Internet Business Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

Advertising to me has a very simple definition, “Spending money to entice people to buy.”

If you aren’t spending money, you aren’t advertising, you’re promoting or marketing.

Marketing is also simple, “Spending time and/or money building your business.”

The difference is in the end goal you hope to achieve.

During our last board meeting, I had to discuss the goals our company hoped to achieve. Here was our ultimate goal:

You see, we have been increasing our revenue every quarter, but every other department in our company has been spending substantially more money every quarter as well.

We decided to cap each department’s spending, and keep them exactly at the level they are at now.

That will stabilize the bottom line, but now we need to increase total revenue.

My idea is to decrease advertising and increase marketing.

Marketing doesn’t have to cost money like advertising does.

We have a billboard that costs about $1,000 a month. That billboard does absolutely nobody any good (except the company that charges us $1k a month).

That was my first step, remove the billboard. With that extra money we plan to have a company picnic with hot dogs, and hamburgers all paid for by the company.

We also plan to release a couple press releases (free to local newspapers, and online) and encourage our employees to come up with an idea that will help sell our products.

The last idea, “encourage our employees to come up with an idea that will help sell our products” is discussed more in detail at Employees Have Great Marketing Ideas.

With these steps we will acheive our goals of increasing revenue and stopping the spending.

Business isn’t just about advertising, business is about marketing.

Set your own goals, and see how well it works for you!