Cheap And Easy Recession Marketing Techniques
*Send out an e-mail newsletter. Even if you have a small bricks-and-mortar business, you should be collecting the e-mail address of every customer who walks through your door.
That way you can send them a regular newsletter with special offers, special events, coupons, and more.
“Your newsletter will keep your best customers coming back again and again,” says Tribby. “You can send your newsletter with cheap software like Get Response, which for only $17 per month Early to Rise uses to send e-mail to more than 440,000 subscribers. Or you can set up a new account with free e-mail services like Yahoo or Gmail to send messages to your list of customers.”
* Try your hand at online public relations. If you have a new product coming out, you should announce the news online. Write an informative press release with plenty of “contact” info that leads back to your own website or business. But because not too many people will be interested in reading only about your business, be sure to link your “news” with a hot topic of the day. It could be something that’s been in the news or that is controversial in your industry. Then submit it to online press release sites like PRWeb.com or Free-press-release.com.
For example, Tribby reports that she had the good fortune to interview Newt Gingrich in March 2007. Immediately after the interview, ETR posted a press release to several online press distribution services. It also uploaded comments about the interview to news-aggregating services, blogs, and political forums (with a back-link to the release posted in its Investors Daily Edge archive).
“Within the weeks following the initial interview, website visits and traffic ranking more than doubled and conversion also showed a spike,” says Tribby. “Three months later, the release was still being picked up by the media and through syndication… and the Investors Daily Edge website was enjoying residual traffic and back-links from this effort.”
* Hold teleconferences (a.k.a. teleseminars). Anybody can pick up a telephone and start talking. And that’s the key to using teleconferences to promote your business. It works like this: You find an expert in your industry to interview over the phone, you arrange a number for your customers to call in to hear the interview either for free or a modest fee, you offer another product to your customers during the call, and you record the call (which you can sell later).
“Essentially, you could have hundreds, or even thousands, of your customers listening in to your marketing message for minimal cost,” says Tribby. “My own company does teleconferences that cost less than $1 per attendee to produce. We actually had one that brought in $330,000.”
* Participate in joint ventures. Leverage your relationships with other, likeminded businesses in your niche or in related industries through joint ventures. Each JV is different, but it basically involves working together to promote each other’s products, with each side taking a split of the profit. It’s a great way to accelerate the growth of a business without spending much money.
“When joint venturing, look for strong partners, businesses that have skills or resources you lack,” advises Tribby. “Make sure each side’s contribution is equal and decided in advance. Make agreements simple, but put them in writing. The idea is to create joint ventures that are easy to maintain, financially lucrative, and long-lasting.
“Agora Inc., the ‘parent’ company of Early to Rise, grew its business from $1 million to $60 million primarily through joint ventures,” she adds. “It partnered with outside investment writers to publish financial newsletters and grow each publication’s subscriber list.”
* Use pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Services like Google AdWords offer a great low-cost way to advertise online. The best part is that your ads are targeted to Web surfers who are looking for products or services just like yours. You can even target your ads to specific geographic areas—perfect for bricks-and-mortar businesses.
In PPC advertising you pay only when someone clicks on your ad on the results page of Google. And your ads, which are three lines with a headline and your URL, show up only when someone is searching for keywords you have designated for your ad. You bid on these keywords, which should be terms that you think your target market is searching for. Because you bid and control how much you spend, you can limit your investment to as much or as little as you’d like.
“The key to success with PPC is testing,” notes Tribby. “You have to change your headlines, copy, and offer until you find the combination that brings in sales.”
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