Recently I’ve seen people take a fresh look at their advertising strategy. For example, Yellow Pages ads are expensive: $600 a month for a quarter-page ad. People ask me, “Am I really getting the best return on my advertising investment with this ad?”

I tell them, “That depends. If your customers always look for you in the phone book, maybe you are. But if more and more people are looking for you online, you’re getting less and less return on that Yellow Pages investment.”

One way to learn how your customers find you is to ask them, either formally, with a simple questionnaire, or informally, in conversation. If you don’t get many positive responses from your Yellow Pages ad, consider a new strategy: reduce the size of your ad, or shrink it to just a line listing, and invest the money you have left over in your Internet presence.

To make the Internet work, you need to know your audience. Do a little research into who your potential new customers are, and what makes them tick, before investing in an online presence. You might find yourself turning more and more to the web for communicating with existing customers and gaining new ones.

What strategies do you use to get the word out about your company's products and services? And how do you measure the success rate of your efforts?