Marketing on the Cheap: 7 Things You Can Learn From Offline Marketers

In the Internet Marketing community, we are constantly exposed to strategies and tactics to market your product/service online and drive traffic to your web site. I don’t mean to dismiss the value of any of these methods.  In fact we use most of them ourselves.

But, it almost makes you wonder... “How did people ever market before the Internet?” 

That question served as my jumping off point in developing this list. You see, it seems everybody is talking about how to increase your online marketing, but nobody ever talks about what you can do to increase your offline marketing with little or no funds.

So here it is: 7 Tried and true tactics for marketing on the cheap. Online or Off

Tip 1: Make yourself newsworthy

Getting a mention of your company in the right medium can do wonders for your career and your business. How much better do you think a book does when Oprah adds it to her book club?  For that fact, would there even be a Dr. Phil? I can only hope not.

The trick to this one is to make yourself interesting in some way.  Gary Vanderchuck from winelibrary.tv is the perfect example. He’d be the first to tell you that selling wine is not the most newsworthy of topics.  So how did he do it? His over-the-top personality and antics. Selling wine is not entertaining.  Getting Conan Obrien to eat grass and suck rocks on national TV to “prepare his palette” is.

Tip 2: Leveraging other peoples work and money

The Best Story Ever: David pwn3s Goliath - A startup I worked at called eRoom Technology used this tactic against Lotus, a painfully well funded corporation at the time.  eRoom had the better product, but Lotus had the marketing bucks.

Lotus was having a press conference on their new virtual collaboration package at a big industry event in Vegas. They paid handsomely to have all the top reporters flown in and lavished them will luxury perks and gifts. They had slick presentations, great location… the whole nine. eRoom’s stroke of genius was to buy the 4 giant banners that were located directly behind the speakers head (remember this was a an industry conference where they accept advertising sponsors). The next step was to have 100 beanie babies, wearing a tiny eRoom t-shirts, placed on each reporters chair immediately before the conference was to start.

The take away: Every last reporter talked about the eRoom coup as part of their Lotus article. Lotus paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the press conference, eRoom spent less than $5k. Brilliant.

The concept of the Mall is another the perfect example of this tactic in action.  Smaller stores move into a space with bigger “anchor” stores in hopes of enticing walk-by traffic that are headed to the anchor store.  Ever see what happens to a strip-mall when all the anchors leave? Not pretty.

As you can see, this rule does not have to be limited to physical location.  Find a synergistic company (preferably outside your industry, but serving same market) and find a way to piggyback on what they are doing anyway. Could be their location, could be their advertising program, could be their branding, could be their research. Find that angle and work it.

Tip 3: The Identity Kit and Ruthless Branding

The marketing maxim that a person needs to see something 6-7 times before it registers still holds true after all these years. But remember, just because you are on the internet does not mean that it does not apply everywhere.

Create an identity kit including business cards, letterhead, envelopes, fax templates, email signatures, folders. Make sure everything includes your logo, business name, and tagline if you have one. A nifty trick is to also use your logo as your profile picture for message boards and social media sites. A crucially important step is to make sure you are consistent offline and online. Same logo, same fonts, same color palette. When this works well, it will look like your company is EVERYWHERE. Better yet, it’s dirt cheap.

Tip 4: Keep your Customers Happy
 
This should be a no-brainer, but I see it happen time and time again with web-based businesses.  All of the emphasis is put on generating traffic and new leads, while current customers are left to wither and rot.  The truth is that keeping a customer is 5-7 times cheaper (that’s 700% kids) than acquiring a new one. Moreover, the probably of selling to an existing customer is 60-70% whereas to a new prospect it is 5-10% at best. 

What you need to do is put in a customer retention program if one does not already exist.  Communicate with them just as often as new prospects, and give away as much to them as you would to entice a new prospect. Just because it is cheaper to obtain a customer on the internet, does not make that customer worth less. 

Tip 5: Maximize referrals

The IM community is actually starting to make some great progress on this front. However, the problem I am still seeing is that the referrals are still taking place on the prospect side, not the customer side.  Again this ties into rule #4 Keep your customer happy.  For example, you offer a free eBook download and encourage that person to refer 5 friends for an additional bonus.  Until that first person buys something from you they are not a customer, they are still a prospect. 

The critical difference is: When a prospect refers another prospect, you still have to start from square one with the new lead.  When a customer refers a prospect, you have a 50% (yes FIFTY) percent higher chance of making a new sale. 

The take away: Spend AT LEAST as much time creating a referral program for current customers as you do for new leads. 

Tip 6: Form a Joint Venture

The term JV and JV Deal get thrown around a lot on the internet.  In most cases it actually refers to an affiliate program and not a true joint venture. A true Joint Venture is when both you and a partner pony up something to reach a common goal.

For example, say you sell investment real estate. You find that 99% of your customers need to have their property managed after the purchase. What’s the JV no brainer? You guessed it, a property manager. In this case you could form a JV with a property manager to split costs on advertising, office space, technology, or anything else that helps you reach a shared goal. 

Tip 7: Donate your time or stuff

Chances are that you are interested in something outside the internet or business world.  Why not find a way to explore a hobby while helping others and creating some good will towards your business.  The key emphasis on this is subtlety. You don’t want to be doing this only to push your business. Hopefully you should get something out of helping people in-and-of itself.  The goodwill is just a bonus.  Albeit a very strong one. 

A great example I saw recently was a realtor who bought a large passenger van and posted a giant picture of his noggin complete with logo, name, and phone number. He had originally bought the van for his customers use when they bought or sold a house with him (Was perfect for moving locally or when new buyers needed to pick up big things like a fridge, dryer, etc)  . This was a great idea itself.  What made it brilliant is when he read a newspaper article that a free after school program was shutting down because they no longer had the budget to ferry the kids from the school to the rec. center.  So what did he do?  He donated his van between the hours of 3-5 to the center. They did the driving and paid for the gas. As you can imagine he became an instant Rockstar in the community. 

Follow up: I spoke to him a year later. His already successful business was up 400% and he was able to cancel all other lead generation marketing. Genius.

To Download a copy of this article in .pdf format, please visit Evil Genius TV.