Marketing is the communication of your message, idea, product, service, company and its culture to your market.  This can be done through various types of communication methods, such as visual, written, auditory, and tactical.  These methods can be combined to form a type of media to communicate your message, such as radio, television, YouTube, the M & E Painting Sign Guy, helping an old lady across the street while wearing your logo on your companies hat, your company landing in the newspaper (hopefully the business section not the police blotter), on television, writing a book, etc.  There are hundreds of medias to communicate your message, and there are two vehicles through which they travel, but only one of these two vehicles, in my experience, works better and long term.

The rusted-out car is paid advertising: your firm pays another company (a lot of money) to create a message, offer, coupon, or other item to disseminate to your target market. Paid advertising raises awareness rather than trust. It is costly and wastes money as your firm grows. It’s a crowded, noisy, and busy place full of sharks vying for the same piece of flesh dropping to the bottom of the ocean; and it’s just you talking about yourself. (To be honest, paid advertising does generate visibility, so if that’s all you’re looking for, this way will suffice.)

The reliable, always running vehicle that builds trust, elevates you and creates faith in your brand is PR, or public relations. PR gets others talking about you so you can stop talking about yourself.  The only investment here is a little time, a great story, and simple action steps that when repeated daily will land you the most credible, trust building exposure for you and your brand. The space is vast, filled with opportunity and is not crowded at all.  As other sharks fight at the bottom for the scraps of flesh falling their way, remember the scraps are produced because PR is that first big meaty chunk sitting at the top of the surface that the informed entrepreneurs grab and chomp up.

Example: Emily and I were featured in Entrepreneur Magazine in August of 2010.  This was a full color piece, with a story (PR) about our company in one of the leading entrepreneurial publications in the world.  We paid $0 for this.  A few pages over, a large franchise company ran a paid piece (advertising) costing roughly $80,000.  Same time, same full color, same full page, same magazine, same audience.  What did I spend? I spent 15 minutes to land this, plus 90 minutes for a really cool and fun photo shoot.