The days of big television ads and full page newspaper ads that drive thousands of customers to your booming business are over (Unless you have an unlimited amount of funding). The Internet and our socially connected world have changed business and marketing forever and it makes me so happy! It has never been easier to get the word out about your business and show people why they should become your customers. And for little to no money if you get creative enough.
I got my first life lesson about marketing the day I opened my first business. Finding funds, setting up the business structure, filing legal documents, getting adequate insurance and all the other logistical things involved in starting this business were easy. But when I found myself with open doors but sitting on only $400 in my bank and business bills coming due, “nervous” doesn’t come close to what I was feeling. I knew that marketing was important so I took the first $1000 that I made and paid an “advertising expert” to put our money to good use. This generated Zero customers. So hey, marketing takes time right? So the second $1000 went to an advertising piece that went out to 10,000 subscribers. It too produced Zero customers. Funds were now getting very low. We did have customers from word of mouth but not enough to sustain the business. At this point I did the only thing I thought I could, I spend an hour designing a flyer and got 200 of them printed off. I spent the next few hours woefully passing them out in a small college town. Numbers skyrocketed a few days later and I was completely amazed. A cheap flyer got us customers?! $2000 dollars…. Zero Customers. But, $10 worth of a creative marketing piece,that some “experts” would laugh at, produced dozens of customers. I estimate that we earned around $1000 from those first flyers.
The flyers themselves were not what produced the customers. It was the way that they were passed out. I knocked on each door, talked with each person that answered the door and invited them to come to our business and check it out. That, is Creative Marketing. We do many types of advertising in our companies now but the best way, that we have found, to market that first business is still passing out flyers. Getting creative in your advertising will go a long way. You can find low cost, fun and easy to do methods to bring tens of thousands of dollars to your bottom line. This is where you have to understand your business and experiment. Some marketing books and gurus will tell you specific things to do in order to get customers. I am a little different. I have had and have run multiple companies and each one has to be treated differently. Each one has a different type of customer and it is different to get the word out to different people. This is where the fun comes in! How can you market to the most people for the least amount of money? Figure it out!