Low-Cost Marketing Trends for 2007

Businesses, especially small businesses, continue to fight the pressures of improving their bottom line. This means they don't have a blank checkbook to spend on marketing. Enter guerrilla marketing: Getting the word out about a business without investing in traditional or Yellow Pages advertising is the challenge at hand. Using time, energy, knowledge, information and especially imagination will be the best practice of the most successful marketers.

So what will guerrilla marketers be doing in 2007? Emphasizing PR, positioning, communication of benefits, networking and more. Take a look:

Local Search

Though we'll discuss globalization later, most small businesses market locally because they tend to do business within their community, suburb or city -- typically staying within about a 50-mile to 100-mile radius. If this sounds like your business, you don't need to invest in marketing that reaches beyond your local audience, such as search engines that reach the whole world. The desired goal is to isolate your search engine listings and related online advertising dollars in an area where you do want to do business.

To learn more about targeting your search engine advertising dollars to your local audience, start with the list of local search engines at LocalSearchGuide.org.

Podcasts

Never before has the online community had such an opportunity to reach its audience offline. On top of that, the spammers and hackers haven't yet found a way to infiltrate podcasting. (They probably will, but not like they've done with email.)

Podcasts, like any information you put out, should be of interest and value to your target market. What do they need to help their businesses or their personal lives? What solutions do you have that they would like to hear more about? These are the things people find interesting in podcasts. A once-a-month delivery promoted through all your other marketing channels will give a real synergistic boost to your marketing.