Although I'm an internet marketing guy at heart, if I had to choose another effective way to reach my market, I'd choose trade shows and direct mail. If it works for you, I wouldn't recommend stopping outbound marketing techniques. If they're done right, trade shows and direct mail alllow a marketer to target a market and measure results and ROI. If you can afford the investments, need to grow faster and your competitors are doing it, I don't think you can afford not to leverage these methods.

Doug is a life long direct marketing man and one of the shining online marketing stars in my growing online business network. He wrote a great post on his blog about how to generate leads from direct mail. There's a lot more detail on his post. Here are the highlights.

• Carefully target your audience.
• Buy Mailing Lists
• Focus on your Customer's Needs and solve their most irritating issue. Don't focus on your product.
• Always stress Benefits.
• Immediately Seize the reader's attention! Use an Impactful headline or first sentence.
• Never end a sentence at the bottom of a page in a sales letter.
• Share some "inside" information.
• Feature the offer.
• Give something away for FREE or Run a contest.
• Use a special "before the price increases" offer.
• Make a time-limited offer.
• Base your offer on a limited supply.
• Offer a special deal to the first 100 people who order.
• Make a "last chance" offer.
• "Buy 1 get 1 FREE" always out pulls "2 for the price of 1."

Read his full post.