By Will Corrente

As a small business entrepreneur in this economy, you are undoubtedly facing a constant struggle to successfully and cost effectively advertise and market your business.  Unfortunately, when it comes to marketing and advertising there is no single medium that is guaranteed to drive sales success.

Effective advertising and marketing comes from a mixture of mediums which must be tested to produce the desired sales and revenue growth.   In addition, the type of business you own will also dictate not only the type(s) of mediums you should consider, but also the potential success of that medium on driving sales.  Knowing where your customers have found you in the past is a good indicator of how new customers will find you in the future.

Before you embark on your trial and error quest of testing advertisements in various mediums, one of the most important marketing and advertising tasks you can perform as a small business entrepreneur is to ask your existing customers where and how there heard about you.  But don’t stop at your clients; ask your prospects as well, every person who calls your business whether an existing client for years or a potential customer should be asked “how did you hear about us?”

After a period of weeks or months, tally up the responses and see what the data tells you.  You may be shocked to find that although you spend most of your advertising on the yellow pages, most of clients have found you online.  Or, you may find that the medium most successful at driving customers is referrals and word of mouth.  Whatever medium you find that is driving your traffic is the medium in which you should consider expanding your advertising budget, and whatever medium you find that is lagging is the one that you should consider reducing your budget.

A client of mine owns and operates a general contracting business.  By following this method of polling clients and prospects and tracking how they heard of his business, the data revealed that word of mouth referrals and his website were generating the majority of his leads and sales.  Although he spent over a thousand dollars each month on yellow page advertising, virtually no clients or prospects found him using the yellow pages.   When renewal time came, he shifted his advertising dollars and created a new marketing mixture.  He eliminated the costly yellow page advertisement and instead focused on online advertising, Search Engine Optimization and other web based advertising mediums.  In addition, he rolled out a customer referral program where he rewarded previous customers with service discounts, benefits and price incentive for any client who referred him to a new customer who purchased his services.

Successful marketing your small business is as much art as science.  The effects of print, online, radio, email, direct mail, customer rewards, billboard, TV and other advertising mediums should all be tested and tracked until you find the right mixture that yields sales revenue success.

Will Corrente is Managing Director of Corrente Consulting International Inc. a small business entrepreneur consulting firm and professional connection company based in West Palm Beach, FL.  Feel free to email him questions, comments or suggested stories at will@willcorrente.com or follow him on Twitter @willcorrente.