This subsection of the situation analysis section of your marketing plan describes only relevant information on macroenvironmental trends that might affect your business:

Company materials may also be utilized to carry PR messages (e.g., stationery, trucks, uniforms, etc.). It may be possible to combine both advertising and PR messages on company materials. For example, beer and soft drink delivery trucks are often painted with advertising (e.g., "Pepsi, the choice of a new generation") and PR messages (e.g., "Support the fight against Muscular Dystrophy in your local community").

Grand openings (or re-openings) are always attention-getters as are anniversary sales and seasonal promotions. A small business can host open house events and invite key target buyers to explain and demonstrate products and services.

Community involvement is a super way to good public relations and free publicity of the best kind. The old saying "you have to give to receive" holds true in business.

PR programs can often be created, managed, and executed completely by small business personnel. Many PR programs are simple to create and do, unlike advertising and some promotion events requiring outside experts to create, produce, manage, and execute.

Press releases, if you make them newsworthy, can lead not only to great free publicity but to valuable reprints you can use in your ad efforts.

Public relations (PR) efforts, like advertising, can help to build business and product awareness among target buyers and end users, often at a fraction of the cost of advertising. Many small and large businesses consciously utilize PR as a way to obtain free advertising about their products and services. PR can be an effective way to generate valuable word-of-mouth advertising, sometimes due to the greater credibility and availability of information provided in editorial articles and interviews with your company personnel.

Trade shows are essential to some types of wholesale and manufacturing businesses. Display design, booth location and pre- as well as post-show mailings are carried to high degrees of sophistication (and expense). A small business person thinking of using this form of advertising would do well to contact the trade or professional association for his or her industry and also to pick up a copy of How to Participate Profitably in Trade Shows, by Robert Konikow, published by Dartnell.

Direct mail and catalogs are gaining enormous popularity. L.L. Bean, Land's End, and Eddie Bauer represent virtually identical products being marketed nationally. Firms like these are masters of database marketing. If you even hope to get started in this arena, our advice is to start very small and narrow your niche to a needlepoint.

Signage is a key component of establishing and perpetuating your identity.

Telemarketing comes in various guises. We all gripe about the computer-dialed boiler room selling operations that pester us at dinnertime, but there are other ways of using the phone as a sales tool. For a small business, it might be best to start calling people you've been referred to by current clients or networking contacts.

If you get big enough to contemplate advertising in major newspapers or magazines or on radio or television, form your own in-house ad agency and save the usual 15 percent commission. This is as easy to do as printing up some letterhead with a name like XYZ Advertising Agency. Have a separate checking account if you're going to do a lot of this. This is standard procedure for medium-sized businesses who handle their own ad buys.

There are many things you can do in the way of advertising, promotion, and publicity that cost little or nothing. And when you become successful enough to be able to afford more sophisticated ad techniques, there are ways of measuring to some extent just how effective these methods are in terms of your business growth. As always, the chief concern is that the advertising do what it is intended to do: cause more people to purchase more from your business.

Advertising in telephone directories is, for some businesses, critically important. But it's definitely not cheap! Publishers of these directories have stringent guidelines that make it hard for you to distinguish your ad from your competitors' without spending a lot of money. If you go with this kind of ad, check out the alternatives — Sprint, Ameritech, SBC, whatever baby Bell you have in your area, as well as the cellular firms such as AT&T and Cingular and Verizon. Many areas receive directories published by more than one company. The cost of advertising varies, as does the market served. Try to pick the one that targets your potential customers the best at the lowest cost.

Classified ads and small display ads in local newspapers or magazines are a good way to reach your buyers. Get media kits from all your local publications (and any regional or national publications you may want to use as a model). Take a look at what they have to offer and at what price. The media kit will give you the demographic and geographic reach of the publication as well as rate information. Remember that the lowly classifieds are perused by a huge number of people, especially on weekends. Big-time auto dealers and real estate agents fill these pages up for a reason. If you slip a classified ad into the right category and keep it running consistently, you'll probably get a response strong enough to at least pay the cost of the ad.

There's an old adage that holds that at least 50 percent of all advertising is a waste of money. It's probably true — and if you can figure out which half of your ad budget is useless, you'll save a bundle. But until you achieve this wisdom (which has so far eluded most marketers), you'd be wise to continue advertising full tilt and not take a chance on eliminating something that just might work.

Advertising is impersonal, usually paid communication intended to inform, educate, persuade, and remind.

Here are some guidelines for creating memorable advertising that really sells:

Many small businesses use coupons as part of their promotional programs. The more common ones entitle the bearer to some benefit, such as a price reduction on a particular product or service. Others reward frequent customers for their loyalty. For example, a coffee shop may give each of its customers a card that is punched when a pound of coffee is purchased. When the card is completely punched (perhaps after 10 or 12 pounds), the customer gets a free pound. Be sure that your pricing supports the cost of this type of promotion.

For a small business, a demonstration is often the most effective and cost-efficient selling tool.

This is the old "prize in the popcorn box" approach. A little something extra at no extra charge.

Once a small business has determined both its business positioning strategy and the size of the promotional budget, specific promotional activities can be selected. Promotion programs provide direct purchase incentives in contrast to most advertising, which provides reasons to buy your product instead of the competing brand.

Mass marketers frequently run games and contests on a nationwide scale. People look under bottle caps, collect game pieces, or submit entries in an effort to win prizes. Most small businesses probably don't need (and can't afford) this type of promotion.

A hot dog stand in a downtown office area has a large sign on it, "Joe's Redhots — Satisfy yourself for $1.00! You deserve it!"

Promotion, advertising, and PR spending (i.e., "marketing support") ranges from less than 1 percent of net sales for industrial business-to-business operations to 10 percent or more, for companies marketing consumer packaged goods. Consumer packaged goods companies may spend 50 percent of net sales for introductory marketing programs in the first year, subsequently lowering the percentage spent to a stable 8 percent to 10 percent within a few years. Retail stores that advertise and promote spend 4 percent to 6 percent of net sales for marketing support, on average.