Marketing Courses - 2 powerful ideas from the real world

Here are two quick tips that could double or even triple your business. These tips will open your eyes on where to find tons of powerful money-making, customer-grabbing ideas for your own business. Are you considering marketing courses to help you understand how to grow your business? Well, loads of marketing courses are available in school and online. Unfortunately, most get stuck at the 4-Ps – product, price, place and promotion – without truly addressing strategy, the part that delivers the highest payoff. Great strategies often use unconventional tools not addressed in conventional marketing courses. Marketing courses typically focus on conventional marketing – and omit some of the most powerful promotional strategies and techniques. And there are loads of examples of unconventional approaches that have delivered great success – many that could easily be adapted for a smaller business. Let’s start with selling to and through groups. Chrysler’s distinctive PT Cruiser car was launched this way, and without any advertising. Instead, they gave away a free PT Cruisers for-a-year to high school senior-class presidents at 200 of the wealthier high-schools in the nation. In marketing, Class Presidents are referred to as “opinion-leaders” meaning their opinion carries a lot of weight with many other people. By lending the class presidents their cars for a year, these distinctively shaped, plum colored vehicles got parked in high school parking lots for thousands of students and teachers to see. And these most-popular-kids-in-school – the class presidents -- would be personally showing them off to all their friends and to anyone else they could find. “Hey Mr. Johnson. Look what Chrysler gave me to drive for a year!” This guerilla strategy helped turn the PT Cruiser into one of the most successful product launches in automotive history. And this strategy could easily be adapted for a smaller business. Local restaurants and shops could give coupons offering FREE samples and free meals – to local sports teams, boy scouts, Rotary and other groups. By concentrating on groups they’d be able to get visitors who tell and invite their friends – at a tiny cost. And concentrating on groups could be hugely lucrative for manufacturers as well. Back in 1937, ABC Baking helped the Girl Scouts greatly expand their fundraising efforts and success by becoming the first manufacturer of Girl Scout Cookies. By getting this massive group – the Girl Scouts – to sell their cookies, ABC Bakeries has become hugely successful. And by the way, today more than 175 million boxes of Girl Scout Cookies are sold each year. So, are there some interesting groups that you could sell or distribute your products or services through – someone you may not have considered? Here’s another idea. I’m not the greatest fan of services like Groupon and Living Social that distribute heavy-discount coupons to an online crowd – because they tend to attract customers who ONLY respond if you offer a super-deep-discount. But Staples, the office supplies chain, uses a discounting technique to launch its new stores that could easily be copied by local businesses. They distribute to local homes and businesses a FREE $10 coupon – with no strings attached. They understand that they’re in the repeat-visit business – where if they can get people to visit just once, there’s a good chance they’ll come back over and over again. If you have a local business, you could easily copy this strategy. You could drop-off coupons to local neighborhoods and businesses – offering $10 off anything in your store or restaurant – no strings attached. Of course, make sure you specify that no cash will be given, but that otherwise, visitors will get $10 off anything – no strings attached. The point is this, there are tons of great ideas out there – that you could use to build your own business, by simply adapting the successful techniques of others.