So this MySpace thing...

Righto, so you can't afford a website? Why not get a MySpace page happening!

Now I'm not on MySpace - but I keep hearing about it so much, I thought I should give it a cruise. And I find it's a great mish-mash of a personal website, personal blog, music sharing, social networking, advertising, interaction, etc. And pretty customisable, peopled by tres cool people. I even found two people's sites I knew within a few clicks...now I find that very impressive, especially since I'm not that cool!

So if you're a groovy young brand, or hip freelancer, that wants to interact, be a touch edgy, then make your first foray into MySpace. It's TOTALLY zero budget and you're bound to earn some cool points...

What I learned from a hairdresser...

...ok, a hairdresser with 35 years in the business and a chain of 18-odd successful salons!

Vouchers - one of my favourite, yet underutilised, retail marketing tools - are even better that I thought.

You see, I was running a "Zero Budget Marketing" seminar for Wella. And I said that the crew at Loyalty Magic had confirmed for me what I'd always suspected - that when you get given a gift voucher, you spend on average 5-8 times the value of the voucher.

And this is where the hairdresser of my story says - try 10-20 times. You seen, his chain is SuperCuts. They hand out $10 "cheques" that people can bring in to cash in on a haircut/colour/style/etc.

He said people regularly brought these in and spent close to $200 - and this was a COMMON occurence.

So for all those who doubt the value of giving away a little something for nothing, I offer this story. $10 to get $200 - and a guaranteed sale, not $10 that MIGHT bring you $200.

Retailers - go give away more gift vouchers!

10% off is music to a girl's ears

It amazes me the pavlovian dog response that hits me when I see the word "sale". Even if I'm not in the market for anything at all, I'm compelled to find out more, check out what bargain I might miss out on. Yes it's theoretically better to reward than discount - but it does get people shopping.

This little email ad from Red Balloon Days was a case in point. It's not a clothing label, nor is it even a consumer brand. It's a (mostly corporate) experiences and gift brand. So my first instinct would be to say don't use a retail marketing tool like discounting. Yet it got me to click...and I hardly think I'm the only one that will.

So perhaps taking a marketing hint from a completely different industry and trialling it isn't such a bad idea. Except for your reduced margin, using a cheap tool like email and limiting the time of the offer (eg. 24 hours) is a pretty cheap way to test an inexpensive little marketing tool.

Take the "bland" test (and get more specific)

If you are creating a piece of marketing material, I think you need to subject it to the "bland" test. If your headline or copy is so generic, it could work for another business (or even a competitor) - ditch it. Go back to the drawing board and make it specific enough that it's actually got a real connection with your business.

And don't just take my word for it.

Roy Morgan presented a paper in Prague at the 12th Worldwide Readership Research Symposium (try saying that quickly and three times in a row!).

At any rate, they showed the difference in Return on Investment on the two ads below.



The first headline says: When they change the way they make people, we'll change the way we make bread.

The second headline says: We've put fibre in Roman Meal for 75 years because people need fibre from day one.

Which do you think worked best?

In terms of persuasion performance, if the second ad returns $100,000, the ad on the
right returns $258,000. The second ad basically kicks butt over the first (and it helps that the headline actually matches the pic)

Being compelling is very cheap - but very hard!

You know, if you have a compelling enough marketing message and offer, it doesn't take much to have a big impact. So back on a bit of a recurring theme, but perhaps it's time to take a bit of a risk and put something out in the marketing that makes it hard for people not to want more.

I decided to check out futurist Faith Popcorn's site when doing some research and I think her extremely simple site - breaking many rules as it has no real information - starts with a hugely compelling message: if you could know everything about tomorrow, what would you do differently today?

Get's you thinking, doesn't it. It then just goes to a screen that says "Let's Talk" and provides her contact details. And if you were in the target market that could afford her services, I'm sure you would pick up the phone.

One simple question but you know immediately why you should call. I was impressed. How can you make your message this compelling?

Like a great SME (small business) marketing guide (for nicks)?

This is a totally zero budget post - a free marketing guide for small business I came across that's a great overview for non-marketers.

The Australian Information Industry Association has put together an SME marketing guide. Whilst it's a tech association, the vast majority of the info in the guide applies to all sorts of small business.

It also has a bunch of great case studies in it. Best of all, it's free. So download it today and build your marketing knowledge for nicks!


(And by the way - what a great way to build a database - giving away valuable free information - and idea for another post!)

Can't afford expensive database software? How's $30 a month sound?

I believe it's essential to have a customer & prospect database these days, in ANY type of business.

And it truly scares me how few businesses have one.

Outlook & excel really aren't enough, access can be clunky and decent CRM (customer relationship management) systems usually start at well over the $1,000 a seat.

When looking for a local email marketing provider for a client, I came across Vision6. They provide email and sms services. But they will also host your database. And you can add all the fields you want in this database, give people access to update their own details if you want, search it and access it from anywhere AND build lists to market to based on criteria. It even has some handy auto email functions.

So it occured to me, this is also a great zero budget database solution. For under 1000 records it's $30 a month - you can't get much cheaper than that!

I'm sure there's other providers out there offering something similar. So why not use this as an inexpensive, centrally accessible database tool - with the bonus that you can then use it on a fee per use option if you decide to use for email marketing.