Tips on how to stretch your marketing budget

Most small businesses have modest marketing budgets, which means you have to make every dollar count.

Here are five ways to get big results from a small budget:

First, use your ads for more than just space advertising. Ads are expensive to produce and expensive to run.

But there are ways to get your advertising message in your prospect’s hands at a fraction of the cost of space advertising.

The least expensive is to order an ample supply of reprints and distribute them to customers and prospects every chance you get.

When you send literature in response to an inquiry, include a copy of the ad in the package.

This reminds a prospect of the reason he responded in the first place and reinforces the original message.

Distribute ads internally to other departments—engineering, production, sales, customer service and R&D—to keep them up to date on your latest marketing and promotional efforts.

Make sure your salespeople receive an extra supply of reprints and are encouraged to include a reprint when they write to or visit their customers.

Turn the ad into a product data sheet by adding technical specifications and additional product information to the back of the ad reprint.

This eliminates the expense of creating a new layout from scratch.

And it makes good advertising sense, because the reader gets double exposure to your advertising message.

Ad reprints can be used as inexpensive direct mail pieces.

You can mail the reprints along with a reply card and a sales letter.

Unlike the ad, which is “cast in concrete,” the letter is easily and inexpensively tailored to specific markets and customer groups.