Marketing Charts reports that most SMBs will maintain or increase their ad spending this year, and many will increase their online ad spending.

Among the most interesting statistics reported in the new study are:

• 47% of SMBs expect to maintain their spending on ads in the next 12 months while 34% expect to increase it
• 31% will make the decision based on ad performance and ROI
• 40% of SMBs plan to add customer reviews to their own websites
• 30% will add links or place ads on social sites or blogs
• 26% will incorporate video on their websites

These are encouraging statistics. If 81% of small businesses plan to maintain or increase their ad spending then it means the economy is not having as big an impact on business as we are being told. A clear 56% of small businesses will make advertising decisions based what is happening internally within their companies. At least 40% of small businesses will do some kind of Internet marketing this year.

I only see these numbers going up in the near future. If that happens then the necessity of doing business online will only increase, which will lead to more online advertising. The future of business is on the Web.

Search engines have nearly ruined customer service. It seems that everyone wants to be No. 1, but few people want to act like No. 1. Here’s a good article that represents what I mean.

Ask yourself if doing business with your company is easy from the customer’s point of view. You can have the best search engine optimization in the world and if your customer service is lousy then it won’t matter. You can have the sleekest web design in your industry, but if customers can’t navigate or have trouble finding what they want then it won’t matter. If they have trouble finding your phone number or reaching someone to answer their questions when they call then it doesn’t matter that you have a pretty website ranked No. 1 on Google for the most valuable key term.

The most important thing in business, even a Web business, is customer service. Make the customer happy and you’ll keep them long term. Frustrate them and they’ll find your competition.

Will Critchlow has some interesting thoughts on whether or not existing businesses starting to do business on the Web should build from the ground up or build their Web presence on the backbone of their brick and mortar reputation. This is a very good topic and I’ll tell you what I think in just a minute. First, here’s Will:

There are a few situations where I would disagree with the conclusion that you always get a mess when you add new marketing to old businesses - particularly in SEO - understanding the basics of SEO (not even linkbait etc. but just keyword research and basic technical on-page SEO) can be enough to form a valuable sales channel for old-school businesses.

In other words, he is somewhat disagreeing with Seth Godin, a recognized expert on new marketing. I think I’m with Will on this one, though in principle Seth is correct.

When it comes to marketing online, you cannot compare it to off line marketing. They are two different things. The way you reach people online is completely different than the way you do it off line. It requires a different approach and sometimes that approach is counter-intuitive to what successful marketers off line are used to. That’s why many traditional marketing agencies don’t do so well online.

Will goes on to discuss link building and SEO. He has an interesting suggestion regarding viral marketing techniques online. I think that kind of marketing online can work for a lot of businesses if some thought goes into it. An example he gives is this one for a dating website.

That approach will work for many businesses, but what if you have a traditional real estate business, or a law practice? Can that type of marketing work? I think so, but you do have to give it a lot of thought. You obviously don’t want to talk about dating a unicorn, but you may be interested in a humorous take on ambulance chasing if you have a personal injury practice in your town. Or maybe you can make fun of real estate agents and drive people to your real estate website.

Online, people like to see things that are entertaining. If you can get them to laugh, especially at you or themselves, and capture their imaginations then you’ll get much further. You may set up a separate website to do that or you might just add a folder to your current site. Either way is fine, but the bottom line is, advertising online is not like advertising off line. You have to think outside the box, and sometimes way outside the box.

When 73% of Internet users first start their research online, it pays to spend some time ranking well in the search engines. If you don’t then you don’t exist.

That’s why I’ve put together a new workshop to address the needs of small business owners who are just now trying to take their business online. The title of the workshop is The 7 Things You Can Do to Make Google Fall in Love with Your Website. In addition that workshop, I’ve a great bonus: How to Turn Your Business Blog into a Search Engine Magnet.

The beginning of your Internet marketing should be your own website. In my workshop I’ll tell you how to go about optimizing your website so that it can be found by people searching for your products online. The topics I’ll cover in depth in this workshop are:

• Search Engine Optimization – what is it?
• Why Search Engine Optimization is critical to your online success
• The 7 things you can do to make Google fall in love with your website
• Blogging – what it is and why you should care
• How to launch your own business blog – the right way
• How to use your business blog as a search engine magnet

In this workshop I’ll cover everything you need to know to make your website the best that it can be and to rank well in the search engines. The cost is a measly $50 and you can register online by going to www.SocialWebTraining.com. Oh, and just in case you’re wondering what date it will be, look for us on September 16, 2008 from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. See you there!

Michael Martine says generalists are better than specialists, and makes a convincing case. Has this ever happened to you?

Take SEO (search engine optimization) and web design, for example. You hire an SEO specialist after you hired a web designer who you thought knew everything about web design. In your mind, you lumped in a bunch of stuff in with “web design” that your web designer was clueless about.

After all, a web design specialist does not study SEO. He or she studies web design, and that’s it. You later find out you have zero SEO, and you’re ticked off. Now you hire yet another specialist who is going to do all kinds of changes to your site and other things you don’t understand. if this stuff had been done as part of the original design, you would have saved thousands of dollars.

Of course, he’s making a sales case for himself, but his point is right on. There are many times when it is good to hire a specialist and that’s exactly what you need. But if you are just starting out in business, or you are just making your first foray into Internet marketing, which is new territory for many small business owners, then what you really need is a guide, a generalist who knows how to get around in the field. There is more than one reason for this.

Michael pointed out of the reasons, which is the ignorance of specialists regarding other specialists specialties. But sometimes it’s not even ignorance. It could be differences of opinion.

You’ll run into some specialists who do things one way and another specialist who does things another way. Neither way is wrong, they’re just different, but they don’t go well together. You need someone who can reconcile the differences, someone who can analyze your situation and determine which direction is the best way to go - and sometimes that direction is between the paths of the two specialists.

What it all boils down to is directorship. Who’s going to run the program? Can you? Do you know enough about the different specialties of online marketing to direct the show and not end up lost? Most small business owners can’t do that. That’s why they need someone who can communicate across specialties to steer their business in the right direction. A director can tell the web designer not to include certain code, or to place it in an external file when it needs to be, based on the SEOs recommendation. Then she can convince the SEO not to be so adamant about the use of image files like Flash because in small doses and appropriate optimization techniques those elements can be implemented successfully. Your director doesn’t have to do the work; she just has to know how it should be done so that she can direct those who will do it. And if that’s the kind of expertise you need to steer your business in the right direction as you make the transition online, well then I’m your girl. And the best part is, I’m knowledgeable of online marketing and traditional marketing so I can help you integrate the two. Ready?

According to Greg Sterling, the top 10 Internet Yellow Pages headings in terms of what local people search for are:

1. Restaurants
2. Physicians & Surgeons
3. Hotels
4. Auto Repairing & Service
5. Florists-Retail
6. Auto Dealers-New & Used
7. Dentists
8. Auto Parts & Supplies - New & Used
9. Beauty Salons (tie)
10. Hospitals (tie)

So what’s that mean? Well, for starters, if you own a local restaurant then you should seriously start thinking about advertising your business through the Internet yellow pages. That includes sites like Citysearch, Superpages, and Yelp. The same goes for doctors and surgeons and hotels. In fact, if you do business in any of the above categories then you would benefit from advertising in the yellow pages online.

More and more people are ditching the old print yellow pages and searching for local businesses online. When searching for real estate, most people start their search online. Tourists looking for a place to stay or eat turn to the Internet. Search Engine Land has a pretty in-depth post about the differences between local online searches and off line searches for businesses. There are plenty of similarities. But I think the real issue here is not whether you should advertise in print or online, but rather how you can incorporate Internet Yellow Pages advertising with what you are already doing in print.

Learn more about integrated marketing from Melberg.com.

Your small business CEO decided it’s time to update your company brochure. But you have a tight budget. Your options are a bi-fold, tri-fold, or hypertext brochure. What do you do?

First, let’s define what these are:

• Bi-Fold - Traditional four-sided brochure. One fold, an inside and an outside. Simple and straightforward, but not a lot of space so you have say the right things and say them fast. But your options are more than simple. Will you use graphics? If so, what kind. Glossy paper? Fancy fonts? What will you do to get the customer’s attention?
• Tri-Fold - A little more space than the bi-fold brochure. Two extra space blocks. Two folds. You can say more, but the options are still the same. Glossy, graphics, etc. Is it a real option?
• Hypertext - This is a website. No space limitations, but because of your limited budget you can’t build a full-fledged website. Limited functionality with an unlimited page space.

There really is no comparison between a brochure website and a print brochure. You might as well get it out of your head that they are the same. Both target different audiences, they’re capable of different results, and instead of thinking of them as either/or options you’re better off thing of them as both/and compliments. In other words, don’t use all of your budget on one and forget the other.

Secondly, if you’re going to bother with a hypertext brochure, or a website of any kind, then I highly recommend ditching the brochure concept and just building a full-fledged website. The expense is not that much greater, but the benefits are. A brochure site is one page. A real website can have as many pages as you think you need. So if your brochure site has 6 “pages” within the one-page that acts as a frame then you can spend just a few more dollars get a 6-page website. Your benefits will far outweigh the cost and you should see more than 600% return versus the hypertext brochure format.

If at all possible, you might try to expand your budget a little and think about building a real website with print marketing collateral that includes a brochure. If you need to scale back some, build the website now and put off the print brochure until the next budgeting cycle unless you are completely out of print brochures. In that case, go ahead and replenish your supply of brochures and work extra hard to put the website into your next budget.

Companies making the transition from print advertising to online marketing might wonder whether web page design is like print page design. This is a legitimate question and it deserves a thoughtful answer. My answer, the one I’d like you to keep in mind is, yes and no.

Cliche, I know. But it’s also true. In some respects, the two are a lot alike. In other ways they are completely different.

Design is design, right? The purpose for any page design - whether print or Web - is to attract a reader’s response. You want your copywriting and visual elements to work together to elicit a positive reaction - close the sale. That’s the point to any kind of page design, whether we’re talking web page design or print page design, but that’s really where the similarity ends.

Web page design is a bit more complex and a lot harder to nail down that print design. With print design you are dealing with a two-dimensional canvas. Web page design is a four-dimensional canvas. Consider:

Print Design
Brochures, flyers, newsletters
All are solid and flat
Words sell, graphics enhance
Limited space
Say too much, lose the sale
Say too little, lose the sale
Say the wrong things, lose the sale

Web Design
Blogs, websites, and html newsletters
Words sell, graphics enhance
Audio and video capable
Unlimited space
People thrive on information
Biggest danger is not saying enough
It is almost impossible to say too much (almost!)

The essential difference between web page design and print page design is that with web design you can include elements that you can’t include with print design and once you publish something it has no time line. A print page can be discarded or discontinued and you know that the information at some point is no longer valid. Once you publish information to the web is there forever and even if the information is outdated, you’ll have a tough time retrieving it. Let’s explore that:

E-mail Newsletters - Hit send, it’s gone. No getting it back. Better make sure it’s accurate and you better make sure that if your information is timely or has a deadline that it is carefully and intentionally spelled out.

Blogs - Blogs are, by nature, timely. Make a post today and this time next year it is obsolete. It’s a given. People expect that. But the blog post is still there and will always be available for viewing. If you want to correct a blog post with incorrect information in it, you’ll have to make another blog post and make sure that your readers can find it. Simply removing a blog post leaves a cache copy of the incorrect information in cyberspace.

Websites - You have a window in the beginning to catch information before it is indexed by the search engines. Once a web page is indexed, it is difficult to have the information de-released. You can change your web page, but there is still a cache copy of the old page until the search engines crawl the new page again. Even then, websites like archive.org will make the old page a treasure for centuries.

I mentioned that web publishing is four-dimensional. I’ve already talked about the time element. The third dimension is what you can do with audio, visual, and links. Programs like Flash and technologies like podcasting and video marketing allow you to do things on web pages that you can’t do in print. A rising trend is the use of spokesmodels on web pages. You can actually turn your web page into a running infomercial. This type of technology plus the element of linking between pages - and between websites - makes web page design a completely different publishing platform than print design. There is more to think about, there are more ways of doing what is possible, and your imagination is the only limitation. The offset is that with web page design, there is much more potential in terms of monetization and reputation success.

Marketing has been around a long time. Without it, most businesses would never have survived. Though I’ve met some business owners in some towns who say they’ve never advertised. I guess their service is so good their customers just talk about them. That’s the best kind of advertising there is - and you don’t have to pay for it.

But most of it, even if our service is darn good, still have to pay for some form of marketing.

Traditional marketing works. So why abandon it, right? Internet marketing works. So we should use it, right? Well, it depends on who you talk to.

The key to any kind of marketing, of course, is effectiveness. The bottom line: Will it increase your ROI? Traditional modes of marketing like the yellow pages are being replaced rather quickly by online versions of the same product, except that the online version is much more flexible and versatile and has the power to increase ROIs tremendously more by reaching a broader base of people interested in your core product or service. Other modes of Internet marketing are doing the same thing. But this is no reason to assume that small business owners should abandon traditional marketing streams.

Sure, you can give up on some of those methods. If you find that your reach is declining through certain traditional marketing methods that you used to see gains on then that could be a sign that it’s time to try something different. But there are still traditional marketing practices that work. That’s why I recommend something I call integrated marketing.

Integrated marketing is taking the best of traditional marketing and coupling it with the best strategies from Internet marketing to tailor a marketing strategy that works for your business. We will examine your business model to see what you have done in the past and to evaluate your current marketing blueprint. If something is working for you then we won’t change it. But if it isn’t then we can find something to replace it, something that will increase your ROI.

Today is the day to look at changes to your marketing plan, changes that could propel you into the 21st century and reach more customers with fewer dollars. Find out how now.

Let’s face it, the world is changing, and so it the Internet. Then why shouldn’t marketing itself change?

If you are a business and you are trying to figure out how to get your products to appeal to the younger set, you probably want to read this article about Generation Y. There are some real good clues here as to what the younger generation is into. Here are some of my take aways:

• They’re tuned in digitally
• Don’t have much use for TV
• Friends are more important than ads
• There’s more to life than work
• Generation Y is a lot more socially conscious
• They aren’t afraid of technology
• They have short attention spans
• And they really like their mobile phones

I find all of this to be rather promising, especially if you starting to do some Internet marketing. As Generation Y gets older and become users of the tools that we now employ to do business, you’ll see search grow, social media grow, and mobile applications grow. You might as well prepare now for marketing in the 21st century. The Baby Boomer generation may still have some good life left in them, but they aren’t the ones driving the economy any more, at least they won’t be in another 10 years. It will be Generation Y, the largest generations since the Boomers. And it makes good marketing sense to pay attention to what drives them.