As business owners, salesmen, and entrepreneurs we are inundated daily with worthless marketing material. We may even have some worthless marketing material ourselves. Pages of mindless jargon thrown on a page because we feel the need to fill something. We feel the need to GIVE away something. What is worthless marketing material?

A. If you used Microsoft Publisher to design your brochure or sales piece.
B. You have placed a 13 page book on an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper
C. You have written a page about YOURSELF and your company and placed it in your sales brochure.

There are many, many other things that make marketing material worthless. Seth Godin has a great example of crappy design and marketing in his blog Silence is a Virtue. He makes the point that sometimes silence is better than creating something that makes you look cheap and amateur. In the world of marketing and authentic communication between client and company, sometimes it is better to be quiet than handing out worthless marketing material to the masses.

Quit kidding yourself. We know you didn’t spend ANY money on it. You designed it yourself. You wrote the copy yourself and it is terrible.

There are plenty of companies out there who do great marketing. Find one.

1. Make sure you can afford the cost of the professional creating your marketing pieces. Truly afford the cost of marketing material. If you can’t justify the cost, the last thing you need to do is sit down at word or publisher and create one yourself.

2. Hire a professional. Unless you are Seth Godin, in that case you can pay yourself untold amounts of wealth. Seth Godin