The other night (after a very long week I hasten to add) my husband and I went to Prezzo, the Italian Restaurant Chain. Prezzo is a company that I really admire in terms of marketing, because they really have it spot on.

Granted they have a huge marketing team and probably a large budget to boot, but there are some things that they do really well that you can implement in your business for free.

So what do they do?

Firstly, they know that people love a bargain and they want to get people into their restaurants. So what they have done is provided vouchers and have literally put their vouchers onto every voucher website they can find out there. I guarantee you that if you do a search for Prezzo vouchers, you’ll find them easily.

These vouchers vary from buy a main course for a £1 to two main courses for £12 and a number of other ones, but they’ve tested them to see what works and keep rotating these. This is fantastic because if you’re looking to go out for dinner, don’t want to spend a fortune and like a bargain, you’ll definitely be attracted to Prezzos.

But – you can’t just get these vouchers. Oh no! You have to enter your details into the voucher system and you get sent a voucher by email or text. Again, this is great marketing – Prezzos not only know exactly who has got a voucher, they know who has used it and they have their contact details.

So, guess what they do when they have this information – they contact you via email or text to let you know that they’ve just released a new voucher and you may want to go to Prezzos again. After all, they know you’ve already been there once don’t they because they’ve tracked your use of the voucher. So, it stands to reason that you might go again.

But that’s not all.

On top of this, they also use social networking extremely well particularly Facebook. Because they’ve got your contact details and they can email you, they naturally want you to go over to their Facebook page, so they can find out more about you and start to build a relationship with you.

So, they’ll email you and let you know about their Facebook Page. They’ll encourage you to go over there because they’ll say things like "If we get 500,000 fans by 3pm this afternoon, we’ll release a new voucher" or last time they gave away 5 free iPad2s and published the names of the winners via Facebook.

They’ve now not only got email as a way to communicate with you, but also Facebook too!

Then, they also do something else that’s really clever – they will send you the voucher codes via text too. Yes, that sounds like it’s being convenient to you doesn’t it, but what they’re really after is your mobile number, because guess what, if you give them this, they’ve got another way to communicate with you.

And because they are experts at pulling their marketing strategy together, they make full use of these three ways they’ve got to communicate with you – no pressure, just useful, helpful vouchers which you can use when you next visit Prezzo. Which, let’s face it is exactly what they want you do to.

Do you see how this is a strategy? I bet it costs thousands to put that one together, but the methods they’re using are effectively free. So, your challenge today (if you choose to accept it) is to go out there and look at some of the big companies who are using good marketing methods and put them in place in your business and then see what happens. I bet you’ll be very pleasantly surprised!