When it comes to promoting your business, now is the best time in the world to take an active, personal approach to your marketing. After all, when times are tough, word of mouth is one of the best ways to get your message out there in a manner that gets a positive response. Here are just a few ways to make sure that you and your business are active in marketing at all levels during this crucial time of change and growth.

• Network like never before. It is more important than ever that customers and potential clients feel like they have a personal relationship with you. Working with someone that you feel you have a rapport with and can trust is vitally important to people in these uncertain times, so the more accessible and familiar you can be, the better.

• Bring all employees in on the action. Even if your employees were not hired to create marketing strategy, you can still reward them when they bring in new clients. Offer incentives for this achievement. It can be something as simple as a good parking spot or as attractive as a vacation or a bonus based on the amount of money the new client brings in.

• Provide incentives to employees and customers. Just as you are motivating your employees, motivate your customers to bring you new customers as well. For example, if a customer brings in a new client who names them as a reference, then that customer might get an additional service or a discount on another service they are already receiving.

• Offer something for “nothing.” Giving away free stuff is always a good way to make an impression. However, the best way to put your free stuff to work for you is to make sure that it is not only accruing the goodwill of the person who gets it, but also exposing everyone who sees it to your company logo, contact information or slogan. This can be done through promotional merchandise (pens, mugs and golf balls are among the most commonly used items but almost anything can become promotional with little effort) that you distribute personally or provide for others aiming for incentives to distribute.

And remember, market creatively, carefully and often!

You have probably heard it before: “Experience is the best teacher.” However, in the past even when this may have been the case, most employers and even clients would opt for working with an entity with a healthy staff of college-educated and degree-bearing employees over a business with few to no college grads. This is changing, though, as the perceptions of the value of a business degree change and, in many cases, decline.

Whether or not you have a business degree is not the issue. Instead, as a smart business person, you know that the real issue is always how to turn public perceptions and thought trends to your professional advantage in order to sell more stock, recruit more clients or move more merchandise. In the current market, an appearance of longevity and the ability to stand strong is far more important than the letters that come after your name, so it is important to utilize strategies in advertising that will make it clear that your business has been around and is here to stay.

Here are some strategies to get your name (and dates) out there:

•    Cite your years of experience.

Make sure that potential clients know that you have been around by giving them references from clients that have worked with you for years. You can also put your business’s founding date on your business cards and any other promotional merchandise to emphasize your experience.

•   Address current market concerns.

In this economy, many icons in the business community are folding. There is no point in ignoring this because everyone knows it. Address the issue directly and explain to potential clients how your business has gotten through tough times before and emerged unscathed and stronger than ever.

•    Get out there.

If you have not been around for long, then give the illusion of age with a great deal of presence. The more people see your logo or company name, the more likely they are to feel like you are a familiar presence and be more inclined to trust your company when they need your goods or services.

And remember, market creatively, carefully and often!

You probably have “a guy” that you use for any number of things. Whether it’s your old high school buddy who sells you cars at a great deal or the mechanic that your father has been using for decades who now works on your kids’ cars, you probably have a number of things that you rely on trusted friends and co-workers for. Think about how this applies to your business: wouldn’t it be great if you had hundreds or even thousands of people who thought of you and your business as “their guy” when it comes to your specific arena of products and services? Of course it would. It would send your productivity through the roof. Well, now with social media, you can achieve this – for free.

Recently, the social media network Twitter made big headlines when Ashton Kutcher challenged the news network CNN to a competition to see who could get to a million followers first. Twitter “followers” are people who have signed up to be notified when you change your Twitter status, for example, you might “tweet” that you are waiting in line at the movies, then again once you finished watching a particularly stellar action flick. Each time you do this, your Twitter followers receive an update on their Twitter page and some may even sign up to get the information via email or text message.

While this diversion was largely a media stunt for both Kutcher and CNN, it has some serious ramifications for you. People who are involved in your day-to-day motions feel like they are part of your life. In fact, they may even consider themselves your friends even though you have never met. At the very least, you will develop a rapport with them based on the fact that you interact on a regular basis. As a result, when it comes time to make a business decision, you and your business will be “that guy.”

Of course, social media memberships alone will not achieve this for you. You need to take some steps to accumulate friends and followers. For example, Ashton Kutcher publicized his competition with CNN on fan sites, blogs and even television spots. For your purposes, simply making a connection will suffice in most cases. Either sign up to follow other people that look like they might be good potential contacts (who will in turn follow you in most cases) or just put your Twitter information on products such as promotional merchandise so that your clients and potential clients can stay in touch and feel a stronger relationship with you than ever.

And remember, market creatively, carefully and often!

In May of 2009, NewsDaily.com reported that on average, newspapers in the United States have lost over 20 percent of their readership. In addition, the article featured quotes from Warren Buffet, well known for purchasing companies in distress and then turning them into million dollar money-making machines, stating that he would buy few, if any, newspapers in the United States regardless of how low the price.

None of this is particularly new. The printed news media has suffered in competition with web based news since the majority of the population first got online. With so many different media sources and information networks at their disposal, internet users do not see any reason to rely on one costly news outlet when they can do their own research and get a variety of viewpoints and information online for free. While many newspapers have taken their news online, this has not staunched the bleeding for print editions, and many periodicals now either have a very limited delivery geography or simply opt to solely deliver the news online.

This has a very direct effect on advertising strategies, particularly when it comes to small and locally based businesses who have relied primarily on news print advertising for years. If you own this type of company, you may not be interested in targeting a wider market as you could online. Fortunately, you have options that are not only far more effective than the now-crippled news advertising industry, but that are far more cost-efficient as well.

•    Advertise online with geographically targeted sponsored ads

You can actually determine where your internet advertising appears based on geographic location of the computer that a person viewing your advertising is using. This is a great way to take your advertising online and still stay local.

•    Sharpen up your networking skills

If you really want to make a local impression, then you can do so by keeping in touch with local potential and existing clients. While a phone call will work wonders, promotional merchandise is a great way to get a lot of use out of a one-time investment. By giving a client something that they will use frequently, you can make sure that you stay in the forefront of their mind and get multiple advertising instances out of a single article of merchandise.

•    Take advantage of local online news sources

If your local paper is going online, they will likely have great deals on advertising in order to try and lure advertisers onto their web space. Work with your local newspaper to get a good deal or even a combination deal on better advertising space both on and offline.

And remember, market creatively, carefully and often!

As a business person, you know that your reputation is everything. It determines who will want to work with you, how you recruit new clients and retain old ones and even whether or not you are permitted to sell and represent other companies and manufacturers. A bad “buzz,” deserved or not, can create a serious problem for you financially and professionally. Most business people are aware of this, but many do not realize that no buzz at all about you can also be harmful.

If potential clients are considering working with you but cannot find out anything about your past customers or get any type of reference for you, they may steer clear because your apparent lack of history could indicate a quiet, lurking problem. In reality, you may have believed that you were being modest or that your satisfied customers would speak for themselves. However, you can never rely on anyone but yourself to toot your horn, so the best way to succeed in business is to put your ethics out there on display.

•    Address potential problem areas directly.

If you work in an area of business that could be sensitive due to your access to passwords or financial information, for example, address that head on. Tell the potential client how you deal with this issue up front, and ask them how they would like to handle it. You will find that simply acknowledging that a client might be concerned will allow them to open up with you enough to determine how to alleviate that concern so that the two parties can move forward.

•    Provide a list of references or testimonials.

Happy people generally do not say much. As a result, if you want to make sure that your client finds out good things about you, give them a list of people to call. Otherwise, they may find only the malcontents, who are given to writing profuse and angry online epistles for the world to see, and fail to factor in all your satisfied customers. While it is important to do the best you can for everyone, the fact of the matter is that sometimes you and a client will part ways. However, that client should not be the only person that your new potential client can get a hold of when they are looking for information about you.

•    Offer to put anything and everything in writing.

Most people do not actually care that much about written agreements. However, once you have one with a client, you and the client are protected because you have established your goals, your rules for interaction and the types of services that will be delivered. Putting this sort of thing in writing not only shows that you take the services seriously, but it also indicates good faith on both your parts that satisfaction will be delivered.

And remember, market creativley, carefully and often!

Being generous is a good quality, and it can be a real booster for your business as well. However, during tough economic times, it can be tempting to cut your budget when it comes to giving. This can be a huge marketing mistake. People like working with other people who are generous, and it can dramatically impact their buying decisions. With that said, though, what can you do when you are cutting the budget and trying to keep your business afloat? Will you simply have to sacrifice part of your customer base? Of course not. Nothing is less necessary or more inadvisable. Instead, alter your generosity so that it is working for you while you maintain your image as a thoughtful businessperson and helpful friend.

The key to this generous image is not, as many people believe, giving extravagant gifts to potential clients. In no other industry or personal relationship arena is the adage “It’s the thought that counts” more true than in business and marketing. Interestingly enough, the simple gift of a working and visually appealing pen can make the same impact that thousands of dollars of advertising or even corporate promotional events. The constant presence of a useful reminder of you and your business will do a great deal of promotional “legwork” for you, and each time that your potential client or customer uses the item, they will remember your business and how helpful you have already been.

While it may have been tempting in the past to splurge on elaborate promotional events, tickets to major galas or exotic trips for top clients, a simple gift of a useful item such as a desk clock or a flash drive can go a long way toward making a person feel appreciated and invested in their relationship with you.

Furthermore, at this point in history, people do not necessarily look kindly on others who appear to be “wasting” money, even if in reality it is money well spent. You may actually alienate potential clients if you go overboard on your promotions with trips or tickets, so it is far more judicious and good for your business appearance to stick with modest and useful items that can be used over and over. Even better, a solid mug or a set of retractable ear buds with your logo and information on them provide a legitimate service to the potential customer, thereby demonstrating your commitment to value at the same time that they are reminding that potential customer what a thoughtful partner you can be.

Of course, it is important to remember that if you are giving away promotional merchandise, this is not just the appearance of generosity. It is being generous! Not only is nearly all promotional merchandise a write-off as a business expense, but it will and should make you feel good about yourself and your business. In a time when your mindset can be the difference between success during tough economic times and total failure, it is important to remember that you are taking a responsible step when you give away promotional merchandise because you are economically keeping your business in the public eye and you are cultivating an image of your business that will serve you well regardless of what the future holds.

Did you know that studies have shown that nearly 99 percent of people who do not react to direct sales letters, sales presentations, or advertising copy the first time they encounter it will never respond at all? Those are pretty daunting odds for any business owner, but in a time when a tight budget is a necessity even for thriving businesses, those odds are downright frightening.

Even more serious, they mean that in order to get reliable results from potential customers, you will have to devote serious amounts of promotional and advertising money to making sure that they stay exposed to you so that you do not suffer from the inertia that prevents many people from buying even if they have the means and the motivation. However, wouldn’t it be great if you could spend a small amount of money one time, then know that your relatively – and literally – tiny expenditure would not stop subtly promoting you ever? Of course it would be. In fact, that would solve a lot of problems that most businesspeople encounter in advertising, including trimming your promotional budget.

The lesson here is that a little piece of promotional merchandise can go a long way. Promotional merchandise is any type of helpful product that has your company logo, name or contact information on that product. Common examples of promotional merchandise include desk accessories, computer accessories and recreational accessories, such as golf tags and sunglasses clips.

These items keep you and your business in a potential customer’s “sights” without requiring you to spend additional time and money on promoting yourself after you have made you initial contact. The gift will do it for you.

Even better, every time that person thinks about your business while they are making use of the promotional piece that you gave them, they will develop a little more of a rapport with you and your business and an affinity for your product that will make the decision to work with you extremely smooth and natural when the time comes for them to make a buying decision.

Of course, it is vitally important to provide decent promotional merchandise. If you give someone a pen with no ink, a calculator with no juice or a flash drive with no memory you will not develop a good image or give them positive feelings about your business. Fortunately, high quality promotional merchandise is easy to come by, and it can be extremely inexpensive. The key to promotional merchandise is to get something that you know the potential customer or client will use while staying within your budget. This is easy when nice pens can cost under a dollar a piece and relatively extravagant computer equipment can come at less than five dollars.

Each time the person uses your promotional merchandise, it will be a pleasant experience that will remind them how much value and effort you have already put into your working relationship with them, and you will have no trouble when it comes time for them to make a buying, contractual or networking decision because they will have been subtly sold on your for some time already.

Imagine this: What if every time you made a casual business contact, instead of hoping that the relationship the two of you developed would be solid enough that the contact would remember you and work with you in the future, you could be confident that you were constantly on their mind. In business, people, products and services are constantly competing for your attention. Just today, you have probably already dealt with many things that required you to make a variety of buying decisions, and you probably had more than one option for each avenue that you took or purchase that you made. Think about how you made these decisions:

• Did you pick the option that was the cheapest in order to save money?
  This may have been a factor, but few business owners will use shoddy products, so cheap is not always the way to go. However, budget is definitely important, particularly during unpredictable economic times.
  
  
• Did you go with an option that enabled you to retain continuity over time?
  Many business owners do not like having to switch between vendors. They prefer to work with people who have staying power and a solid work history.
  
  
• Did you opt for a service or product provided by someone you felt like you already had a rapport with?
  Most business decisions are driven largely by trust because even if trusting a person is not enough on its own, when all other things are equal, you will go with the person that you believe will be the best for your business. In your own business, it is vital to build an sense of trust and relationship with potential customers and contacts as quickly as possible so that you can benefit from the feeling of security that this relationship provides.

Many experts believe that customer loyalty will be what gets businesses through the current recession and what makes the difference between a business scraping by and really profiting in this new economical economy. One of the best ways to build a rapport fast is to insure that a contact has you in the forefront of their mind each day while doing something that brings positive thoughts about you to mind. There is no better way to accomplish this than by giving a small, useful gift.

This gift, which can be as simple as a pen with your contact information or as elaborate as a messenger bag or a golf accessory, shows that you provide value to everyone – even those that are not yet in a working relationship with you. This type of promotional merchandise works as an incentive because it accelerates the relationship process so that a contact feels that they have a connection with you even though they may only have met you once or not have spent a great deal of time with you. In times when every single decision that each contact makes counts for your business, it is vital to have this “trust” edge. Promotional merchandise is the best and fastest way to get it.

One of my favorite promotional products is a real classic: the coffee mug. It almost seems too simple at first – after all, who among us does not own at least ten of these things? However, when you stop to think about the innovative design of a coffee mug from an advertising and sales perspective, it’s really hard to beat.

A coffee mug does several things throughout the day. It holds your coffee, gets rinsed out and then usually sits on the corner of your desk for the remainder of the morning and often into the afternoon. Later it may hold more coffee, tea or even water. In short, it is an extremely useful item all on its own. When a coffee mug has your logo or contact information on it though, its utility escalates dramatically. All of a sudden, that useful item is incredibly powerful, constantly reminding the user of how useful you and your business product or service can be to them. Even more advantageous is the coffee mug with a design on both sides. This way other people also spend a great deal of time thinking on a conscious or subconscious level about the things that you can offer them because the coffee drinker and the coffee viewer are both exposed to your marketing each time the mug makes contact with the lips.

Really, the only thing to think about when you are considering investing in promotional coffee mugs is not if you are going to invest, but what type of mug to get. This is where you can make a major difference in your exposure with very little effort. By simply making your mug more practical or more appealing than other, commonplace coffee mugs, you can insure that your mug will have a spot on the desk every day rather than being part of the weekly rotation. Many promotional mugs can be purchased with additional insulation; lids for easy use while driving or even heated bottoms. Some mugs’ sleek design makes them more fashionable than others and even help the user look more professional an in control.

If you want to give a promotional item that gets the same results as a coffee mug but you want it to have more general use options, a water bottle, travel tumbler or sport thermos can also be good options. These containers can hold coffee or any other beverage, and are ideal for on-the-go businesspeople who understand the importance of staying hydrated. Even better, promotional “drinkware” is extremely budget friendly, and you can purchase many high quality items at a low price so that you can get incredible marketing mileage out of a single investment.

I’m drinking coffee out of a mug right now that has a long-time business associate’s name and number on it. That reminds me, I need to call him.

There are millions of reasons to use promotional merchandise and promotional printing to promote and advertise your business just as there are millions of promotional products to choose from.

Here are some of the reasons you should consider when choosing your promotional products:

• Promotional products, especially when given free, are seen by the recipient as an expression of your appreciation and will hopefully result in them being open and willing to talk about your business in a positive way.
• People who use your promotional products are seen as effective sources of testimonials to encourage more people to patronize your business. In effect, you get more advertising mileage when people use your promotional products.

Not only do the products increase the level of awareness of the public of your business, but they will also see your business as viable and effective.

• Promotional products have the ability to strengthen customer relationships and turn them into delighted and loyal customers that will insulate your business from competition. If you strategically implement the distribution of your promotional products, you will realize that it is one of the more effective ways to increase your competitive advantage by strengthening your customer loyalty.
• Your business will be seen as generous by “giving back”. This is crucial as the times are getting more challenging, and as people will only choose to depart with their hard-earned resources by spending on worthy and relevant things. This holds true for businesses to. People are encouraged to support businesses that are perceived to be of more value and less ‘profit-oriented’.

There are millions of promotional products that you can even source online. Get as much information as you can in order to benefit from the best deals.