A recent report from the Direct Marketing Association predicts that business spending on direct mail spending is going to increase by one billion dollars in 2010. This may come as a surprise to those who thought that email was the advertising media of the future. Because many customers have no problem deleting anything in their inbox that comes from an unrecognized source, direct mail remains one of the best ways to actually get your message into your customers’ hands… if you follow a few simple rules. Here are five tips for getting the most out of every single mailing.

Direct mail should be branded. Everything that leaves your office should be part of your brand, from the color scheme to the presence of your unique logo design. Any deviation from this will confuse your customers and weaken your company immensely. If you don’t have a brand and a logo design, invest in that area before even considering direct mail as a marketing option.

Direct mail should be targeted. That is, only send mail to relevant customers, such as people in your geographical area or people who earn incomes in your target range. While many business owners have a marketing policy that more is better, sending direct mail to people who cannot afford your product or reach one of your locations in a short drive is both expensive and annoying. It only gives your logo design and brand negative connotations in the public eye. Spending time to thin out your direct mail list is not only a cheaper choice, but a more eco-friendly one as well.

Direct mail should have quality content. Modern customers are more sensitive than ever to advertising, but not in the way that advertisers would like. In a world filled with marketing, Americans are becoming more and more likely to disregard blatant advertising. This means that offering good content is the key to keeping your direct mail out of the recycling bin. Offer a few tips that are relevant to your product allows you to position your brand in a very different way.

Direct mail should be visually attractive. This doesn’t necessarily entail having a splashy, expensive, full color mailing. Make sure your mailing is well balanced, with key messages highlighted and easy to read. A few images can help, but the most important image to include is that of your professional logo design.

Direct mail should be trackable. The post office now offers an ‘Intelligent Mail’ barcode that allows bulk mailers to get information on when their mail is delivered and how customers respond. If this is not available in your area, include a coupon or another special offer on the mailing. This will allow you to see what areas and which types of customers are best responding to your direct mail, which will allow you to further refine any future marketing. It will also give you a heads-up on changes in your target audience and the relevance of your current marketing.

Even if your company doesn’t do business directly over its website, there are good reasons to use email marketing to brand your company and spread the word about your products and services. First, it’s inexpensive and makes it to the target with lightning speed. Second, many people check their email with much more regularity than they check their snail mail. Clearly this can be a great way of marketing your small business, but these few suggestions may help make this more successful.

Be targeted. Don’t send email to anyone who has not voluntarily opted in to your mailing list. This is not only rude, but in some cases illegal. Either way, it will do nothing for your small business brand. Send email only to people who have agreed to receive it and who are in your target audience.

Offer content. This doesn’t have to be long and drawn out; simply offer a few tips that are relevant both to the time of the year and to your business. Even a few lines may be enough to keep your message out of the trash, especially if you combine them with a catchy title. This content will reinforce your image as an expert in your field.

Offer news. Whether there is a new product line that you are particularly proud of or a special sale to celebrate some occasion, use every email as a method of offering new information that is relevant to your brand and your small business. Often, this will be even more effective than hard sell tactics, which brings me to the next suggestion…

Avoid hard sell tactics. People are flooded with these in almost every aspect of modern life, which has significantly cut the chances of response. More gentle, organics sales tactics work best with the modern customer. Simply tell them what you are offering and why they need it—no more, no less. Anything more will turn them off.

Offer a way to contact you. Better, offer several. Not only should the email be sent from your return address (so contacting you is a matter of pressing reply), you also should also give complete contact information including address and telephone number. This will not only improve your sales, but make you look more legitimate as well.

Be branded. Make sure your email communications, like all other communications, are harmonious with the brand image that you have worked so hard to cultivate. Include your logo design and all visual aspects of your brand in the logo. This will ensure that even if the customer doesn’t buy anything from you today, you are still building your brand.

Be considerate. Allow customers to opt off your list at any time. Also, avoid emailing more than once a month. Don’t flood your customers with marketing messages—it will only cheapen your message.

Email marketing can be very effective if you keep the actual marketing to a minimum and follow these few basic rules. This will give you a huge advantage in your market and allow you to communicate with your customer in a way that would otherwise be impossible.

2010 has brought new trends, both in marketing and among your customer base. Here are five ways that you can find marketing success for your small business in 2010.

Plan ahead. Take the time to evaluate the success of your marketing last year. What types of marketing were most successful? Which fell flat? Are you dealing with the same target audience that you planned for a year ago? Does your logo design and branding strategy still feel relevant? Now is the time to look at every aspect of your marketing. Some types of marketing may need less investment, others may need more, while some may need an entire change of perspective. Looking at this matter objectively before spending money or time in areas where it doesn’t matter. Remember the old adage: Failing to plan is planning to fail.

Be social. Social networking is more than a way for your teenage daughter to pass the weekend; it is a way that grownups and decision makers communicate and learn about the world. If you have a solid presence on one or two of the major social networking sites, your prospective customers will be exposed to your brand, your logo design, and your message on a regular basis in a natural way that is more credible than other forms of marketing.

Be more personal. Don’t be afraid to blog or post videos on YouTube. The more customers see and hear from you as a person with a voice and a name, the more they will want to buy from you. Make sure all communications are congruent with your brand and be sure to refer almost constantly to your business and prominently display your logo design. However, if you follow these simple rules there is virtually no way to go wrong when letting your customers get to know you and your small business.

Get in their phone. That is, have an application for cell phones that users can download onto their telephone. This gets your name and logo design into the customer’s life every time they make a phone call. It is getting easier and easier to find someone to write applications for the iPhone and/or other 3G telephones as the technology becomes commonplace. There is a considerable market in this skill, which means that there is no reason not to hire an expert if you decide that this is the way to go.

Hire an expert. Marketing professionals bring something to the table that few small business owners can match: years and even decades of seeing firsthand what works. Even a few short sessions with a marketing or branding professional are well within the smallest business budget, and in most cases you will get the money back many times over. You wouldn’t fix your own plumbing; why attempt a do-it-yourself job on something as important as your business’s success?

An HP survey recently examined small business owners and their marketing plans, looking for trends and changes. There were a few elements that, while not surprising to marketing consultants, may be interesting for small business owners who haven’t been following the changing times. Digital media is more important than ever to success in any field. Here is a short list of what your competition is doing to find success.

Blogs. In this survey, blogs were such an important part of marketing that they were part of the actual marketing plan. In fact, 16% of small business list blogs as a way to market themselves in the next two to three years. What does this mean for businesses that don’t blog? That they will be missing an invaluable and usually free way of communicating with their target customers. This is such an increasingly important factor that blogging consultants are becoming the business consultant of the future.

Websites. Over forty percent of small businesses maintain a website, even if this is not their primary mode of sales. Almost sixty percent feel that a website will be part of their marketing in the next two to three years. This makes the information superhighway just a little more crowded, which means that your website will have to be better designed than ever in order to stand out in the crowd. A poorly designed website gives the feeling that you are unprofessional in other areas.

SEO. Having more websites on the internet generally lowers your chances of popping up on the first few pages of a search. This means that business bloggers and website owners will have to take more care to court the search engines. A qualified web designer knows how to do this through careful word choices, tags, and other elements. These become more and more important as more website owners begrudgingly embrace search engine optimization. As in a race, if you don’t give your best you will be left behind.

Consultants. This was not a specific part of the survey, but the need for high quality consultants was implied throughout. No one can be an expert on every topic. Finding excellence in fields like graphic design, logo design, and website design requires specialized knowledge that can’t be learned from a book or seminar. As such, many of these small businesses will be hiring these consultants to design online and visual aspects of their brand. This is often cheaper in the long run because it frees the business owners to actually run the business rather than constantly tweaking details. Opening a small business is a steep learning curve as it is.

If you don’t have a blog and a business website, this should be a wakeup call. If you have a blog or a business website, now is the time to have them designed so you can reap maximum results. It’s difficult to survive in the small business world without these elements; with experts in your corner, your chances of success skyrocket.

Marketing to the affluent is different from marketing to any other group. These discriminating customers have been raised with different social values as well as exposure to some of the highest quality products the nation has to offer. This makes for a unique group of potential consumers, one that small business owners ignore at their own risk. Luckily, you can successfully market yourself to the wealthy in your community if you keep the following five tips in mind.

1. Be involved. Many wealthy people have pet causes that they contribute a significant amount of time and money to. They identify with people and brands that also concentrate on giving back to the community. If you share their values, especially this key one, they are very likely to patronize your business and recommend you to their peers, who most likely are affluent as well.

2. Offer opportunities to grow. Another key value of the affluent is a respect for education, including self education opportunities. Businesses that offer literature or classes on their subject that are presented as enriching and empowering will often find that their classes are full of wealthy people, who often will then feel a loyalty to the company and go out of their way to shop there.

3. Make the effort to establish yourself. Most affluent people prefer to deal with established businesses with a proven track record. While it can be difficult for a small business to produce this, especially early on, getting your name in publications and on the local media is one way of creating an aura of expertise. Another way to create this general feeling is by getting involved in local business organizations and even volunteering your time to local charities.

4. Market directly to them. The wealthy are less likely to choose businesses based on traditional marketing methods such as advertisements and flyers. Instead, they make their consumer decisions based on referrals from people they trust. Getting the word out about your business can be as simple as joining business associations or clubs in affluent areas where you can ‘casually’ mention your line of work to a variety of people who are likely to have influence in wealthier spheres. Another option is offering to give talks in your area of expertise to these organizations.

5. Offer quality. As stated above, the wealthy usually have spent their lives with access to high quality products. They known cheap or shoddy work when they see it, and certainly are not interested in these products. Adding the extra effort it takes to offer products that will meet their higher, more discerning standards is an essential part of marketing to the affluent. One way of doing this while still maintaining an attractive price point for other shoppers is by offering a premium line with added features and benefits.

As you can see, the affluent are not really much different from other consumers; they are merely more discerning and more likely to consider their peers’ opinions over traditional marketing messages. Armed with this knowledge, you can successfully reach out to a new market that can afford your services and products more than any other group.

Brand integration is a subject that many business owners talk about, but few feel they really control. This is because it is a rather abstract idea. However, you can gauge your brand integration by asking yourself the following five questions.

1. Do I have a professionally designed logo and brand? The first step to brand integration is having a brand that is strong enough to be the basis of your business. You will need to have not just a professional logo design—although this is very important—but values, a personality, and even a promise. These ideas will form the basis of your brand integration.

2. Do your products and services fall within the scope of your brand? If your brand promises a certain type of goods, do not offer anything that is not overtly and obviously in line with this. Doing so weakens your brand by implying that your brand promise is at least a little disingenuous. While some items seem fun or like they would be an ‘easy sell’, they will hurt your business over the long run is they end up undermining your viability but damaging your brand image.

3. Do your physical locations and materials match your brand? This is not just about fonts and color schemes, either. Your displays, stationary, and even your shopping bags need to be recognizable parts of your brand. This will make your business feel more professional and also help customers take the crucial first step of associating your brand with your actual brick and mortar location.

4. Does employee behavior reflect your brand? You must interact with everyone you meet in a way that is integrated with your brand identity. Dress and appearance suddenly become very important because they are communicating the details that set you apart from the competition. If you haven’t already, it is time to begin implementing employee policies about how phones should be answered as well as how and when customers should be interacted with. This may seem like micromanaging, but it is in actuality an essential part of creating a consistent brand experience that is identifiable with your overall brand. Retail giants such as Macy’s train employees to wear certain clothing and use certain phrases in their customer interactions; your company must have similar training in order to get the same brand integration.

5. Does your customer experience match your brand promise? This is the last and often most important part of brand integration. Your brand promise gives customers an idea of what to expect when interacting with your company. Because your customer usually is initiating contact with your company based on this promise, breaking it will only disappoint and annoy them. Make sure your customers entire experience with your company is congruent with your brand promise, and you will have achieved complete brand integration.

Do these questions seem difficult to answer? If so, your brand likely needs more fine tuning. If you find yourself answering no to any of these questions, it is time to talk to a branding consultant about how you can improve your brand integration.