Customers and clients are the lifeblood of any small business. As a new business owner, you must do things to drive people to your business. Word of mouth is a great way to drum up business, but if you have not been around long enough to build a referral base, you need another source of customers. Advertising is quite simply the only way to drive new clients to your business. If all you had to do for the phone to magically begin to ring off the hook was open a business, everyone would be doing it. People who have been in business for some time can still benefit greatly from a marketing program. They may want to expand and may need extra sources of income to do so. Some existing business owners may want to focus on one of their primary goods or services. An effective marketing strategy can help them reach those goals. Some people are reluctant to advertise because it is not a tangible purchase. When you buy a printer, you end up with a machine in your office that can print out documents. When you cut a check to the utility company, it’s for the amount of energy your business consumed. Advertising is different. When you buy an ad in a newspaper, what are you really getting? How many people look at your advertisement? How many come right in for a purchase? How many visit you way down the road? How many totally ignore it? It’s extremely difficult to quantify what you’re getting when you purchase an ad. There are many ways to track your return, but this variable scares many business owners out of taking the advertising plunge. Worse yet, some people decide to just get their feet wet, which usually leads to weak results and the assumption that advertising doesn’t work. The more educated you are about marketing your type of business in your area, the more you can erase some of the uncertainty that comes with buying advertising. What works for a mattress dealer in Manhattan may not work for a dog groomer in a suburb of Minneapolis. (Taken from Mark Hoxie Book)