Needless to say, if you decided to run an ad campaign in a radio or on TV, you probably know your reasons. Just make sure you know that the listenership is relevant to customers and that you don’t waste too much advertising space on people who will never buy your products.

For your, you probably want to pick radio stations and programs that are watched by customers. Our main advice here is that there is no point in going to a mass of people without any targeting. You could spend lots of money and not get anything out of it.

So let’s suppose you picked a program that is by 80% watched by customers. What do you do next?

Again, here it proves to talk to experts and people who will write a professional script for you, get a voiceover actor and record the ad in a professional studio. Whether going for radio or TV, probably the easiest way is to contact the advertising section of a particular station, and ask them for a rate card, as well as prices and air times.

Ideally, if you are placing a spot, you should try to get interviewed in a particular program so that you will not only be seen as an advertiser, but also as a real person who is involved in the program, which increases your credibility and chances that people will contact you.

As with all marketing tools, always make a clear call to action in the ad – you can either ask customers to give you a call, bring them to your website, or to your offices.

Here are a few tips that could help you evaluate the advertising effectiveness when advertising in print media:

• Use different phone numbers on various ads or in various magazines
• Have a slightly different call to action on each ad, e.g. “Ask for a Quick Quote” or “Ask for a Free Consultation”, or “Call for a Free Audit” etc.
• Provide slightly different offer in each ad, e.g. pick a different product or slightly different price – $9.99 or $9.97

With all these options, you will have to always put down what the prospect asked about so that you can track back which ad brought in most customers.

What is the image of your your company in public? Do you know which tools you can use free to get your name out there?

How can you work with media people in a way beneficial to both sides?

To succeed in public relations and marketing, here are a few things you need to master:

• Know how to use press releases to tell the your world about your news
• Understand what to do when you get interviewed for TV or radio
• See how you could get more business by organizing seminars and other events
• Find out whether sponsoring is the right thing to do
• Know what to do when things go wrong and your public image is endangered

If you are serious about long-term success of your company, you might want to consider these areas that can help you improve profitability and efficiency throughout all departments of your company:

• Defining Processes – processes designed specifically around your products and practices, will ensure your company can continue to grow profitably
• Time Management – tracking how working time of yourself and your staff is spent will help you identify room for improvement and sometimes this can result in significant cost savings as well
• Staff Motivation – it’s about having your employees enjoy what they do and letting them participate on setting their goals and most importantly, listening to them
• Staff Training – when your workforce is well trained, their efficiency will grow tremendously. Their value will increase, and their input to the company might even double. You should train them not only in their formal area of specialization, not only in your, but also in personal and interpersonal skills – e.g. communication, time management, self motivation etc.
• Using Technology – computers, security systems, networks etc. – all these can make the work life of your employees much easier, while you could be saving a lot of money – so think about where you could invest this year so that you will reap the benefits in the long run
• Measuring Effectiveness of All Your Activities – this is the key and we will continue emphasizing it throughout the manual – only by religious tracking and then reviewing of what you and your employees do can you see the gaps for improvement

If you really want to use your blog to get more business from online marketing, you might want to seriously consider the following:

1. Short – Write short snappy informative posts that make people curious
2. Personal – Be you, people like people who are honest
3. Easy to Find – Use directories, post to other people’s blogs and link from your main website
4. Commonplace – forget all the formalities and write as you would speak in the pub!
5. Interesting – So what makes your stuff interesting – slip in your unique value in a way to catch attention
6. Frequent – Keep doing it and do it often, people love new stuff
7. Interactive – Turn off moderation, allow people just express themselves – then you know what they think
8. Content – Make it real, with great content that adds value to the reader so they want to come back

Once you know how you want to approach individual customer groups, it should be easier to allocate your marketing budget to individual marketing campaigns.

Before we use start any serious marketing campaign planning, you should look at these areas:

• Target Market – Who are you targeting with this marketing campaign? What type of potential customers?
• Reach of Campaign – How many customers can be reached by your campaign? This depends on the actual type of marketing campaign, eg:

• Brochures – How many brochures will you distribute?
• Print Advertising – What is the circulation of the magazine? How many people will get to read it?
• Radio/TV Ads – What is the listenership or audience of the radio/TV station? How many people will listen to or watch the show?
• Personalized Letters – How many letters will you send?
• Networking Events – How many people will hear your marketing message? How many will you meet?
• Exhibitions – How many people will attend?
• Seminars – How many people will attend?
• Online Marketing – How many visitors will come to your website?

• Expected # Leads – How many potential customers do you expect to contact you after the campaign?
• Expected # Sales – How many customers do you expect to buy from you after the campaign?
• Expected Sales Value – How much sales will the campaign generate?
• Expected Marketing Budget – What is your marketing budget for the campaign? How much will you spend?

Friends. This doesn’t mean you need to know thousands of people, but “friends” in social media terminology simply mean contacts, or people you are connected with through your profiles.

Usually you can add your “real world” friends and customers just by checking whether they have a profile on that particular social site. If so, you can request to add them as a “friend”. As you make more and more friends this way, you will notice that you can easily get introduced to the friends of your friends, join groups – and that’s when things start to move.

The more friends you have, the more influential you become – since all that you publish, will be visible to your friends.

It is also very important that every time you run a seminar or an open day, you talk about it in your profile pages. You can also take pictures of the past events and place them in your profile, so that people can get an idea of what your events look like, and maybe they will want to come along to the next one.

Online marketing has become a huge industry these days, and social media, as one of its part, are a great way of promoting your company online, effectively.

When selling particular your service, it is a good idea to summarize it in a simple brochure – again, with some very specific content.

Below you can see a few ideas on what should a successful brochure contain:

Front Page

• Attention grabbing image that is attractive to customers
• Your logo
• Powerful Heading
• Message that addresses a customers’ problem or responds to one of their desires
• A genuine testimonial from one of your customers
• Your contact details

Inside Pages

You can use this space to describe individual products in more detail, introduce your company or solutions, however, always keep in mind all essentials of advertising success outlined above.

Don’t forget to tell customers exactly what to do next, and every single page must have your contact details on it.

On the last inside page, you can also have a simple contact form.

Back of the brochure

• Your logo
• Message that addresses a customers’ problem or responds to one of their desires (different from the one on the front page)
• Another genuine testimonial from one of your customers
• Your contact details

These ideas could also be adjusted and applied to flyers which are just a simpler version of brochures, usually targeted more specifically on one particular offer.

While applying this approach, you must make sure that your brochures are well aligned with the rest of your marketing strategy, and also that they stand out as unique and special.

Apart from your website content, another very important factor search engines use when ranking websites is the number and quality of links pointing to your website. This means, how many websites have a hyperlink to your website.

You can check which websites link to any website by going to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ and putting a website’s URL to the box provided.

There are many to increase the number of links pointing to your website and here are the most common and most effective ways:

• Exchanging links with other your related websites
• Submitting your link to free or paid web directories
• Submitting original articles with your tips to free article directories
• Commenting on other your blogs
• Creating social media profiles etc.

When building any type of link to your website, it is important to follow these rules:

• The website’s content should be somehow relevant to your
• Give priority to local websites if you are targeting a specific area
• Make sure that the hyperlinked phrase is actually one of your main keywords, as opposed to your name or your company name
• If you are asked to send somebody a HTML of the link you would like them to put on their website, make sure it is in this structure:

<a href=”http://www.YourWebsite.com” title=”Keyword1,Keyword2, Keyword3”>Keyword1</a>

There are tons of news every day, reaching us from papers, radio, TV and whatever else. However, sometimes your own company becomes a part of this news world, and you will probably want to make it look as good as possible.

A press release is basically an article informing the public about particular events. These should be based on running open days, introducing special offers or new services, and most importantly offering these to new customers.

To get the maximum impact, you should aim for publishing one press release at least every two months. So how to do it?

Free press or print advertising is where you have been contacted by a paper or magazine to either give a comment on your, seek your advice or simply report on you and your business.  These are known as editorials or press releases and can be created by yourself or the media.  If you have something that you feel is of public interest, you might submit a written piece to the paper in which they could possibly use your story and print without any cost to you.

It may also be a possibility that you get to advertise for free in the print media.  For instance your local magazine or newsletter may offer you a position to put in an ad for your business at no charge.

Then you can always send the printed articles as mailers to your prospects – and link them on your website.

Always remember – focus on the media which are read by customers, and then make sure you align your website content with the press release.