Post your best rogue marketing tips
The owner of an online bookstore asks for advice on attracting college students as customers in "Rogue marketing to Generation Facebook." FSB's Anne Fisher turns to Dotster founder George DeCarlo for advice. He suggests guerrilla marketing strategies such as buying a low-cost ad on Facebook. What cheap and unconventional techniques have you used to spread the word about your business? Post a comment here.
From Brian Javeline, Pompano Beach, FL We go to trade shows, and place "custom tickets" under the doors of all the hotel rooms to come to our exclusive presentation, along with top of the line speciality coffees and breakfast snacks. This did wonders to attract our first investors who liked that we marketed "out of the box". Now we have created TheContractorShow.com to educate the contractor who prefers to see & listen as opposed to read endless pages of text on a website. Nice article. Brian and the team at MyOnlineToolbox.com
From Dale Sturdevant (Marketing Manager, Samscreen Inc.) Conklin, NY One of the best ways I have seen is thru sponsorship of “professional” fraternities on campuses. At the University of Buffalo, for example, Pi Sigma Epsilon (PSE) is a marketing fraternity who markets places in the community, such as the off-campus bookstore, in return for cost and experience. The results have been awesome to say the least. I would highly recommend getting involved in a similar way in the markets you desire to reach.
As far as Facebook, I would not recommend this at all, most college students simply ignore them and you would be wasting your time and money.
From Tom Klein, Atlanta, GA We have a whole website of marketing and growth strategies at feed growth!. Many are free and just require some imagination.
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A cool Facebook app with some humor, sex or other entertainment value might work better than advertising on Facebook. You can also try creating a community of women in your town on facebook.
Also, in your efforts, it makes sense to take Victoria's Secret head on (without inviting legal liability of course). That would make you larger than yourself. Use PR. College Magazines would definitely be amenable to your PR. Break into the tightly knit Sorority networks and use some of them as your models and give them free publicity.
Do realize that the cost of production is almost nothing compared with the cost of mass marketing. So try reaching out to women by giving away free samples (at least a 1000 of them) at Tupperware parties or local fashion shows. Try the flexible pricing that radiohead tried. The word about this kinda pricing itself would spread like a wildfire. Nonetheless, you gotta make sure that your customers won't get habituated to paying what they like.