For over 20 years, GAA has provided honest, direct, effective marketing services to our tough-minded clients at companies of all sizes, across many different markets, based on our proven principles of Real Marketing.

We work with good people with good products, who need clear, effective, salesmanlike presentation and rapid, competent, marketing execution for all the elements in their marketing plans: Direct mail, sales support, advertising, trade shows, Web development, and many other marketing and product development services.

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Tough Times Require Tougher Approaches

The soft platitudes of feel-good marketingspeak: "branding," "customer awareness," "creating customer value," are of little use to marketing managers at companies in trade, industrial, and business-to-business markets charged with the mission of increasing their company's sales in today's tough business conditions.

A new "branding strategy" isn't likely to improve your company's sales in the next quarter. Neither will a clever or "creative" headline for your company's next ad campaign.

Your company needs more sales now, not the vague promise of market awareness later.

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Our Approach: Real Marketing™

The first step to increasing your company's sales is Real Marketing:

Clear and direct presentation of your company's prime sales benefits in every marketing project, with every marketing deliverable, and in all marketing media, backed up with swift, forceful marketing execution.

The only goal of your company's marketing program is to increase sales. And the best way to meet this goal is through clear and persuasive presentation of your product's most compelling sales benefits, and basic, down-on-the ground marketing execution. This is Real Marketing.

If what you see on this Web site rings true to you, and if you're a CEO or marketing manager who's running a marketing program that you feel could be doing better, or if you have that not-so-funny feeling that you are not getting the best effort from your company's current ad agency, contact us.

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Effective Marketing Presentation

We specialize in clear, sales-oriented presentation in all marketing programs we develop for our clients. Clear, simple, obvious, direct presentation of your product’s sales benefits, in plain language that appeals to the reader’s motivations, is the surest, most effective way to sell your company’s products.

This is especially true for companies involved in trade, industrial, and business-to-business marketing. Here, there is an even greater need for simplification and clarity, as the important aspects of complex products or services must be broken down, explained, and presented to prospects in specialized industries and markets.

High-technology companies bear an even greater burden of presenting their product’s major benefits, and explaining to prospects how they will be better off by using their company’s products.

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Plain Words and Basic Appeals Sell Products

By staying focused on salesmanship and reality in your advertising copy, you can make simple, plain, and direct ad sales approaches beat creative, “impactful,” or emotional appeals every time.

Many trade, industrial, and business-to-business marketers, and the ad agencies who represent them, have lost sight of the importance of salesmanship in the content of their marketing deliverables—print advertising, direct mail, Web sites, sales support, trade shows, etc.

The plain truth is that most marketing deliverables in trade and B2B advertising don't adequately inform or sell the prospect. This inevitably leads to a poor sales response—if anyone even thought to measure response in the first place.

Many ad agency people also seem more interested in winning design awards than creating effective marketing programs that generate inquiries for sales reps or direct sales for clients. Instead, they come up with clever, “creative” ideas for ad campaigns, mailings, and layouts with the expectation that a sight gag, a funny headline, or some other magic bullet will move people to buy the client’s product.

The end result is an ad campaign, direct mailing, or other marketing project that doesn’t clearly tell the reader about the company’s product, and fails to provide the reader with the product’s known sales benefits, features, and potential applications, presented in a way that persuades the reader to take the action required by the marketing deliverable: To call the company’s toll-free number, to fill out and mail a coupon, or link to the company’s Web site.

The purpose of the direct, salesmanlike approach to advertising is to insure that you have presented your product’s very best sales benefits in your advertising, and that you have presented these benefits in a way that eliminates any doubt they could have been presented more clearly, or with any greater impact.

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Our Approach

While the techniques of writing clear, direct, salesmanlike copy are used most often in your company’s print advertising, these very same principles apply just as well to any other type of copywriting and presentation task in any marketing project: Brochures and print collateral, direct mail packages, Web sites, multimedia presentations, trade show signage, and sales support materials.

We use clear, simple, direct language to communicate the known sales benefits of your company’s product in all marketing deliverables, using bold presentation and layout techniques to make the sales message as obvious as possible to the largest number of readers and viewers in your market. This is how to increase sales in your company through better marketing presentation.

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Effective Marketing Execution

Swift and competent execution is the most important part of any marketing program, but poor execution is a common affliction in many marketing company programs. Missed ad deadlines, slipped mailing dates, important sales materials delayed at the printer due to gratuitous type changes or other production glitches, are the enemies of good marketing execution.

Poor execution leads to missed marketing opportunities. A critical mailing that’s not ready to drop in time to support a company’s peak selling season or a new product launch, a new Web site endlessly delayed, an important advertising placement missed in a key issue of a trade publication, poor or late advance promotion and slipshod production for a company’s most important trade show appearance of the year. All are examples of missed selling opportunities caused by poor marketing execution, and are easily correctable, if you work with the right marketing team.

A well-executed marketing program that arrives in time to generate inquiries and sales for your company is infinitely more valuable than any hypothetically better one that is not there when needed, or is hobbled by rushed, slipshod, or late execution.

Our emphasis on effective marketing execution has served our clients well. In over 20 years, GAA has never missed a deadline on any project, for any client.

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Marketing Tradecraft

Tradecraft—the knowledge and skill required to create and execute successful marketing programs—is an important requirement for any marketing consulting firm, as is a working background knowledge of marketing tradecraft on the part of marketing managers.

We work with marketing managers at our client companies using a teamwork approach, helping them to become familiar with the important tradecraft of marketing. For example, helping our clients learn why we have written about a product's sales benefits in a certain way, and why we recommend certain marketing activities over others. Also, our emphasis on helping to familiarize our clients with the day-to-day tasks of marketing execution builds respect for the process, and a far more efficient marketing program.

Better knowledge of marketing tradecraft leads to better marketing programs, and better sales response.
GAA staff are skilled in all of the marketing arts and crafts required to develop and execute marketing programs for trade, industrial, and business-to-business clients:

• marketing program research, development
and execution
• copywriting for all "marketing media:"
Advertising, direct mail, video, multimedia,
and the Internet
• design, layout, photography and
videography
• print production
• Web site design and development
• Web, software, systems, and network
programming
• Trade show development and support
• Video production and editing

Whatever the marketing project, or collection of projects required to execute the client's marketing plan, GAA has the knowledge, expertise, and skillsets required to successfully plan, develop, and execute any marketing program.

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The Marketing Manager's Handbook

Eric Gagnon, president of GAA, has recently written The Marketing Manager's Handbook, a 508-page book detailing the proven, effective marketing techniques required for the planning, development, presentation, and successful execution of marketing programs for companies of all sizes.

The Marketing Manager's Handbook is an indispensible professional development reference, and provides marketing managers in trade, business-to-business, and industrial companies with the proven, practical information they need to increase the presentation and execution of their marketing programs.

For more information on this book, click here . . .