Marketing Tactics Worth The Money

Create A Community
Word of mouth is still the most powerful form of marketing for small businesses. Lure customers online by launching a blog where they can network, share information and hopefully talk about how cool your company is. Blogs are generally inexpensive but you will burn man-hours updating and monitoring the site. (For more on this tactic, check out "Go Blogging For Customers.")

Survey The Landscape
Too few entrepreneurs bother to define the market--and its willingness to pay--for their product, says Leonard M. Lodish, professor or marketing at the Wharton School. Market surveys--online, direct-mail or by phone--can help, though they can cost up to $10,000. Online surveys are easiest. Zoomerang charges $599 for a year subscription to its surveys service; Survey Monkey offers subscriptions starting at around $20 per month.

Get Friendly With Google
After you've shelled out a few grand for a user-friendly Web site, budget another few for getting noticed by the big search engines like Google and Yahoo!. You can buy keywords like Google's AdWords, which help direct customers to your site (see "Marching Up The Search Stack") or even hire a "search engine optimization" expert (see "Should You Hire A Search Engine Consultant?").

Call Customers To Action
Not all e-mail marketing campaigns are created equal. Those that give customers a call to action--like Diaper.com's referral program (see "Six Marketing Tactics Worth Paying For")--will get more people onto your Web site or into your store. E-mail marketer Constant Contact charges $15 a month to blast e-mails to up to 500 addresses; $30 will get you up to 2,500. StreamSend charges $6 per month for 500 e-mails and up to $50 per month for 50,000 e-mails. Those prices include testing presentations in different e-mail formats--such as Yahoo! mail and Google mail--and tabulating the response and bounce-back rates. (For more e-mail marketing tips, check out "Artful Spam" and "E-Mail Marketers Should Look Beyond Outlook.")

Test--And Test Some More
No one hits on the perfect marketing strategy on their first try. Instead of placing all your bets on one radio advertisement or telemarketing campaign, try concurrently testing two or three strategies on targeted groups of customers and in limited areas. "It's hard to convince companies to do this because they want to do everything rapidly, but then they end up wasting a lot of money," says Wharton's Lodish.