Marketing tools in the 2000's vs. tools for 2010:quite a difference

The old marketing plans were driven by three major components:
- print advertising- most costly, least amount of tracking
- direct mailings- costly but tracking is improved
- call campaigns- time consuming but tracking can be better linked to direct orders

For most small business owners print advertising is all but an impossible expense. Direct mail and call campaigns become resource hogs and require quite a bit of set up and professional coaching. In order to have your mail opened today, you have to produce a mailing product that is professional looking and has a tight, succinct message. Not an easy chore for a small business owner without much support. To set up a call campaign, again you need to have a professional message, need to have a cleansed calling list and need to have trained people to conduct the calls and book the appointments or sale.

The easiest approach for Small Business Owners is to use the various tools on the Internet for outreach and marketing.

The most tried and true method is the use of email marketing with newsletter messaging. You can send out a blast to 100's or 1000's of emails but today your open rate (the number of emails opened divided by the number sent) is going to be very very low. So, you need to gather emails from people that have provided their email to you in the course of a transaction, a response, or a referral. With this list as a base and growing over time, you can easily craft professional looking email newsletters and annoucements every few weeks using very inexpensive tools such as Constant Contact. Hopefully, you get friends to forward your email to them and enlist others into your network. Get the connection bewteen the tools?

Another means of communicating with your customer base is through a professionally managed and monitored website. Yes, there is a cost to set it up and typically costs to continue the management of the site and its content. But, if you are using your web address in EVERYTHING you print, people will visit, gather information and even sign up for your newsletters. Again, notice the connections...

The newest method to attract and engage your customers and prospects is to provide your audience with a Facebook presence, set up a corporate page and allow people to 'fan you', again using your newsletter and your website to drive home this message.

Next, we'll talk about other low cost advertising tools to drive traffic to your website, to your facebook page, and to your microsite.