Can you find a subscription model?

The best marketing is marketing that's built in from the beginning. It's not an afterthought, not working out how to sell something AFTER it's developed.

Smart marketing is considered AT THE BEGINNING of a product or service life-cycle.

One of the most clever of marketing models - and thus sales models - is the subscription model. Why? Because you only need to "sell" once, but the sales keep coming in over months or, hopefully, years.

It's a pricing related concept, and pricing sometimes feels like the poorest of marketing cousins, but that doesn't mean it should be ignored.

Very profitable businesses are built on subscription models, from insurance to banking to utilities to media to professional services. So why not try and tap into this for your business? There is no reason it can't work for many more sectors, if only they thought about it how to apply it.

Don't believe me? If it can work for PET FOOD and EMERGENCY SUPPLIES, then it can work for a whole LOT of products and services. Go on, think about it.

Looking for cost savings isn't just for small business

Sometimes the assumption with "zero budget" marketing is that it's only for new / start up / tiny businesses. But every day huge businesses are looking for ways to cut their spend, wherever they can, if it's not delivering results OR if they have come across a smarter way to approach a marketing challenge.

In January of this year, the Procter & Gamble CEO advised Wall Street he was scaling back his company's $10 billion annual ad budget (mostly in traditional media) to take advantage of free impressions offered by Facebook in the form of Likes and status updates. Yes, you read it right, $10 billion!

General Motors has recently followed suit in cutting their Facebook spend. That's two out of America's top three biggest advertisers. More on this here.

The two decisions were made for different reasons (GM isn't convinced Facebook ads are effective; P&G was seeking free media efficiencies) but they're linked.

It appears to be dawning on some businesses budgets that if your marketing content is interesting enough - engaging enough - you don't NEED to advertise on Facebook. Advertising on Facebook is can be free, if you can create something compelling enough to go viral. It goes back to ensuring your product, service - or marketing message - is remarkable.

Or put simply - stop shouting, start engaging with your market.