451: Inexpensive Marketing Ideas For Small Business

My Business On Purpose

Inexpensive Marketing Ideas For Small Business

There is no love loss in my relationship with marketing.

If you ask any of the members of my Mastermind they would chuckle if you asked about my history with marketing. Their response would sound something like this, “he hates marketing.”

It’s true.

I don’t like things that feel ambiguous and cross-your-fingers-ish.

Marketing can feel like trying to find an undersized needle in an earth-sized haystack, in the dark, upside down, with sub-zero temperatures...all while wolves are chasing you and snipers are aiming in on you.

Two years ago we tried to take the shifting and unpredictable tide of marketing and put a system to it. I read the interesting book by Marcus Sheridan entitled They Ask You Answer (the second best marketing book I’ve read next to This Is Marketing by Seth Godin).

Sheridan makes a powerful (and yet obvious) point that customers prefer honestly providing direct responses to their biggest questions.

The title of this post for instance; Google told me that this is the title that many of you have searched in the past. I can answer this question based on our experience. Our answer may vary from other business owners... but it is how we see it from our angle.

If you go to our website at mybusinessonpurpose.com you will find that we answer the biggest question we receive directly on our homepage so as not to waste the time of business owners who are not a fit, and yet to solidify our offering for those business owners we are a perfect fit for.

In following Sheridan’s model we have created a unique and inexpensive content marketing strategy that adds loads of value to our existing clients, our future clients, and our existing team.

First, we ask each of our coaches to write one article per week between 500 and 800 words. The subject of the article is simply a response to a question that we received from clients during our coaching time the previous week.

I can hear some of you now, “I can’t write!” That is another battle for another time, but you can certainly talk, right? Of course, you can! Pretend that a client just asked you a question, turn your phone camera on and record your response and then go get it transcribed using a service like Rev.com. Voila! You have your article.

Second, we ask each of our coaches to use the article they wrote as the script for their video. Pretend you are a radio show that happens to do video recording. Download the Teleprompter app on your phone, press record, and read your script with a little life and enthusiasm.

Third, we send our article and video each week to a virtual team member who then edits both the article and video with some callout headlines and images.

These edited assets then become an amazing list of tools that both existing and future clients can draw value from.

From only one weekly article and video we are able to provide a YouTube video and Facebook Live video, a podcast episode, a LinkedIn article, a blog post, and a string of valuable social media posts with images.

It is an inexpensive marketing process for our business in terms of real dollars spent, although it costs each one of our coaches about two hours of time per week. With four coaches this process can provide up to twenty pieces of content per week that we can share with our network.

For us, we believe that our online media is air support to our ground game. The most effective form of marketing in our work with business owners (and most other businesses) is direct referral by word of mouth...that IS the ground game.

After being referred, the first place future clients will go to learn more about us is our online channels. With this inexpensive marketing idea, we make sure that we are adding credibility to the referral, and more importantly, adding value to our existing and future clients.

Don’t make excuses as to why this cannot or should not be done. Get started with this methodical, consistent, predictable, and inexpensive marketing idea, and maybe even your relationship with marketing could be redeemed like mine has been.