Greening your business is not only one of the latest marketing trends, but it’s also a smart move, especially during an economic downturn. Here are three tips to lessen your carbon footprint and save your business some money:

Critics often accuse direct marketing copywriters of hype and puffery, but I think the real B.S. artists in marketing today are wine and beer writers.

Here are some ways to get closer as part of your customer relationship building efforts:

Show you are responsive to consumers by venturing into social media with a plan. Example: When McDonald’s launched its first blog, customers bombarded the company with complaints about toy Hummers in its Happy Meals. Unprepared, the company was slow to respond. Lesson: Social media is a powerful relationship-building tool, but only if you’re ready to listen and act on customers’ comments ...

We're looking to create an incentive plan for all rank-and-file employees who bring in leads that help us land new business. (That's already part of our sales force's job, so they would be excluded.) What kind of incentives work best? I'm assuming cash is popular—so how much? How should we track our incentive program?—Bill M., Las Vegas

“Ugly works” in direct mail design, writes my colleague Denny Hatch in his latest column in Target Marketing (7/08, p. 50). His premise: direct mail should be intentionally designed to look ugly and junky, because it will increase response.

Studies show that most growing businesses plan to maintain or increase spending on marketing and business development in the months ahead as the economy recovers. Here are five small business development tips to help you become more competitive in 2010:

Offering genuinely valuable information is one of the best ways to strengthen bonds with existing customers and reach out to new ones. Here are five strategic ways to do it:

Blogs are spreading faster than kudzu in the business world, and for a reason: They help build relationships with customers, something every business and boss want to see. Here’s how to write blog posts for your company, without spending too much time, according to Stephanie Lloyd, founder and CEO of Radiant Veracity.

If it’s important to be user-friendly, and if the highest form of user-friendliness is user-centric, then why aren’t you doing it? That’s the challenge posed by Dev Patnaik and Robert Becker, co-founders of Jump Associates. They do “need-finding,” which is part of their user-based business design. Three reasons to uncover your customers’ needs:

If you don’t know how to harness the power of social networking, you can be left out in the cold, says Steve Fretzin, founder and president of Sales Results Inc. He offers these tips:

When I began my corporate career in the late 70s, corporations spent huge amounts of time and money perfecting their “mission statements,” which they proudly posted on placards in the lobby. Multi-channel marketing guru Don Libey thinks most mission statements are for the most part banal and of limited value.

How do you determine the right color palette so that your corporate identity sends the right message to potential customers? Erin Ferree, founder of elf design, offers these recommendations:

Until now, newspaper ads, mailings and referrals may have kept your business growing. But fewer people are reading newspapers these days, and they’re doing more Twittering than actual talking. So how can you connect with those “lost” potential customers? One great way: Have your company appear high up in the list of results when people do Google searches for your product or service.

New media gurus these days rave about getting tens of thousands — or millions — of page views on MySpace and YouTube. But any idiot can put up a video that gets a ton of traffic. The easiest way: just use sex.

Consider these nine tips to help improve the stature — and performance — of marketing within your company:

Author Robin Fisher Roffer offers these tips to help you highlight those qualities that make you different and more desirable than your competitors.

Here are five smart ways to get customers to champion your cause-related-marketing efforts:

My colleague Denny Hatch is one of the most respected of the “old school” direct marketing copywriters and publishers operating today. He says the reason so many Internet marketers get it wrong is that they fail to apply DM selling techniques online.

Author Steven S. Little says that companies that duck the immediate dangers of the economic downturn and put themselves in a position to recover once the dust settles will be the ones on top in the end.

It has been observed many times that blogging, Web 2.0, and social media are effective because today’s consumers are more intersted in the opinions and recommendations of their peers than those of professional reviewers, critics, and experts. Certainly the success of the reader reviews on Amazon.com is a great example of this. But the dominance of Citizen Journalism over professional journalists is not universal.

While the unit cost of a creative direct mail campaign is often higher than that for many online marketing efforts, direct mail advertising has four unique strengths that online marketing can’t quite match.

The most recent Epsilon Email trends and benchmarks study shows average open rates for marketing “e-blasts” is 22.1%, with the average click-through clocked at 6.5%. Unlike many metrics in this economy, these figures are up from a year ago!

The average person reads 250 words per minute. Looking at your web analytics, determine how long people stay on your site ...

Add a grain of salt to the conventional wisdom that says web sites with the lowest prices win the battle for online shoppers. To truly prosper online, you need to create trust in your brand name. That's why you shouldn't aim to compete online on price alone. To boost your brand's visibility online, follow these four steps: