If you haven't already begun to explore the potential that social media can have for your business, you're behind the curve. While not all social media tools are right for all businesses, you're sure to find at least one that you can leverage to help with your business goals. Social media marketing, or SMM, can help you:

• Generate website traffic
• Increase brand awareness
• Create discussions around your company's products or services

Here are some tips that you can use to help inexpensively bolster your marketing efforts using different social media options:

• Use Facebook to spread information about your business. If you have several hundred Facebook friends, use those connections to spread the word about your business and its products and services. Create a page or group for your business and invite your friends and others to become fans or join your group. Make sure to include a link to your company's website.
• Create a Twitter account to keep customers updated on your business. It takes very little time and effort to maintain a Twitter account and the service provides a great medium for disseminating brief bits of information. Make sure to regularly update your information so your account remains relevant to your audience (tools like Hootsuite can vastly simplify this process!).
• Use crowdsourcing to survey your customers. Many social media tools allow you to create surveys for your customers or market to provide useful marketing information to your business. SurveyMonkey, for example, is a free service that is easy to use and allows you to create surveys and easily track response.
• Monitor blogs and other social media related to your business. Blogs create a forum for customers and potential customers to both praise and complain about companies in your industry as well as customer needs. Identify a handful of blogs you find useful and easy to follow and monitor them regularly.

Social media is a new tool that is foreign to many business, and it can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the new medium. However, many social media tools are free and easy to use and can provide an extra arrow in your marketing quiver. 

We have many blog posts on social media that can provide you with additional tips and ideas for leveraging these inexpensive -- and increasingly effective -- tools.

Whether online or off, when you're working on a promotion, one of the most important elements is the order form. Unfortunately, it's also one of the most overlooked elements. But, think about it -- the order form is the part of the direct mail package that expressly provides the customer with the means to purchase your products or services. Complicate the process, even subtly, and you risk losing the sale.

Here are some tips to help you create an order form that boosts your odds of making the sale:

• Remind the customer why they should purchase your product or service. While your entire promotional package or web page should be conveying this information, use the order form to provide a final reminder that summarizes the benefits they will receive.
• Provide precise information on how to order. Too many companies overlook seemingly obvious elements in their order form. Be sure to include clear instructions on where to send a check or how to purchase online, who to contact with questions, etc. If you use an online ordering process make sure it's clear, easy to understand and doesn't involve too many clicks. "Abandoned shopping carts" are a big problem in e-commerce.
• Don't hide your order form and don't try to be too "cute" - your order form should look like an order form, should follow a natural progression in terms of the information asked for and should be easy to understand.
• Get your back-office staff involved in evaluating your order form or online ordering process. 
• Offer multiple ordering options. Some customers may choose not to purchase a product if they can't call a number and talk to a service representative. Others will only order online. Offer multiple options to serve varying preferences.

It doesn't matter whether you're seeking orders through traditional direct mail marketing, email marketing or e-commerce. Making sure your order form and ordering process is clear, straightforward and easy to use will dramatically boost your sales. Don't overlook this critical element of your promotional efforts.

Advertising campaigns are often expensive investments, particularly for small businesses with little name recognition and limited financial resources. Therefore, it's no surprise that businesses are very interested in measuring the effectiveness of their advertising efforts.

Unfortunately, this is not an easy task. Advertising does not exist in a vacuum and it can be very difficult to tease out the individual factors that might impact business performance and profitability.

For instance, a great ad campaign could be negated by poor economic conditions that cause sales to drop overall. On the flip side, sales could increase sharply due to factors entirely unrelated to a new ad campaign that happened to coincide with an increase in sales.

While you can't control for every variable and you probably don't have the time or resources to monitor and measure everything there are some simple things you can do to get a sense of what's working -- and what's not.

For some simple tips, visit our blog.