Marketing Tips and Wisdom

Articles and Other Writings

Rick Osmann

Marketing Tips and Wisdom

10 Marketing Tactics Under $10
By Al Lautenslager
October 03, 2006
Article originally published on Entrepreneur.com

         No marketing budget? No problem, with these 10 creative techniques for bringing in business. Sometimes it only takes a few dollars to make a marketing idea go a long way. If you’re looking for some new ideas, here are a few to consider. If one of these works, do it again. If it works a little, fix it or adjust it, and then do it again. If it doesn’t work, just try another one of these low-cost ideas. What do you have to lose when your tactic costs just $10?

1)     Instead of putting a 39-cent stamp on an envelope, put 39 1-cent stamps on the front of an envelope. One of the principles of direct mail is to stand out to get the attention of the receiver so your mail isn’t thrown away or ignored. Attention, interest, desire and action lead to a successful direct-mail program. And anything you can do to get attention increases the probability of action being taken. Best of all, in this case, you won’t even rack up any additional costs.

2)     Every month, give customers a chance to win a free lunch, compliments of your business. Everyone likes a chance to win things. An incentive like a $10 gift card for lunch at a local restaurant might be enough to influence a customer to order from you now, rather than later, or choose your business instead of your competition. You could also consider other offers, like a Starbucks or gas card. You’ll probably want to offer a full tank of gas, though, which would mean upping your price a little—a few gallons doesn’t sound all that appealing.

3)    Make a donation to charity for every purchase made during a particular month. If your orders average more than $100 each, donate $10 per order. If that doesn’t make sense for your prices, find another dollar amount that’s a good fit. Your donations will be well worth it if they accelerate orders or increase volume.

4)     Use lottery tickets as incentives for referrals. You could market your giveaway as a chance to win a million dollars (or whatever the grand prize is for the lottery in your area) for all referrals received during a particular period of time.

5)     Hold a contest for prospects and customers. How about “Guess the serial number on a $10 bill and it’s yours”? It’s not a lot of money, but people who stop by your place of business will have fun and will remember the contest. And if they win, they’ll tell people about it--even for just $10.

6)     If there’s still penny candy available, $10 will buy 1,000 pieces. If not, you can still get quite a bit for a small investment. Including candy in your invoices makes companies remember you. Typically, the people who handle accounts payable don’t get the attention buyers get, so even the least little bit of attention could go a long way in a company. Include two pieces--one for the receiver and one for the receiver to give away. This isn’t huge materially, but it’s the thought that counts.

7)     For $10, you can hire a student, a niece or nephew, or a friend’s teen to picket your business with a sign protesting something positive. It may sound silly, but having a picketer outside your place of business with a sign that reads something like, “We’re protesting good customer service at this location!” or “This place is full of nice people,” will get you noticed. You may even get coverage from the local media.

8)     On a toll road, pay the toll for the car behind you, and ask the toll collector to give your business card to the car’s driver and tell him or her you paid the toll. Sure, it’s a crapshoot, but you never know who might be on the road. And it’s a low-cost tactic that has imagination written all over it. If the toll is $0.50, you can do this 20 times for your $10 marketing budget. Chances are good that at least one or two of those 20 people will contact you.

9)     Show up in person with a cookie for the receptionist at a client or prospect’s office. The thing is, customers and prospects love attention. Drop in and visit a few of your customers and just say you’re stopping by to brighten their day. You can’t do this with 1,000 customers, but you can do it with 10 or 20. And sometimes those 10 or 20 can be enough to supply you with just the right orders to meet your monthly goal.

10)     Advertise using fliers. At an average cost of 2 cents each, $10 will buy 500 printed fliers. You can use them to canvass a targeted area, include them in packaging and delivered orders, hand them to walk-in customers or mail them to a targeted list. Better yet, get your fliers to 100 people, five times each, and the power of frequency will increase the probability of a response. But make sure you have the right message, the right offer and the right target. Also keep in mind that many printing or office-supply companies often offer specials on copy pricing. If you can’t find any specials, offer a fusion marketing arrangement to do a joint promotion with a printing supplier.

There you go--10 true guerrilla marketing examples that use time, energy and imagination instead of a lot of money. They work. And they can be used to build revenue to the point where your marketing efforts can be expanded in scale and scope to really ramp up your business.

Marketing Along the Path of Least Resistance
From C.J. Hayden

    Marketing is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. You have to find your own unique path, the one that works best for you and your business. To make marketing easy, that path needs to be the one where you will encounter the least resistance -- both from the marketplace and from inside yourself.

         Here are six steps to put you on the road to effortless marketing:

    Be willing to let go of struggle. You may believe you want marketing to be easier, but stop and think for a moment. Is there some part of you that is attached to making things difficult? Is there a secret payoff you get from trying so hard? Whenever you find yourself struggling about marketing, pause and ask yourself, "How could this be easy?"

    Market to the people you like, and who like you. A colleague once told me I would never earn a living marketing my services to solo entrepreneurs. "You have to focus on getting corporate clients," she said. "Then you can afford to work with entrepreneurs once in a while."

    Thank goodness I didn't listen to her. Maybe that was the formula that worked for HER business, but it's not where my heart was. One of the reasons I became self-employed was to spend more time working in non-corporate environments. If I had followed her advice, I would have failed miserably.

    Start with the people who are ready for your message. Yes, there is an entire population out there who would hire you if only you could make them understand what it is you offer and how you can help them. You can make educating those people part of your long-term mission. But in the meantime, you need to make the car payment.

    Seek out the customers who are most likely to already understand the value of what you do. If you are a reflexologist, you need to be speaking at the Whole Life Expo instead of at the Chamber of Commerce. If you offer a workshop on corporate ethics, network with members of Businesses for Social Responsibility instead of the Millionaires Circle.

    Choose marketing strategies that match who you are. I'll be the first to admit that I'm a mediocre cold caller. It just doesn't fit my personal style. So I focus on the strategies that are natural to me -- speaking, writing, and networking to build referrals. I've consistently maintained a full practice that way for over ten years now.

    One of my clients is also a business coach who targets solo entrepreneurs. Her business is identical to mine, but her personality is completely different. She loves to cold call, and has been able to fill her practice that way. Speaking and networking don't come naturally to her at all. It's a good thing she didn't try to copy me.

    Find people who can pay what you need to charge. If you persist in marketing to people who can't pay your fee, you will encounter not just resistance, but a brick wall. Don't give up because it seems that no one in the population you want to serve has any money. You have to look for the intersection between your chosen market and people who have enough resources to hire you.

    Colleagues have told me that people suffering from life-threatening illnesses, or recovering from substance abuse, can't or won't pay for professional coaching. But I have had several people in these situations as full-fee clients. The intersection is that they were also entrepreneurs. People say you can't make money working with teens, but I have had many clients who do -- as life coaches, private tutors, psychologists, and professional speakers. The intersection they found was teens with well-to-do parents, or schools with funds obtained from grants and corporate sponsors.

    Pay attention to how people respond to hearing about your business, whether or not you are marketing to them. A client of mine used to be a computer skills trainer. When she talked about her work, people nodded politely. But what she really wanted to do was teach public speaking. When she began to talk about that idea, her listeners got excited. The difference wasn't in the content of her message -- public speaking can be just as dry a topic as computer software. It was her own enthusiasm for the work that attracted such a positive response. If you really want your marketing to be effortless, you need to be in a business that excites YOU.

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