Advertising can take many forms, but all of these forms fall into two broad categories: direct and indirect advertising. Direct advertising is, as the name implies, in-your-face promotion about what you are selling. Indirect advertising is a little more subtle, involving promotion of your company as well as the items or services you sell. This type of advertising involves the use of a company logo to develop awareness of your business. As the public grows to recognize your logo, it will embrace what you have to sell because of your name as much as the features of the things you are selling.

Some of the most common ways for small businesses to advertise include:

Telephone Directories

If your business is primarily local, then advertising in the yellow pages of your telephone directory may be advisable. Having a business telephone number automatically entitles you to a free listing in all yellow pages directories. But to stand out from your competitors, you need to pay for larger ads. The amount you pay depends on the market you are in and on the size of the ad you take. Also obtain a listing for your web site in Internet yellow pages.

Online Directories

Consumers are increasingly turning to the Web for all their buying needs. If you sell products beyond your locality, you may want to spend some advertising dollars for listings in Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines. The cost of advertising here is a charge for each visitor you obtain through the search engine. You may pay as little as a penny or two to draw a visitor to your site, but usually the cost is higher.

Local Newspapers and Pennysavers

This form of print advertising can be useful for certain types of businesses. For example, tradespeople and restaurants frequently use local Pennysavers, distributed weekly to all households in the area, as a low-cost advertising medium.

Community Mailers

Send out coupons to local households and businesses as inducements to buy your goods or services. PsPrint online printing is another integrated marketing and direct mail partner which will help you advertise your business through value-added services like custom graphic design, direct mailing list creation, direct mail fulfillment, and more. Unlike other expensive print shops, PsPrint combines web technologies with production facilities, delivers online convenience with lightening-fast turnaround and very competitive prices.

Advertising can be costly, but you can advertise without blowing your entire marketing budget on a single effort. Keep in mind that the key to successful advertising is repetition, although it’s impossible to say how much repetition is needed. It’s safe to say that just one ad in a magazine may prove totally ineffective in attracting new customers. It’s probably a good idea to pick one method of advertising and stick with it for a while. Don’t start one month and stop the next.

Decide whether to handle your own advertising or use an agency or other professionals to assist you. Obviously there is a cost factor to consider. Agencies charge for their services, but may be able to negotiate better placements and cheaper rates than you can.

Last but not least, make sure your advertising complies with all law requirements. For example, you cannot use false or deceptive ads and you must have proof to back up any claims you make.

• Create a category you can be first in.
• It’s much easier to get into the mind first than to try to convince customers you have a better product than the one that did get there first.
• First brands tend to retain their leadership as the names often become generic.
• Regardless of reality, people perceive first products into the mind as superior.

2. THE LAW OF THE CATEGORY
If you can’t be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.

• Launch a new product that answers the question “first what?”
• What category is this new product first in?

3. THE LAW OF THE MIND
It’s better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace.

• Being first in the mind is everything in marketing.
• The mind takes precedence over the marketplace.
• The single most wasteful marketing effort is try to change a mind-set. People don’t like to change their minds.

4. THE LAW OF PERCEPTION
Marketing is not a battle of products, it’s a battle of perceptions.

• All that exists in the world of marketing are perceptions in the minds of the customers.
• The perception is the reality. Everything else is an illusion.
• It is what people think about the brand that makes it a winner or a loser. They believe what they want to believe.

5. THE LAW OF FOCUS
The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect’s mind.

• Burn your way into the mind by narrowing the focus to a single word or concept.
• The most effective words are simple and benefit-oriented, service-related, audience-related or sales-related.
• You become stronger when you reduce the scope of your operations. You can’t stand for something if you chase after everything.

6. THE LAW OF EXCLUSIVITY
Two companies cannot own the same word in the prospect’s mind.

• It is futile to attempt to own the same word or position owned by your competition.
• You can’t change people’s minds once they are made up.
• Get into the mind first and preempt the concept.

7. THE LAW OF THE LADDER
The strategy to use depends on which rung of the ladder you occupy.

• There is a hierarchy in the mind that prospects use in making decisions. Each rung has a brand name.
• The mind is selective. It accepts data that is consistent with its product ladder in the category. Everything else is ignored.
• There is a relationship between market share and your position on the ladder in the prospect’s mind.
• Ensure that your marketing program deals realistically with your position in the ladder.

8. THE LAW OF DUALITY
In the long run, every market becomes a two-brand race.

• The battle usually winds up between two major players, usually the old reliable and the newcomer.
• In a maturing industry, third place is a difficult position to be in.
• The customer believes that marketing is a battle of products. The kind of thinking keeps two brands on top. ‘They must be the best, they’re the leaders.’

9. THE LAW OF THE OPPOSITE
If you’re shooting for second place, your strategy is determined by the leader.

• Whenever the leader is strong, there is an opportunity for a no. 2 to turn the tables. In strength there is weakness.
• Discover the essence of the leader and present the prospect with the opposite. Try to be different not better.
• Present your products as the alternative to the leader.
• The first brand that captures the concept is often able to portray its competitors as “me too’s.”

10. THE LAW OF DIVISION
Over time, a category will divide and become two or more categories.

• It’s a mistake to try to take a well-known brand name and use it in another category.
• People prefer to buy products or services from different companies whom they perceive as leaders in the category.

11. THE LAW OF PERSPECTIVE
Marketing effects take place over an extended period of time.

• The long-term effects are often the exact opposite of the short-term effects.
• There is evidence to show that sales (discounting, etc.) decrease business in the long run by educating customers not to buy at ‘regular prices’.

12. THE LAW OF LINE EXTENSION
There is an irresistible pressure to extend the equity of the brand.

• Keep tightly focused on a single product that is profitable.
• Don’t spread yourself thin over many products that lose money.
• When you try to be all things to all people, you inevitably wind up in trouble. Standing for everything means it stands for nothing.

13. THE LAW OF SACRIFICE
You have to give up something in order to get something. There are 3 things to sacrifice:

• PRODUCT LINE. To be successful reduce your product line. Eliminate the losers/no growth potentials.
• TARGET MARKET. The apparent target of your marketing is not the same as the people who will actually buy your market.
• CONSTANT CHOICE. The best way to maintain a consistent position is not to change it. Fine tune. Don’t try to follow the twists and turns of the market, you’re bound to wind up off the road.

14. THE LAW OF ATTRIBUTES
For every attribute, there is an opposite effective attribute.

• You must have an idea or attribute of your own to focus your effort around.
• Seize a different attribute, dramatize its value and thus increase your sales.

15. THE LAW OF CANDOR
When you admit a negative, the prospect will give you a positive.

• One of the effective ways to get into the prospect’s mind is to first admit a negative (that is, widely perceived as negative) and then twist it into a positive.
• Every negative statement you make about yourself is instantly accepted as truth.
• The law of candor must be used carefully and with great skill.

16. THE LAW OF SINGULARITY
In each situation, only one move will produce substantial results.

• The only thing that works in marketing is the single bold stoke.
• Most often there is only one place where a competitor is vulnerable, and that should be the focus of competition.
• What works in marketing is the same as what works in military the unexpected.
• To find that singular idea or concept, marketing managers should know what’s happening in the marketplace (trenches).

17. THE LAW OF UNPREDICTABILITY
Unless you write your competitors’ plan, you can’t predict the future.

• Failure to forecast competitive reaction is major reason for marketing failures.
• No one can predict the future with any degree of certainty. Nor should marketing plans try to.
• Change isn’t easy, but it’s the only way to cope with an unpredictable future.

18. THE LAW OF SUCCESS
Success often leads to arrogance, and arrogance to failure.

• The brand got to the mind first–it owns a powerful attribute.
• Don’t delegate the marketing function to underlings. Be involved, check put the market yourself–”It’s better to see once than to hear a hundred times.”

19. THE LAW OF FAILURE
Failure is to be expected and accepted.

• Ego is the enemy of successful marketing–don’t inject it in the marketing process.
• Don’t substitute your own judgment for what the market wants.
• When a brand is successful, the company assumes the name is the primary reason for success. The brand is successful because it was in tune with the laws of marketing.
• It is a better strategy to recognize failure and cut your losses.
• For a company to operate in an ideal way, it must have teamwork, esprit de corps and a self-sacrificing leader.

20. THE LAW OF HYPE
The situation is often the opposite of the way it appears in the press. When things are going well, it doesn’t need the hype. When you need the hype, it usually means you’re in trouble.

21. THE LAW OF ACCELERATION
Successful programs are not built on fads, their built on trends.

• A fad is short-term phenomena that might be profitable, but a fad doesn’t last long enough to do a company much good.
• Forget fads. One way to maintain a long-term demand for a product is to never satisfy the demand.
• The best and most profitable thing to ride in marketing is a long-term trend.

22. THE LAW OF RESOURCES
Without adequate funding, an idea won’t get off the ground.

• Marketing is a game fought in the mind of the prospect. You need money to get into the mind, and money to stay in the mind once you get there.
• Successful marketers front-load their investment. They take no profit for 2 or 3 years as they plow all earnings into marketing to grow the business.
• Money makes the marketing world go round. To be successful, you’ll have to find money you need to get those marketing wheels going.

Others sign off on plans so generic that they seem unrelated to the brand or company offering them, despite the fact that sales promotions may absorb a significant portion of a company’s promotional dollars and they are increasingly being used for both packaged goods and consumer durables as concern has grown about the cost effectiveness of media advertising.

Deterring Imitation but Attracting Buyers Quickly

An easily imitated promotion can result in a lose-lose outcome both for the originating company and for its imitators. Imitation can not only reduce profitability — it can even reduce per-unit sales revenue. If a temporary price promotion is more than matched by competition, an escalating price war can lower prices throughout a product category.

That danger suggests that price promotions should be adopted only with great caution. Certainly longer term price reductions can be valuable competitive tools when they expand the total market for a product category, promote trial for a brand with a distinct but hard to communicate advantage, or discourage competitors from entering a category. However, a price promotion is by definition a short-term cut, and many such promotions accomplish little more than inviting imitation and reducing profits. Their primary advantage, accounting for their frequent use, is that buyers understand price promotions easily and so can respond quickly. Ideally, promotions are designed with consideration of the time gaps between initiation of a promotion and two subsequent events: significant response by a target audience and imitation by competitors.

Realistically, maximizing the “monopoly window”– the time between consumers’ response to a promotion and competitors’ reaction to it — involves trade-offs, because the simplicity and ease of communication that speed up a consumer purchase will likewise normally speed up imitation. Conversely, promotions designed to be difficult to mimic may also be difficult for targeted individuals to understand, and thereby may delay customer response. Furthermore, promotions designed for implementation by channel partners must be simple enough so that those channel partners are motivated and able to implement them, an effort often made more complex if those partners span the globe.

Given these conflicting priorities, managers increase the likelihood of successful sales promotions when they “buy time” by employing elements that are scarce or difficult to acquire and incorporating complex linkages with third party providers that are difficult to imitate. Among the factors that predict competitive imitation of promotions, preemption of scarce resources ranks high as a way to preclude imitation.

Developing a strategy for preventing promotional imitation is of course most important when imitation of a promotion by rivals is most likely. The best clues to such a likelihood come from research on imitation of pioneering new products. Such research identifies as factors that increase imitation (1) a high degree of market dependence on the part of the competitor, (2) market power asymmetry in favor of the competitor, and (3) a high degree of perceived similarity between the competitor and the pioneer.

Speeding Consumer Response

Promotions elicit purchase by tapping into one or more of three types of motivations: economic, informational and affective. Economic incentives make a purchase less expensive in money and/or in time and effort. Information influences consumers’ beliefs about the brand or product category. The affective approach arouses favorable feelings and emotions and associates them with the promoted brand.

The best way to increase success for a promotion is to structure it to supply all three motivations. Some promotions can be very successful by employing only one or two types of motivation. Often, an informational approach seems unnecessary, for instance, and a sponsor simultaneously offers a “deal” while communicating to produce an emotional link between the company’s brand and the consumer.

Winners Benefit Disproportionately

The third principle is the disproportionate benefit accruing to brands that have some other “plus” factor besides the promotion itself. One such factor is the perceived quality level of the brand sponsoring the promotion. Researchers have found that consumer switching is not symmetrical, but that promotions of brands with greater brand equity bring about more switching than do promotions of less distinguished brands. In other words, promotions accentuate perceived quality advantages rather than overcoming quality disadvantages.

However, these same researchers caution that market share should not be used as a proxy for perceived quality. If a firm has “bought” market share through its pricing strategy or distributional advantages, there is no reason to attribute share leadership to perceived quality and therefore no reason to expect a differential advantage from even the best sales promotion efforts. Still, a well-planned promotion can build brand equity while making “buy now” an attractive proposition.

Additional Lessons

In addition to the three principles outlined above, analysis of successful promotions suggests a number of other lessons:

Avoid Imitation

Not only is it a mistake to launch a promotion that can be imitated easily, but from the perspective of the imitator, a copycat promotion also is likely to be a mistake. The originating company may counter by escalating its deal, incurring losses for the originating company and the imitators, and trapping all competitors because none wants to stop the promotion first. Also, imitators may find that potential buyers associate a copycat promotion with the original promoter’s brand.

Plan for Contingencies

Given the downsides of imitation, sensible managers will undertake contingency planning: If our competition launches Promotion X, we will launch Promotion Y. This kind of contingency planning seems particularly valuable in a business-to-business marketing context, where price promotions offered to one customer can be demanded by a competitor of that customer and matched almost instantly, eliminating the profitable “monopoly window.”

Managerial Challenges

When all of those factors are aligned, the result is a successful promotion. However, two aspects of what they have recommended work against adoption of these ideas in many organizations, posing internal challenges for managers:

Overcoming the Comfort of Imitation

In some corporate cultures, marketing managers will encounter resistance to originality and innovation from others who ask for evidence of expected outcomes. If a company re-uses last year’s promotion, there is some basis on which to forecast the results. If a company imitates what others have done, there is likewise greater certainty than with a novel approach. Thus, a manager may face opposition in attempting the kind of promotion described here, which by definition will most often lack a “track record.”

Overcoming the Resistance to Speed

The approaches advocated here often require moving fast. In some organizations, the need for speed, to preclude competition or to seize an opportunity, doubles the intra-organizational doubts: Not only is it unclear what a promotion will accomplish, but those who want to launch it are in a hurry. That alone may elicit resistance in some organizational settings.

Marketing managers in resistant organizations not only must tailor a promotion successfully to its intended market, they must also skillfully shepherd it around internal barriers. Knowing why, how and for whom sales promotions will most likely be profitable will surely help.

Source: MIT Sloan Management Review, Summer 2007

If you think the answer is “Just more of the same,” you’re in for a surprise. Howe and Strauss, the authors of Generations, The Fourth Turning, Millennials Rising, and other books, have studied the differences among generations for some 30 years.

Their extensive research has revealed a fascinating pattern — one so strong that it supports a measure of predictability. On the basis of historical precedent, they say, we can foresee how the generations that are alive today will think and act in decades to come.

Three of those generations will still be vital forces in American society 20 years from now: Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials. Their attitudes and behaviors will have profound effects on the economy, the workplace, and social institutions in general.

For example, as aging Boomers eschew high-tech medicine in favor of holistic self-care, natural foods, and mind-body healing techniques, some hospitals are opening new wings featuring alternative medicine and spiritual counseling.

Gen Xers, having grown up in an era of failing schools and marriages, will remain alienated, disaffected, and pragmatic as they enter midlife. Already the greatest entrepreneurial generation in U.S. history, they will be highly effective at pushing innovation, effi ciency, and mass customization.

In contrast, young adult Millennials will favor teamwork, close family relationships, job security, and a bland popular culture. Their unprecedented digital empowerment and talent for organizing will create a political powerhouse and may even revitalize the union movement.

Adopted from Neil Howe and William Strauss (Harvard Business Review, Jul 2007)

While subscriber fees, government grants and private investment capital paid for the development of the backbone, advertisers paid for the development and sustentation of commercial websites. The same is true today but, just over a decade into the evolution of the public/commercial Internet, advertising has become much more precise, targeted and universally pervasive.

Advertising techniques are changing and a coordinated series of discussions and experimentation surrounding emerging forms of online advertising known as Web2.0 is taking place. To be more precise, the experimentation has been going on for about two years at a much less coordinated technical level.

A virtual slew of online marketing gurus are catching on to a number of new ideas and concepts and struggling to put them together into a coherent marketing philosophy, hence the slew of hopeful hype surrounding Web2.0 last week.

There’s often a seriousness to hype that shouldn’t be dismissed just because the messenger sounds like a huckster. When mass-marketing ideas are exchanged by a lot of mass-marketers, (even far-fetched philosophical ones), the stuff we do in marketing is subtly changed.

As we’ve seen in the past, some ideas will work well and some will not. All hyperbole aside, a month worth of headlines in the search-media clearly shows a rapid evolution in the world of online marketing is taking place. It is happening for a number of reasons. Advertisers need to expand on Internet marketing models, more players are entering the field, and technology is allowing developers to do amazing new things.

While theoretical mountains are being moved around Madison Ave, the simple and practical business of organic search engine optimization and placement continues to operate under the radar of the mainstream business world. The irony is, the one thing about each of the previous (and most of the newer) online promotional trends that remains constant is a dependence on some form of organic search.

Organic search is the backbone of all other search-based advertising formats. Representing the fastest research and reference tool, various types of search are the most used applications on the Internet after email. Several user behaviour studies have confirmed that the majority of search engine users click on the Top organic placements before looking at the paid placements to the right and above. Organic search optimization also remains the least expensive form of online marketing.

Google continues to understand the importance of its organic search listings and if the conversations taking place over at Digital Point and Search Engine Watch are any indication, so do many webmasters making money through Google’s AdSense program. It is a human tendency to neglect the simplest things and a business tendency to promote things that make the most money. Often those that tend to simple things are successful beyond those stuck in auras of complexity. In our complex world however, those that learn to use the simplest tools along with complex systems tend to do better than the rest.

An excellent example of this is the long-term StagedHomes.com online advertising campaign we’ve worked with for two years. The campaign features a real estate service developed and taught by our client. By targeting the most frequently search keywords and phrases for her specific niche of the massive US real estate industry, we have managed to achieve and maintain a wide range of Top5 organic placements over the past two years. I’m going to use this campaign as an example as I think the client is one of the savviest long-term thinkers when it comes to making practical use of new technologies to market and facilitate her business.

Being found on the search engine results pages wasn’t enough for our client’s ambitions or the capacity of her business. Not only did she want to grow quickly, the demand for her professional and teaching services is immense and continues to grow. About eighteen months ago, she started using AdWords and Overture (now Yahoo Search Marketing) to promote her business and expand her reach by having her ads appear in online versions of publications through content-distribution and AdSense subscribers.

Now, she has enjoyed the benefits of both worlds with amazing and persistent organic placements and prominent AdWords and YSM placements under a wide array of keywords and phrases. The organic placements continue to be the most clicked from the search engine results pages themselves but she has also gained a substantial number of clicks from ads appearing in online trade magazines, real estate sites and blogs displaying ads generated by Google or Yahoo.

She is always interested in expanding her markets and has done several television and radio pieces along with producing her own series of videos, products and educational services. It will be interesting to see what happens when she begins to focus on the expanding array of online advertising options from pod-casting commercials to targeting her messages through social networking applications.

While the cost of advertising will likely be calculated based on the familiar pay-per-click/call/action business model, the number of methods of expressing her message is about to expand, rapidly.

In the coming months, search advertisers and webmasters will be able to incorporate sound and video to keyword-specific landing pages. Pod-casting, blogs and social networking trees will become means of delivering messages and advertising. The search behaviours of members of social networks are going to be been incorporated into algorithms of search results tailored to meet the individual needs of each search-consumer. Some marketers even speculate the rise of social networking and peer-recommendations will lead to the diminishment of traditional search engines.

The rapidity of the evolution is being propelled by a number of extraordinary events, the first and foremost of which is a sudden sense of urgency in an environment increasingly dominated by Google. With Google assuming the leadership role Microsoft held before 2000, every other online advertising provider large and small has a universal competitor to examine, copy and target.

Human life is reflected in human art. Today’s business drama is sort of Shakespearian. In a world where there is one king who appears to dominate above all others, there is only one main character for rivals to study, emulate and undercut. When the king acts like a fink, as all corporate kings tend to do from time to time, pretenders beget plotters who in turn tend to stage an interesting second and third act. Yahoo, MSN, AOL and even LookSmart have all made subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) Google-bashing a pillar of their corporate PR strategies while working to copy and out-innovate Google in the background.

Next, advancements in technology over the past two years are now being accepted and used in the development and marketing communities. Ajax, a tool developed in the late 90′s by Microsoft to run an online version of Outlook, is now being used to operate server-side applications such as Google Maps, and the subsequent explosion of using the Google Maps API to customize maps to specific interests.

Lastly, as new technologies come into mainstream usage, they tend to disrupt or change the way the mainstream does things. Think about the way instant messaging has replaced Email in many circumstances. As Internet marketers dream up new ways to present ideas and products, they advance thinking on how to merge the most useful aspects of new communications technologies. Users of the newest version of MSN IM will soon see contextual advertising based on their current conversation appearing where banner ads now appear.

For the past two years, interest in pay-per-click search advertising has dominated the search engine marketing environment. Easily explained and understood, PPC offers definite answers to advertisers and more control over ad-placements than any other form of mass-marketing, on or off-line. PPC offers tangible, reportable results gained from a predictable investment. It also offers a flexibility that no other form of mass marketing can facilitate.

PPC has also been a cash cow for the search engines themselves. Interest in PPC allowed Google to go public fifteen months ago and paid-advertising account for the vast majority of Google’s revenues. Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask have all modeled their businesses on the provision of contextually delivered paid advertising.

The paid-per-click/call/action business model is obviously successful and will almost certainly form one of the pillars of future paid advertising venues offered by the major search engines.

A decade ago, the websites were littered with banner ads of every shape, size and colour. Marketing costs were calculated based on how many times the banner would appear in rotation with other advertising banners on a site. As time moved on, these banners became more sophisticated, featuring animations and even sound. The biggest problem with the model was that even if people did click the banner ad, mainstream consumers had not yet adopted online commerce. In other words, the chances of making a sale were often dependent on the consumer using the traditional communications mediums of voice and telephone to place an order. By the time the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, banner ads had lost their luster and, as the dominant means of Internet advertising, were on a steady decline. A new form of advertising had taken form and for want of a pricing structure, it was totally free.

1999 was the year Google started to be known as the coolest thing since spliced cable. Those were the days when being a geek was entirely chic. The first stages of the SEO industry had already formed around Alta Vista, Yahoo and Lycos but the Internet itself was just starting to be used by most of the general public.

Google appeared at just the right time and in just the right format to please the people and via the new fangled miracle of email, viral marketing word-of-mouth testimonies drove millions to try it. It created a very big and very sudden buzz, becoming the poster-child homepage of the millions of new Internet users. In the mid to late 90′s, nearly everybody was an Internet newbie and Google helped them find stuff fast.

Around the same time, consumers were starting to trust the Internet environment. A similar phenomenon has been happening since the Google IPO last year. The intense buzz created around Google has spurred interest in the rest of the sector. Search marketing is about to become a lot more interesting and, if previous trends hold true, much of the change will have a distinctly organic flavour.

As advertisers, webmasters and search marketers take advantage of the emerging possibilities, finding and sorting information through organic algorithms will remain a core consistency for the search service providers. In other words, while the rest of the search-advertising milieu evolves into more complex and targeted forms of paid-ad distribution, most consumers will still find those paid-ads (whatever format they take) and the documents they are embedded in via organic search results.