Mary Schmidt Marketing Troubleshooter

It’s Monday, so time to be (somewhat) practical again…Bruce Fryer gives some great pointers in If Your Idea of Marketing Materials is Word and Kinkos... Now, I’m not saying never use either (I use Word for some things and there’s a Kinko’s right around the corner) but there are, as Bruce notes, some great options that won’t bust your small biz budget. And, please, please, please small (and big) biz people, burn/trash/kill the clip art and high-gloss, low-soul stock smiling faces. Check out Stock.XCHNG, for a wide variety of professional low and no-cost images. (Lots of very unusual angles and subjects.)

Or, bite the budget bullet and outsource to a professional designer who already has all the tools and can do the job in about a tenth the time it’d take you to crank out an “okay” piece. The time you save (and the look you’ll get) will be well worth the money. I highly recommend, for example, Patrick Foster at Hired Gun. (He did my logo.)

(Full Disclosure: Bruce is a client. He and I spend a lot of time volleying ideas back and forth - some good, some great, and some - well - crap. But you sometimes have to make merde before magic. We even - gasp - disagree on occasion.)

If you’d like to leave a comment, please do so. It may take a bit to show up since I hate making people type in little letters (I can’t read most of them myself) - so I moderate all comments. Feel free to disagree - debate is healthy. However, I’ve blacklisted the worst obscenities, including the “f” word, as part of the troll wall.

Tags: entrepreneur sanity check, marketing communications, marketing, marketing troubleshooting