What Your Marketing Dollars can do for You - A Content vs Swag Showdown - infographic

If you are a marketer, you know two things: your audiences are savvy and your budgets are tight. So why contribute to the $20 billion companies spend on swag (french for "crap") like tote bags, t-shirts and branded pens when the return on investment for content creation is so much higher? Here's a look at what your dollars can do for you - a content-versus-swag showdown.

You can buy 2,940 branded coffee mugs for $5,000 dollars, but what is its ROI: The office intern, too nervous to ask for a desk organizer, appreciates that your mug doubles as a pen holder. On the other hand, for this price you can brew up enough blog posts a week for 10 week - that's the full-bodied aroma of serious lead generation - because companies that blog generate 67 percent more leads than those that don't.