Here are some steps that can help you get your advertising and business back on track.

Try to determine what the market wants. Do they want your product delivered in a certain way, Are there features they are willing to extra for? Are there some features they don’t need? Potential cost savings for you? Once you figure out the basics, you can charge a much more competitive price and then get your sales force out there to capitalize!!

Communication is key. You need do what your promise, deliver when you say so, and provide excellent after sale service. So many busineses do not follow this simple step, so it is easy to gain advantage in this area.

Recently I was perusinga local business magazine and noticed how many advertisments were of poor quality.  Things that I noticed were not just because I am in the trade but any body reading the publication would notice.  Pixelated graphics, cropping not done properly, spell check not completed, and the worst was company’s logos being grainy and pixelated.  The amount of money invested in these publications, many advertisers use the publication year round which equates into $10,000 to $60,000.  How can a company expect to be thought of as a professional organization if the first thing the potential client notices is a poor quality ad?  I guess it may be work, because people may look at the ad just to see why it is so out of place and not comparable to competitors, but is that really what you want.  I guess it comes back to “good advertising doesn’t always sell more than bad advertising, but at least its good”. 

When your investing 10 of thousands of dollars, it is highly recommended that your company pursue a quality graphic artist, one with a portfolio, one that has worked with your industry before, one that is willing to come to you to work with you and communicate. 

The price of the advertising doesn’t change but the quality sure does!

One month after DL Fitness opened their doors in Worcester, MA, the owners began to notice customers enrolling that were not from referrals or their limited advertising. The owners looked into the random customers and learnt that the clients had found them on Twitter.

The owners of DL Fitness did not really understand how Twitter worked, but quickly were informed that their current clients were raving about the classes on Twitter. As a result it created buzz in the online world. DL Fitness set up their own account and not have close to 400 followers who are the studios main advertising.

“We would like to say we had a good advertising campaign, but it seems Twitter is the cornerstone to our success”, the owners said.

Many small business start ups have no ad budget, as a result Twitter is the main source of marketing for these companies. It is easier to set up and update Twitter for low tech individuals than maintaining their webpage.

Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers through word of mouth and Twitter capitalizes on this. Twitter use 140 characters in length to update followers on specials on specific days and time frames.