Kevin Lisota

What’s the hardest part about starting a new business? It’s not the product or business model. We figured that out long ago and continue to tweak it. It’s not our budget, though on days when we lose a deal and have a payroll or rent payment, it certainly isn’t fun. No, the hardest part we’ve found is simply getting the word out about our new business.

When I started the business, I was starry-eyed about the sort of marketing we would do. I had grand visions of our name being plastered on billboards, radio ads, buses, event sponsorships and the like. After a little bit of research, we were immediately humbled.

We’re a small, privately funded venture, so many of the big media outlets were simply beyond our meager budget.       

Since then, we’ve been on a relentless mission to find high and low-tech marketing ideas that won’t break the bank. We also tend to be a bit obsessive about data, so we needed ways to easily measure our marketing results. What we’ve ended up with is a mix of some ideas that are working great and others that turned out to be duds.

The Good

1. Find your feedback loop:  Our website is the key to get customers to contact us, but to make our website discoverable, we need dynamic content that raises our page rank in search engines. We’ve setup an interesting feedback loop that tells us pretty much exactly what content our customers are searching for, and then we write our new content to take advantage of those search terms.

For a few hundred bucks, we can purchase a whole slew of keywords from search engines that we think are relevant. After a few weeks, we take the keywords that perform well, combine them with the common search terms from our own web traffic, and then write more articles to support the popular keywords. Voila! This increases our web traffic every time.

2. Pretend you are a university professor:  I’ll admit it, I didn’t have the patience to continue on to graduate school, but I do like to teach people about our business. We’ve had great luck with hosting educational seminars for potential customers. Share your knowledge freely and without obligation or sales pitch, and the customers will gravitate to you.

3. Behave like a mattress store:  Driving by a mattress store always makes me chuckle. No other industry has so many enthusiastic headphone-sporting dancers who love wearing promotional sandwich boards. While we skip the dancers, we do have our own signs in front of homes for sale. It’s low tech, but we get a constant stream of calls and comments from people who notice our signs.

4. Our attempt at a Purple Cow:  We were inspired by Seth Godin’s book and continue to try and find ways to stand out from the crowd. During the heated political season, we found some very affordable radio advertising by inserting this spoof ad in the online stream of our local talk radio station. Based on the calls we received, it definitely got people to notice, though we probably underestimated people’s emotional reactions to mocking politicians.

5. I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener: Don’t underestimate how much your neighbors like hot dogs! We hosted an open house for neighboring businesses and gave away free hot dogs. After one hour, we were out of our 75 hot dogs and were deep in real estate conversations with five new customers. We also managed to anger the deli owner next door, so this was not a sustainable marketing plan!  

6. Become a media star: Every startup has a story to tell, often a more interesting story than large, established businesses, but getting the media to write about your business is the challenge. Identify the publications that are relevant to your geography and your particular business, and develop a relationship with the reporters. You are not going to win any friends by spamming them with press releases, but if you can offer up your expertise with a liberal dose of your personality and passion, you will get written about.

The Not So Good

1. Not many fingers doing the walking: I thought a small but visible yellow pages ad would definitely work. It is not terribly expensive for an ad that stays in someone's house for a year. Our ad is small, but it does stand out on the page. We are eight months in without a single call.

2. Good ‘ole print: Despite my nerdish tendencies, I do have a soft spot for the printed word. We’ve tried some high visibility advertising in magazines and newspapers with little success, and find that our budget simply doesn’t get us the repetitions that you need to be noticed in traditional print.

If you are in our shoes and trying to get the word out about your new business, tell your story at every possible opportunity. Be willing to experiment with all sorts of marketing, and be relentless about measuring your results. The process will be slow, but you will see steady progress if you keep at it.

Kevin Lisota is the President and Co-Founder of findwell. You can read more of his writings on the findwell blog. Opinions expressed in guest posts are those of their authors, and don't necessarily reflect the views of TechFlash or its staff.