For startup business owners who are long on passion and short on cash, taking a chance on experimental marketing can offer the biggest customer finding bang for their buck.

What is experimental marketing? "Things may be experimental if you've never done them," says Alina Wheeler, a marketing consultant and author of marketing primer Brand Atlas: Branding Intelligence Made Visible. So by that definition, anything from hosting giveaways to using daily deal sites like Groupon or LivingSocial count, she says. But keep in mind that to find customers, originality also plays a role.

"An entrepreneur would be wise to identify an environment that's not cluttered -- where there can be a singular focus on your brand," says Wheeler. "At the end of the day everyone is dealing with scarce resources, so the best thing to do is be experimental."

We all know it takes money to make money, but is spending big bucks on advertising really worth the cost?

Most businesses stand to benefit from advertising, but many do it poorly. Few actually test or measure their results, and fewer still truly understand the numbers their advertising needs to generate to be profitable.

Of course, a certain degree of trial and error is to be expected when hammering out an optimal advertising strategy. But for start-up business owners who tend to have more limited means, making too many costly mistakes can be disastrous for business.

For this reason, referrals, which tend to offer the lowest cost per lead and highest customer retention rates, may be a beginner's best customer-finding strategy. Here are five ways to boost referrals:

You don’t need to produce your own videos to find customers on YouTube. Instead, try promoting your business in millions of other people’s videos with YouTube’s in-video and in-stream advertising. 

YouTube boasts over two billion daily video streams and a hundred million unique monthly users in the U.S. alone. It also offers the ability to narrow the options and target viewers using ad demographics, geography, language, interest categories, keywords and video-content categories. And you can target ads to individual videos and channels if you know exactly what your potential customers are watching.

There's variety on how you pay too. YouTube charges advertisers on a cost-per-thousand, or CPM, basis, or a cost-per-click basis. Some video ads can also be purchased on a cost-per-view basis.

No matter how you pay, to get the most bang for your buck consider these three basic options for placing your advertising inside the YouTube videos themselves.

Just when you thought American's love affair with their mobile phones couldn't get any closer. A recent study shows that an increasing number of mobile-device users -- a.k.a. would-be customers -- are taking advantage of geosocial and location-based check-in services such as Facebook Places, Gowalla and Foursquare.

One in five smartphone users currently use location-based "check-in" services on their phones, representing 16.7 million U.S. mobile subscribers, or about 7 percent of the nation's total mobile phone population, according to a recent study from comScore, a Reston, Va., audience measurement service.

That's quite a jump from the piddling 4 percent figure announced after the results of a Pew Research Center survey were released just last November. But for small business owners who've been looking to geolocation services to put them on the map in front of new customers, that growing propensity for check-ins is certainly welcome.

As entrepreneurs, it’s fair to say that many of us are fledglings when it comes to prioritizing prospects and scoring leads. We know, for instance, that collecting data from those who make inquiries about our products or services allows us to focus our attention on those prospects that are more likely to become customers. But actually doing it is another story.

Enter, Silverpop, an Atlanta-based email marketing-automation service, which offers six tips to kick your lead-scoring -- and customer finding -- efforts into high gear.

If your path to finding customers walks the line between online marketing and the human touch of one or more salespeople, you can increase the number of those touch points by linking your website and emails to the actions that directly involve your salespeople.

All you have to do is decide which of the following five actions are most likely to help your salespeople identify quality prospects and close the sale. Then, use a comprehensive service such as Agendize.com or one of the individual services listed below to install links that connect your salespeople to your customers through your website and email content.

Online retailers in the U.S. reaped an impressive $176 billion in sales last year, an 11 percent increase over 2009. That pretty much establishes Web retailing as a legitimate tactic that should command respect from those who market and sell their wares exclusively within a brick and mortar environment.

But a new study finds that while online sales continue to compete well with physical retail establishments, most online merchants believe that social media-related marketing does little in the way of lifting sales -- calling into question what if any benefits businesses actually derive from participating in social media.

Smart business owners find customers by placing their marketing messages where the most eyeballs are focused. And nowhere are there more eyeballs than on the screens of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

More than two thirds of the world’s population has a mobile subscription, and mobile users are highly active. Facebook recently reported statistics indicating that over half of its 500 million subscribers access Facebook from a mobile device and exhibit twice the activity level of non-mobile users. The time for mobile marketing is now.

Finding customers with mobile marketing involves either pulling people toward your messages or pushing your messages out. Here are 10 mobile-marketing channels that'll help your efforts: 

We're hearing an awful lot these days about daily-deal websites. Facebook just launched Deals, Groupon turned down a $6 billion buyout offer from Google and now has a presence in over 500 local markets, LivingSocial has raised more than $600 million in funding from the likes of Amazon and T. Rowe Price, and just last week the San Diego Union-Tribune -- in partnership with Mission Bay SportCenter -- pulled in more than $360,000 on a one-day deal offering: a week of kid's summer camp priced at $95 a pop.

But for finding customers, a new study reveals that less than 10 percent of consumers are actually influenced by online deals and offers when choosing one local business over another. CityGrid Media released that new factoid this week in its 2011 Online Consumer Behavior Study -- along with a plethora of data that should be of interest to marketers and anyone else responsible for lead generation.

Here are a few takeaways from the survey that will work for swaying customers:

Big businesses spend a lot of time and money trying to find new potential customers with test campaigns and by using demographic research, psychographic analysis and market research. Small businesses don't need a data crunching geek squad to identify and reach more qualified groups of customers, however. All you need is a marketing strategy that targets people in the following four groups and reaches them with the right media and message combination.

To start a business, you don't need financing, a website or business plan. All you need is a customer.

But even when it comes to the all-important task of acquiring those first customers, a new business is usually looking to save as much time and money as possible.

Buying a customer list can be expensive, so most small businesses look to build their own. The best way to do it? Get smart about networking, according to Sheryl Johnson, founder of Pittsburgh-based BD-PRo Marketing Solutions. Here are some of her tips for expanding a contact database.

This week I received a great marketing lesson in the form of a hand-written thank you card from my insurance agent. The card was thoughtful and sincere enough, but the timing could have been a lot better. The card was sent to beg me to come back in response to my decision to switch to another insurance provider.

At that point in our business relationship, the agent seemed willing to do almost anything to earn back my business. If only the agent had been willing to offer the same level of service in order to insure my continued patronage during my previous two years as a customer.

It can be easy for business owners to ignore their existing customers. After all, you've already won them, right? Not necessarily. Even current customers can become prospects again because the minute they complete a purchase, you'll want to lasso another. 

If landing leads is an art, knowing which prospects are more likely to turn into customers is a science. Here are a few vendors who've managed to develp tools that help you crack the code.

Each provider below offers marketing automation or revenue-performance management services -- a.k.a. customer relationship management tools -- that includes a lead management and lead scoring tool based on your website’s activity. So not only will these tools measurably contribute to the bottom line, they'll also accurately help you score more leads in less time -- giving you added opportunities to convert leads into paying customers.

The flooring business isn't what it used to be. But for Tom Wood, the president and CEO of Floor Coverings International, that's a good thing.

When the mortgage meltdown set in, the rate of new home construction plunged -- and Wood's floor-installation franchise business went with it. In 2009, FCI's sales sank 10 percent, while 16 of its 75 franchise locations went under.

"I remember vividly thinking, that we needed to conserve cash and do whatever we could to do to keep the lights on," says Wood. Although FCI continued to spend on Internet advertising and direct mail in local communities over the period, the return on investment started to get "brutal," he says. "We felt like we were throwing money down the drain, as customers weren’t spending."

Ask many fledgling entrepreneurs to describe their target demographic and you're more likely to hear a generalized response like: "Every business can use our product," rather than, "My demographic is IT managers with an annual budget of $5 million or more who are actively searching for a Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard solution."

Rarely is everyone in the market seeking your product or service. Given that, it's incumbent on you to score your leads.

Lead scoring is the process of ranking your leads according to their likeliness to purchase your product or service, which can be helpful for prioritizing your sales efforts. Let's say you've figured out that prospects who register for your webinar are more likely to become paying clients or customers than those who download a whitepaper from your website or sign up to receive e-newsletters, then you might ply more of your resources toward making a dynamite webinar and marketing it than you would otherwise.