Marketing against all odds

I was talking with a business owner last week, and he was giving me a sob story about how he can’t afford to market properly even though he really wants to. Below is a summary of our conversation…

First off, I explained to him that if he really wanted to, finding dollars for marketing would be easy. I know what kind of vehicle he drives…

But I said that if he didn’t want to divert dollars from more important things, (his BMW), then he needed to get creative and plan on putting some work in. As they say, you invest Time or Money, but you always have one. So since it was time, I told him he needed to get writing. Send out press releases to all the local media, as well as any trade publication that he could find. He also needed to guest blog on some blogs in his niche.

Simple enough… Then we talked about using a tool like Twitter to communicate to past customers… But I told him just spewing info wasn’t enough, he also needed to seek out people with a problem on Twitter and help solve them. By doing this he would get more interest and more followers.

Finally I told him to find a conference where a lot of potential customers would be (he’s in the B2B field), and then he needed to book the biggest suite he could find at the host hotel, and have a networking event every night.

Ok, so I know the last one cost some money, but with a quick search online I found a suite for 249$ per night for 3 nights. He couldn’t even buy a decent sized ad in his favorite trade magazine for that.

I told him to make friends with local liquor store, and make his room the networking center. It wouldn’t be easy, but he could make a ton of contacts in a short time.

So what can you do that is different than just throwing up some ads and hoping?

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