I recently read an article that was written by an astute business person well a retired one that took a look at what a dry cleaning advertising budget should look like today. This article has stuck in my mind if only because its one of the few that I have seen that was real!

If you look at the local paper you will see its size decreasing at an alarming rate, display ads are almost non-existent in the newspapers. Why? because there are less subscribers now than in the past, they prefer to read the paper online. For one thing its greener than tossing the paper in the trash when done reading it. Also they can log onto the internet at work and read the news, not to mention the advent of CNN.com and its peers which provide up to the minute news at a click of the mouse. Why pay for a subscription offline when you can get your content free online? Anyways back to online marketing, well with the decrease in the newspaper and the focus on reducing waste the internet and local marketing are fast catching on.

The retires dry cleaner mentioned in the article that she would reduce her marketing budget for local print marketing by 50% and move that into Online marketing and well she was right but more likely it should be a 25%-75% split.

Moving to a website and local marketing online will achieve a great deal more with a properly laid out website. Your website is one of the best tools for local online marketing. One of the things that alot of merchants forget when setting up a website is to include an downloadable coupon. This would be printable and low and behold it will bring the customers from your website to your business.

Include in your online marketing plans a feature of uploading your typical ?Television Commercial? to your website and to some of the video hosting sites like, YouTube. This will allow you to double or even triple the viewing of the commercial.

Even radio ads simply don't cut it these days. With satellite radio subscriptions growing by the year, the amount of people that can hear the ads on air are decreasing rapidly. Online is the way to go when it comes to marketing.

When you consider even a small bedroom community, if you have a customer base of 20,000 families. Figure 90% of my customers are middle to upper middle class. Further, assume a conservative 50% have computers at home or work and are online (most likely much more than that, but we will round down to be safe). That's 9,000 customers. Those 9,000 people that have computers are not likely to be looking at the traditional marketing information so its important to approach them where they are looking.