Coming up with a marketing plan should be one of the first things on your “To Do” list if you are a business owner-especially during these trying economic times. Not only is marketing important to the survival and thrival of your business, but it helps to “create a buzz” about your name or brand. For example, many of us who were around in the 1980s still remember the jingles to certain commercials such as the Tootsie Roll commercial, etc. If you can still remember the jingle to a commercial from back then, then the marketing team has done their job correctly.

There are even some commercials out now that people cannot stand, but because they have a catchy tune, people tend to remember them regardless of how annoying the salesperson was. Marketing is about being smart. It is about knowing what the consumers are looking for and then making it available to them with some savvy and know-how. Nowadays, especially with the current economic crunch, more and more people are turning towards online marketing to save money (it is considerably less expensive than other forms of marketing and in most cases is actually free) as well as to make themselves more appealing to the billions of people who log onto the Internet each and every day.

Online marketing can include anything from Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertisements in which you get paid for every time someone clicks on an ad to Google's AdSense (which is similar to PPC). There are also things called “banner ads” that some businesses will pay for, and if you know of someone who has a really huge site, you can actually pay them to put an advertisement on their site for your business with the hopes that one of their many readers will see it and actually click on it, which will result in more business for you. The Internet is vast, and there is no end to the possibilities for how you can market yourself. Of course, Twitter is still the king of social media right now (and probably will be for some time). Additionally, there are other clever ways to market yourself. For example, guest blogging is a great way to get your name out there- especially if you can write a guest blog for a site in which there are a lot of visitors.

On the Internet, it is all about visibility. How visible is your company to other people when they search the Internet? What would make a consumer interested in what you would have to say? How would you swing it to make it look interesting and exciting to be a part of? Marketing involves knowing your customers and what their needs and wants are. You can't expect to run a successful business without some sort of marketing plan. From pens to business cards to logos and shameless elf promotion, the best marketing tool to have in your arsenal is perhaps word-of-mouth advertising. If you create a product or provide a service that people are happy with, then chances are that they are going to tell other people about it, and on the social web, this is exactly what is happening.