Likely one of the hardest hurdles to overcome, especially for individuals who are just starting their own business, is the ability to think outside of the box when it comes to figuring out how to get new leads or customers to come and buy your products. The majority of new business start ups stick to the three primary advertising mediums that are the most obvious i.e. television, radio, and the newspaper. Once in a while you'll find a few entrepreneurs starting out that will try other marketing concepts like direct mail marketing, and perhaps some other technique for generating leads, but they often quit there - before going further - and expect the customers to come rolling through their doors.

If this is you, you are really missing the boat because while those methods are effective, it is just scraping the surface of what's available in advertising. If you're willing to listen for a few minutes, I'll show you several different ways you can bring new leads through your door which are quite different from the traditional methods that I’ve just mentioned above. I'm going to go little bit further than just making the claim that these other methods are there, I'm going to show you four ways that you can find the additional customers that you need.

1. Classified Ads

Yes classified ads: these are a really great tool that businesses have been using for years, and they still remain a truly powerful way to market your business and the products you are trying to sell. There are some really good reasons why you should be using classified ads. Besides the fact that they're cheap to run, they are also really great for testing any offers or ads that you have developed. If you select the right location to run your classified ads, they can potentially be put in front of thousands of readers. While a business can use classified ads to actually sell their products, I would recommend using them as a way to drive traffic to some of your more substantial sales messages, or as a means to get a potential buyer to make contact with your business.

Fast Action Tips:

• Placing a classified ad in a relevant magazine will have a lot more staying power than ads in newspapers, but you can expect to spend a bit more money for this exposure. However, they take longer to be placed so it’ll take longer to determine how effective the ad will be.

• Classified ads need headings that grab a readers’ attention.

• Classified ads need to be run consecutively for many days in order to determine their effectiveness and gain some traction.

• Do heavy experimentation with classified ads.

• Measure all of your results and be sure that you key code all of them

2. Leaflets

Leaflets work really well for marketing to those neighborhoods that you really have your sights focused on. They're quite similar the traditional door hanger, and do really well for generating leads. One of the most important components of the leaflet is to have a really good headline and an offer that is going to compel the individual to take action. It's never a good idea to have an overabundance of sales copy on the leaflet because people really don't want to read much, nor do you want to have a lot of fine print on it. These are really good for brand recognition, and if you plan on cold calling an area they work really well to warm up your target audience.

Fast Action Tips:

• If you can, find some volunteers or some civic groups that are willing to distribute your leaflets for you.

• Go through filled car parks and place them on cars as well as through front doors.

• Encourage your volunteers to distribute them to people by hand.

• Use different colours or key codes so that you can test and track the results of your leaflets.

• Make sure that you include a coupon so that people will be more inclined to give your business a try.

3. Free Exclusive Reports

Typically these free exclusive reports, or special reports, will be anywhere between three and 30 pages long, but it could potentially be more if you have that much to say. These special reports should contain information that people will consider to be valuable and feel that they would be benefiting from if they were to read it all the way through. You can make a free exclusive report about any subject you want. To give you an example, if you sell some variety of insurance, you could make a free exclusive report on ‘How to Shave 30% off Your Premiums’. The exclusive report would not necessarily provide all of the details on how to do that, but you can also include some sales copy worked into the content if you wish. Another good tactic is to follow-up on the free report by contacting them shortly after you provide them with the report.

Fast Action Tips:

• Make sure that you provide the information that the title of your free report states. People don't like to be duped into reading a bunch of sales material when they are promised something entirely different

• Make use of the classified ads that we talked about earlier in order to promote your free report. You might also want to give Yellow Pages, or some larger more prominent ads in magazines or newspapers a try.

• Don't provide a boring report. It must be exciting and strike a chord within the individual.

4. Telemarketing to Incoming Calls

It's important to realize that every call that your business receives is important - regardless of whether an individual is just looking for more information, or if they are looking to buy your product. Every savvy business owner understands the fact that these calls are important, and will make it a part of their policy to treat every phone call as a new opportunity for building a relationship with a new client. Try to get the caller to tell you how they found out about your business so you'll be able to track how well your different marketing techniques are working. Another great way to increase sales and better your customer service is to provide rewards for those employees who consistently create sales and/or get the contact information of the caller.

Fast Action Tips:

• Whenever you receive calls from your marketing efforts, you can quickly determine which of your marketing methods are returning the best results. Make sure that you track all of your different offers and calls associated with them, so that you know where to place more of your focus and crank up your marketing efforts.

• Develop a reward system for employees who consistently get the most contact details from the incoming calls that they receive, and deliver those rewards consistently.

• Make sure that your employees are fully aware of the information that you are hoping to get from each of the incoming calls: the only way that you can truly get great results from incoming calls is by having your employees completely trained in what you want.

• It's important to remember that gaining all of the contact details from a lead is just as important as finishing a sale.

Author Bio: Obi Orgnot: Founder and CEO, OrgNot Ltd. Author of the Exponential Growth Manual. As a social entrepreneur he helps small businesses to grow through his company’s advisory service.

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