As a small business, it is recommended that your advertising budget be 5% of your gross sales. The challenge for most small businesses is using these limited resources successfully. Small businesses can realize a return on their advertising investment by following a few simple rules. Here are the keys to successfully advertise your small business.

Generate Interest
When planning your ad campaign, always keep in mind that you must generate interest in those who see your ad in order to have a chance at gaining their patronage. The best way to grab interest is to advertise the benefit(s) that you will provide rather than the product or the service itself. This can be as simple as a print poster with an image of a beautiful beach landscape with the caption “Can you picture yourself here?”

One on One
A second key to successful advertising is to narrow the message of your ad to speak to one targeted market. Your products and services may be useful for many different markets. Select the two or three markets with the largest volume and tailor an advertising message for each of them. Have each message incorporated into a print poster design and display them according to where your target markets travel.

Brand Yourself
Always be sure to include your company name, logo, and contact info on your advertising material and any material that customers may come into contact with, such as shipping boxes or shopping bags. Passersby should know your business name within seconds of seeing your print poster or picking up your brochure.

Evaluate Effectiveness
Evaluating the effectiveness of an ad campaign may be as simple as taking note of increased sales and foot traffic. But to know how to better direct your marketing budget in the future, you need to find out what brought customers to you. A simple way to do this is just to ask: how did you hear about us? what brought you in today? This will help identify what marketing venues had the greatest effect.

Be Credible
The natural response to advertisements is distrust. You will have to counteract the distrust by being honest in your advertising. It may take some added creativity to come up with ways to promote your product as what consumers need without causing that instant “it can’t be true” reaction. Sell the true benefits that you can provide consumers and back them up with your customer service.

Simple and to the Point
The final key to successfully advertising your small business is to keep the message simple. Find the one simple and compelling tagline that best fits your product or service and use it for print posters, business cards, brochures, shopping bags, shipping boxes, etc. It needs to be true and it needs to communicate your mission in a simple, to the point phrase. Think Ivory soap, “Ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent pure”, I can hear it now and you probably can too. Simple and to the point.

I say Twitter’s been “mainstream” because it actually started as a research project by San Francisco start-up Obvious in 2006. It was first used only by employees to communicate with each other. In April 2007, Obvious spun off what would become “Twitter.” Anyhoo, Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that lets users read other people’s updates on what they’re doing or what they’re thinking, in real time. These updates are known as tweets, and they’re short messages of up to 140 characters.

Micro-blogging differs from traditional blogging due to the limited space of 140 characters. Micro-blogs can include short messages about personal matters, commentary to another person, how someone is feeling or it can just be a link dump. Here are three more just like Twitter.

Pownce
Another social networking and micro-blogging site is Pownce. Twitter is by far the most popular micro-blogging site, but Pownce has its fair share of users. The difference is that Pownce is centered around sharing messages, files, events and links with people you already know. This site debuted in January 2008.

Pownce has been called “Twitter on steroids,” and employees like it over Twitter because it has discussion-tracking capabilities. Pownce was started by Digg.com founder Kevin Rose along with three other developers.

Plurk
Another site you might want to check out if you don’t care for Twitter is Plurk.com. It references itself as a “social journal for your life.” Instead of tweets, your updates are called plurks, and are limited to 140 characters, which is the max for micro-blogging.

Plurk is still a newbie compared to Twitter; it launched in May 2008. That means I’m going to wait to check it out and let others be the guinea pigs. The nice thing about Plurk is that you can share video, images and other media.

Spoink
Spoink is another competitor, founded in 2007. Spoink’s big feature is enabling users to podcast by phone from anywhere as well as post photos, video, audio and text. You stay in touch with people through podcasts, really, more so than text.

I do know a few things about history though that would suggest it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. After all, radio ads didn’t put it to rest, nor did TV commercials topple print advertising as the king of marketing. Now online advertising is making a play for dominance over the world of marketing, but based on what I’ve seen in the past, I have a feeling that the print world is more than up to the challenge.

Why has traditional marketing survived this long to still stand proud in the world of marketing? Radio and TV didn’t topple it for the same reason that the internet isn’t going to right now.

Not everyone had access to a radio when it was first introduced, or not everyone really cared to listen to one. That meant anyone who didn’t have a radio was automatically not going to hear that ad, which meant you were cutting yourself off from a certain part of the population.

The same is true for TV. It took a lot of years before they spread to be in nearly every home, yet even now they aren’t really in every single home there is. And even in the homes that do have a TV, not everyone watches it that much, or pays attention to the commercials on it.

The same is true for the internet. While computers have spread rapidly over the past ten years, not everyone owns one, and even fewer people actually have an internet connection. I’d say that yes, the majority of homes probably have some form of the internet these days, but that still isn’t all of them, and that’s still a portion of the population you’d be cutting yourself off from.

Here’s the thing about print advertising: a person doesn’t need to have anything in order to be handed a flyer on the street. They don’t need to pay a single cent to buy a computer or TV in order to pick up a brochure. All of those other forms of marketing require a person to spend money in order to get the equipment needed to view the marketing.

With printing you’re footing the bill for all of it and simply handing a person the advertisement. You do all the work and they get to benefit from it by reading what you have to say. The world of print advertising requires the least amount of effort from a person, and that’s why it has stuck around for so long.

Maybe that will change, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon.

eMarketer is expecting the economy to recover by 2011 coupled with an increase in online video advertising to push the online ad spending to more than $40 billion that year. They then expect online advertising to grow by about $10 billion each year after that to 2013. eMarketer gets its projections by benchmarking against the Interactive Advertising Bureau numbers.

Digital marketing doesn’t only include online advertising – it includes everything from online video ads to search media to in-game and mobile advertising. A report from analyst firm Parks Associates also forecasts growth in digital media advertising segments. Parks Associates gives a breakdown of everything from Internet display, rich media, search, DVR, mobile and in-game advertising. New categories, such as in-game ads and mobile ads will have the highest gains because they’re starting from lower bases than other forms of digital advertising like online ads.

Parks Associates projects digital media to compose 10 percent of overall ad spending or about $24 billion by 2010. eMarketer predicts a higher number for 2010 of about $33 billion.

Of course, these are all just predictions, and each research firm has its own numbers that tell a different story.

JupiterResearch, for instance, forecasts display ad spending to reach $7.2 billion by 2010, while Parks Associates forecasts display ad spending to reach only $2.4 billion.

JupiterResearch believes by 2010 search marketing will reach $7.5 billion in revenues. Parks Associates sees search marketing growing more than that – up to $9.7 billion. 

New categories like rich media, in-game and mobile advertising shows the most growth according to Parks Associates. Internet rich-media ads are projected to bring in an estimated $5.7 billion by 2010. In-game ads will grow at least 50 percent according to the study, bringing in about $430 million annually. Mobile advertising is expected to grow to $2 billion in the same time period.

Even though all the numbers are different, quite different, actually, they are all projecting an upward trend for digital marketing. The Parks Associates report says that media is moving from mass to niche, forcing advertisers to adapt to new content and ad formats. “We believe that advertising over the next five years will go through some changes,” said Parks Associates Research Analyst Harry Wang in a Webcast presentation of the report. “For content providers as well as media publishers, they have to provide content in a form that the audience prefers.”

Seventy percent of print ads include a URL, although that’s an average number. The number is skewed a bit, which you’ll see by the following stats: Male-focused, urban magazines like VIBE and Dub had almost 90 percent URL-inclusive ads, while only 20 to 30 percent of ads in various fashion magazines had URL-inclusive ads. That’s a pretty big gap.

Why the gap when it’s only natural for people to look to the Internet for more info? It’s not that hard to integrate your print and online advertising. It might take a little extra work, but I guarantee it’s well worth it. It’s easy for people to research companies and products online, and most people do the research. It’s best to be safe than sorry, and having a Web site and a landing page just for your print ads can bring in more customers and more profits.

Here are the steps to take to integrate:

1. Include your URL in all of your print materials. Your URL can go straight to your Web site’s homepage, but if you want to measure how much of your online traffic comes from print ads, create a different landing page for each ad. This is where the extra work comes in.

If you create an extension like www.url.com/postcard or www.url.com/magazine you can count the hits on these pages and figure out how many people visited your Web site solely because of the print ad they viewed. Making these landing pages might be a hassle now, but you’ll be happy later when all you have to do is look at your page counter to see how much traffic your print ads are bringing in.

Make sure the URL is in a font and size that is readable. Don’t put in a background color to try not to stand out; you want it to stand out. People expect to see a URL on print ads these days, so don’t make them search for it.

2. Making it measureable is the next step, which I integrated into Step 1 by creating a URL extension. (See, integration happening all over the place!)

3. Give your URL meaning. Tell people why they should visit your Web site. Should they place an order through the site or find out more info? If your product includes a complex decision-making process, directing people to a tutorial or video of your product in action could help them make their decision. Tell readers what they can expect from visiting your Web site. If you want them to place an order, make the URL you point them to a product page of the advertised product with an easy link to a shopping cart.

4. Extend the ad online. Whatever your ad looks like in print, carry that design and feel to the URL you’re sending consumers to. If you’re showing a car out on a curvy country road, continue that road and country feel on your landing page URL.  By creating continuity and consistency, you’ll encourage consumers to make a purchase or find out more information.