bottom-line-- can you eat goodwill? No. Can your company do well without goodwill? No. But somewhere there is a balance and that traditionally is done with Public Relations (PR) effort. If you want a lot of people to hear about you, sponsor an event with the YMCA like a Swim Night and parents will hear about you from their children.

What kind of PR is most effective? The simple answer is one that supports your personal and/or company Value Statement. Your customers may never even know you have a Value Statement but how you treat them and the community around you should be guided by such statements. There may be a statement on how you treat others, your staff or even a Green Statement on what you are doing for the environment or to conserve energy. People will notice your actions and you will can express your Value Statement long before anyone ever reads it.

BestInOregon.Com emphasizes video services. But, despite the rumors, print is not dead. People love coupons. They love free passes. They rely on business cards and stationary and all the ways you use to define your brand. Rod Killen started off using Aldus Pagemaker in 1986. From church newsletters to business cards to brochures, these skills span 25 years. And the best part for the people in the local community, we regularly cooperate with Walt Stutz of Walt's Print and Copy to really provide cost effective quality output.

The most basic start to marketing is to start tracking who your clients are and compare that to whom you would like to be selling. BestInPolk.Com developed a marketing campaign for a local business to reach out to the Latino Community. Traditionally, this community is often ignored and yet it comprises up to 30% of the population. We helped get that company up to 30% of it's sales coming from the Latino Community. But it takes more than marketing. Can you or one of your staff speak Spanish? Do you use Latino vendors or support Latino cultural events in the area?

Take a look at the print materials we developed to support the different markets targeted.

To help you get started, check out below and see part of what we ask those interested in a TV commercial.