Effective marketing has always relied on a steady stream of creativity. You cannot produce effect communications without inspiration. And yet, innovation is poorly understood as a component of effective marketing. You have to test your many ideas and sort out the good ones from the bad ones. Matt Heinz explains below, and the complete article at iMedia Connection gives steps and guidelines–very valuable.

iMedia Connection: Be Proud of Your Mistakes by Matt Heinz of HouseValues

Growth comes from innovation and an acceleration of new ideas and creative thinking, across the company — with our products, with our sales and customer service organizations, and especially in our marketing. To keep growing at a continued accelerated rate, we need to reinvent how we do business on a regular basis, and find new ways to delight our customers and get our message across. That means taking risks; calculated, educated guesses about what’s going to work.