Useful strategies to help you maximize your campaigns and save money.
By Robert W. Bly

Most small businesses have modest marketing budgets, which means you have to make every dollar count. Here are 5 ways to get big results from a small budget:

1. First, use your ads for more than just space advertising. Ads are expensive to produce and expensive to run. But there are ways to get your advertising message in your prospect’s hands at a fraction of the cost of space advertising.

The least expensive is to order an ample supply of reprints and distribute them to customers and prospects every chance you get. When you send literature in response to an inquiry, include a copy of the ad in the package. This reminds a prospect of the reason he responded in the first place and reinforces the original message.

Distribute ads internally to other departments–engineering, production, sales, customer service and R&D–to keep them up to date on your latest marketing and promotional efforts. Make sure your salespeople receive an extra supply of reprints and are encouraged to include a reprint when they write to or visit their customers.

Turn the ad into a product data sheet by adding technical specifications and additional product information to the back of the ad reprint. This eliminates the expense of creating a new layout from scratch. And it makes good advertising sense, because the reader gets double exposure to your advertising message.

Ad reprints can be used as inexpensive direct mail pieces. You can mail the reprints along with a reply card and a sales letter. Unlike the ad, which is “cast in concrete,” the letter is easily and inexpensively tailored to specific markets and customer groups.

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Give your business a boost with these no-cost marketing resources.

By Barbara Findlay Schenck

Are your 2010 marketing goals and plans ready to go? Or, are you working so hard to run your business, navigate consumer and marketplace changes, make payroll, and keep your business afloat that you’re greeting the second quarter without a blueprint for how you’ll steer its future? If so, take action immediately to get your marketing plan in order. This lineup of free resources will ease the process.

Market research MapStats. Don’t rely on guesswork to determine whether the region you serve can support your growth goals or whether new markets are good choices for business expansion. Instead, tap into government-assembled facts about any U.S. state, county, city or congressional district. With just a few keyboard clicks you’ll see the region’s population and demographics, as well as facts about growth, housing, income, employment, number and nature of businesses, and business activity by sector. Through this single source you can gather valuable information to weigh as you plot your next marketing moves.

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Search engine marketing can be costly, get the most out of your efforts.

Among web marketers, it is the big debate: SEM versus SEO. Sound like just a bunch of letters to you?

If you owned a web site, you wouldn’t think so. SEO stands for search engine optimization, a process that seeks to boost a site’s traffic by helping it rise within a search engine’s organic, or un-paid, search results. It is often seen as the Holy Grail for internet marketers, as people tend to click those links over their paid counterparts. However, the conversion rate–that is, the number of shoppers that turn from browsers to buyers–tends to be lower in organic search listings.

Search engine marketing, popularly referred to as pay-per-click, on the other hand, is a form of internet marketing that promotes websites on search engine result pages through paid placement (In search engines, these links appear on the right side of the screen or they’re highlighted at the top of organic search results.) The conversion rate from these paid links is 2.03 percent versus 1.26 percent from organic links, according a 2009 study from Engine Ready, an internet marketing company in San Diego. What’s more, those clicking over from sponsored links also tend to spend more. According to the study, those who clicked through a paid link spent on average $11 more, or $117.06 versus $106.64, than those who traveled to sites via un-paid links.

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