Two different companies in the same industry may utilize completely different marketing mediums to reach their consumers, either by choice or by chance, but one that should be considered is online advertising. We are not talking about PPC or text link advertising but rather banner type advertising, which actually server two distinct purposes.

The first purpose of this type of advertising is that visitors to the web site that your business is being advertised on may click on your banner and visit your web site. This increased traffic will obviously result in more prospects for your company, and potentially more business. Provided that you take the time to carefully choose an appropriate web site to advertise on, these visitors will be your exact demographic. Although the overall click through rates for banner advertising are relatively low, the associated costs are also relatively low so it is an easy choice even for a company on a small budget.

The second purpose of this type of advertising is branding. Consider that while not all of the visitors will click on your banner to visit your web site, most if not all of them will see it. Each time they do, they are reminded about your company. Over time this will have a cumulative effect and will help to multiply the overall effectiveness of you marketing campaign.

Take a few hours to search out one targeted web site to advertise on and give it a shot. If you do your homework, you will get some pretty impressive results for a reasonable investment.

JB Translations, a professional Spanish Translation company, recently contracted WMG to redesign their existing web site to accurately portray their company, increase usability and visitor conversion, and provide updated information and functionality.

In addition to a new design and an improved navigation system, their new web site also features a blog which allows them to regularly post information related to their business and their industry. Aside from the obvious benefits this provides to their visitors (which keeps them returning more frequently), it also provides significant search engine optimization benefits which will increase new traffic.

You don’t hear that very often lately.

The simple words “thank you” can really set you apart from your competitors. Even better is a hand written letter. Think of how you would feel if you received a thank you letter in the mail a day or two after meeting with a sales rep. They would certainly stand out in your mind, and if you truly needed what they were offering, chances are they would be the one to earn your business. Your prospects will feel the same way.

The next time you meet with a prospect, be sure to follow up with a hand written thank you note. It wouldn’t hurt to send your existing clients one from time to time as well. Make a habit of this and you will be well on your way to really standing out from your competitors.

As a result of the growing trend toward media convergence, consumers are being increasingly exposed to marketing messages across multiple mediums. A perfect example is this year’s Superbowl Ads which were obviously aired during the game, but were also able to be viewed (and are still available) on numerous web sites.

Companies on the leading edge of marketing are utilizing convergence to their advantage in order to more effectively reach their consumer, who often doesn?t spend the same amount of time in front a television as consumers have in the past. Conversely, those companies that continue to focus solely on the traditionally core mediums such as television, newspaper and radio, are seeing their advertising spending increase while their results decrease. What these companies don?t realize is that simply increasing their spending isn?t going to help them because they are marketing to consumers that are not present. Instead of sitting in front of a television for hours on end, today?s consumers live a busier life and are often on the go. This has caused traditional mediums to become less effective while making non-traditional mediums vital to an effective marketing campaign.

Traditional mediums are not dead, nor will they be anytime soon, but the days of being able to rely on them are. The evolution of the marketing world has forced all of us to be more creative in finding new ways to interact with our consumers. Those of us that are willing to make the transition will enjoy a prosperous (and probably somewhat bumpy) ride while competitors set in their ways begin to fall off the map. Which category do you fall into?

Email marketing is a tool that can, and really should be utilized by businesses of all sizes, regardless of the industry. For new or small businesses with little resources, email marketing is a powerful way to consistently reach your prospects in an inexpensive manner. For established businesses and businesses with larger marketing budgets, email marketing is a great way to provide more traction to your other marketing channels. If you are already developing content on a regular basis for your print newsletters or blog, then much of the work for your email campaign is already done.

The first step in launching an email marketing campaign is to determine if you’ll handle it in-house our outsource it. If you’ll be handling it in-house, you’ll need to choose your platform for delivery. If you’re not the technical type, then you may want to look at one of the web based services such as Constant Contact or Bronto. Aside from being relatively simple to use, these types of services also offer varying levels of statistics analysis to help you fine tune your campaigns for a higher ROI. If you know your way around a server and are comfortable installing software on a web server then you may want to consider running your own email marketing software such as phplist. This is more complex to set up but gives you complete control over all aspects of it’s operation.

The next step is to build your mailing list. You’ll want to add a link on your web site enabling visitors to join, and then contact your current customers/clients and ask them if you can add them. In moving forward, be sure to ask all of your prospects if you can add them to your mailing list. It will take some time to build a large list but the focus should be quality over quantity.

Now you’ll need to create your first email newsletter. HTML newsletters produce far better results than text newsletters but you’ll need to carefully test yours to ensure that it displays properly. Roughly 75% of business users use Outlook, so start there, but you will also need to ensure that your newsletter displays properly in web based email including free accounts like Hotmail or Yahoo. Be sure to check that all links in your newsletter work properly and that all images load properly.

When it comes to sending your newsletter, keep in mind that Wednesday, Thursday and Friday generally generate higher open rates but email sent on the weekends generally generates higher click-through rates.

Many business owners believe that they are simply stuck with whatever ranking the search engines happen to bestow upon them at that given point in time, while some of the more technologically savvy business owners understand that certain techniques can be utilized to drastically improve the ranking of a web site. Collectively, these techniques are called search engine optimization and unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation often presented as fact on the subject - often by industry insiders. To further complicate the matter, the algorithms that search engines use to determine the importance and relevance of a particular page are constantly evolving to provide more useful results while combating spam or black hat optimization techniques.

So, if many of the so called professionals in the search engine optimization industry are operating off of incorrect or incomplete information and the algorithms that power the search engines are constantly evolving, is there really any way for a smaller business to benefit from search engine optimization?

The short answer is yes.

While outsourcing your company’s search engine optimization campaign will usually produce results far more quickly than learning and implementing the necessary techniques on your own, you’ll need to take the time to carefully research any optimization companies before hiring them. Unfortunately, many of these companies are more than willing to use techniques that can put your web site at a high risk of being banned by the search engines just to get quick results. When this happens, they only risk loosing you as a client but your business risks loosing the long term revenue that would be generated by your web site.

On the other hand, if you choose to learn and implement the necessary techniques in-house you’ll need to ensure that you get your information from reliable sources and stay up to date on the latest changes in the algorithms. You should get your information from the internet rather than books, which are usually not up to date. Additionally, you should take a look at the “webmaster guidelines” published by the major four search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN & Ask, in that order) to learn what they consider to be black hat techniques.

Which ever approach you take you’ll need to understand that search engine optimization is a marathon, not a sprint. An effective campaign can often take six months or more of steady work before showing significant results. This can not be changed by simply increasing the amount of work being preformed, in fact, it can actually have a detrimental effect on your optimization campaign. Another thing to consider is that even once you’ve achieved the results that you were after, you’ll still have to continue your campaign if you want to maintain them.

Before you rush out to have 50,000 brochures printed and all of your company vehicles wrapped in vinyl, you need to take a minute to ensure that your marketing materials are going to deliver the results you are looking for. While achieving maximum results is probably something that you won’t be able to do without the help of an experienced marketing professional, there are several things that you can to improve your own results.

• Have your marketing materials professionally designed. Even though you and your family and friends may love the new brochure that you designed in Microsoft Word, chances are that it is not going to be as effective as a brochure from a professional graphic designer . As a result your ROI will be lower.
• Have your printed marketing materials produced in full color. Full color printing has been shown to significantly increase response rates compared to any other combination of colors and can be surprisingly affordable for even the smallest of businesses. Another benefit is that it makes your company appear larger and more established while improving your credibility.
• Include a call to action in all of your marketing materials. The most beautifully designed brochure will deliver poor results if it doesn’t clearly tell your prospect what they need to do. Do you want them to call you? To visit your web site? To send you something? Tell them exactly what you want and when you want it and your results will improve dramatically.
• Include your URL on all of your marketing materials. From your business cards to your vehicles and everything in between, your URL needs to be easily accessible in order to open up another opportunity to expose your company to your prospects and clients.
• Ensure that your company’s image stands out from your competitors. No matter how much you love your biggest competitor’s color scheme or style of advertising, copying it will not work for you. Small businesses often try to emulate other companies with the mindset of ” if it works for them it will work for me ” which is not true and will hurt your business in the long run.