There is no question that advertising is a basic essential: it can tell everybody in a town/business sector what you do and how well it works. Right now is a good time to talk to local newspapers because the recession with its double whammy on property and motors has hit them very hard. Negotiate a long-term deal now and you will get the best rates you'll ever find.

Yellow Pages is an important advertising vehicle. The two key categories are ‘T-shirt printers' and ‘embroidery services'. Printwear businesses in general make a basic mistake in Yellow Pages ads: they list products and features, they don't sell benefits. There are typically dozens of printwear businesses in a book, so you need to give them a good reason to call you. Remember that when someone calls you and says they found you in Yellow Pages, it's a racing certainty that they will be phoning at least two others. Depending on the level of competition in your book I would recommend trying to dominate the section: this is one ad that lasts a long time it's worth investing in it.

The key problem advertising business to business in a local area is that there simply are few magazines that focus on a local area which are business orientated and when they do exist they tend to be poor. In my experience business sections in local evening dailies are similarly poor. A few areas are lucky enough to have a morning newspaper with a local focus such as Western Daily Press and Yorkshire Post and these have good local business coverage. If you've got one in your catchment area, use it.

Revisit your website and be honest with yourself. Is it generating business and if not what changes will turn that round? Have a look at competitors' sites and aim to be better. It is the nature of websites that they can include everything, plus a kitchen sink or two and many, many do. I am increasingly of the view that this isn't appropriate. I suggest that a small number of key issues dealt with plus a regularly changing special offer works better. Changing the site regularly is one of the virtues of web marketing. I have seen some sites - for big companies, too - which clearly have not been updated for years. What value is a business getting from that? On the point of simplicity, note that website designers are totally used to all the various whistles, bells and navigation processes of sites but your customers probably aren't.

E-mailing customers is free to broadband users and dead easy to do. But so many e-mail messages I get or see are deathly dull and boring. Worse they often repeat the same message time and again. This is an unnecessary failure. Printwear is full of variety - styles, colours, uses - the works and if you've got success stories to tell, client endorsements to show then you've got yet further relevant variations available. I have a contact who e-mails me on average three times a week. Each one is different. I've never bought from him - yet, but I certainly wouldn't unsubscribe because what he's sending has the occasional nugget in it.

Which brings us to direct mail a supposedly easy medium, one that most people do badly and fail to get full advantage. There are three elements to improving your outcomes and they're none of them easy. First make your mailer distinctive and interesting; the recipient probably gets twenty a week and you need to stand out. This can be done with a letter but a printed mailer works better. You have to build your list and check the names on it regularly. You have to follow up by phone - they are not going to phone you - and you have do this within three days or your message will have been forgotten.

Allow a personal anecdote. A client had previously mailed 2500 businesses from a bought list. The mailer was OK but not as good as it could have been. They did no follow-up. They got one client from the exercise. His turnover, never mind margin, was less than the cost of the stamps. When they repeated the process with the above hard graft included, they turned a list of 1000 into 92 presentations, resulting in 12 clients, some of whom they still traded with after ten years.

PR is what you really want because it's free isn't it? No, it's not. It involves lots of your time to do it properly. Most businesses make the mistake of writing press releases that are essentially an advert not a story. "Super Shirts have been in business for 30 years in Anytown" is a story; "Super Shirts have just printed their millionth t-shirt" is a story; "Super Shirts are experts at print and embroidery" is an advert. However, there would be every reason to include all the skills, expertise and range as reasons for the million shirts or the longevity of the business.

Events and stunts are what get you the biggest result from PR. The people who built a copy of Big Ben out of bales of straw in a field in Cheshire had coverage in national dailies. Copy the thinking. As an example, you could invite the local population to turn up in their printwear (an event with photographer on hand). If you could have all 92 league football clubs featured, that would be national stuff. All 50 local clubs would work locally. Be creative, talk to the local newspapers.

How hard do you use printwear? I make no apology for repeating for the nth time that your business should actively publicise itself with printwear. Nobody in the industry should be embarrassed to wear a shirt that says, in essence, "Throw your name around just like this."

I would also suggest that a local research exercise could be highly effective. For instance, you could print up a small number of shirts for a client, perhaps free, or at cost, and have them worn around the town over a weekend by staff (yours and theirs), each of them recording where they went and estimating how many people were in each place and therefore had the opportunity to see the message (OTS).

The effect of this would be that you could quote solid numbers and extrapolate from those numbers the total number of likely OTS per shirt purchased over its estimated life. Businesses, especially marketing people, crave statistics to support their purchasing decisions. Having that basic research also looks highly professional.

Three points: don't fiddle the figures (one person in the shirt at Wembley is not 100,000 OTS); write down the structure you used to come up with your results and give it to clients; record the data your wearers come up with and offer to show them. I believe that a small amount of product plus some beer vouchers for the wearers would prove a very successful investment.

For your own purposes, you could also research your customers to find out where to spend your money. Do they read the local paper(s)? Which one? What sections? How much direct mail do they get and do they respond to it? What trade magazines do they read? Etc, etc. Make it simple so responding is a five minute e-mail.

A final element of the mix is selling. Most businesses think their sales weakness is closing. Sales trainers will tell you that the biggest failures are not asking enough questions, not listening carefully and talking too much. So many sales people act like the pub bore: they talk about themselves constantly, showing little apparent interest in what the customer wants or why he wants it. The 80/20 rule applies - you should aim to do 20% of the talking and 80% of the listening. I will own up. I talk too much in a presentation but I'm working on it.

Which brings us back to balancing up the marketing mix. Sorry, there is no magic formula - we'd all be stinking rich if there were. The best advice is to try the options and then focus your spend where it works best.

If a particular newspaper or section works better than others, concentrate on it. If a special offer brings in customers, repeat it and come up with variants of the same idea. If you find a business sector where you're successful, target everyone inside a large radius - when you hit gold, dig right through the mountain.

Paul Clapham is a marketing expert with more than 25 years' experience covering a broad range of business sectors and a full spread of marketing disciplines. He works with small, medium and large companies alike to increase their profitability through marketing. Tel: 01843 296555.

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