You know your marketing is making an impact when someone threatens to have you arrested.
Here's a lesson in lateral thinking and how powerful it is to have zero marketing budget. Very useful for many MSPs.
Jump in the DeLorean with me... it's 2002 and I'm running a music radio station in the city of Peterborough, UK.
In the years before I joined, the station took a battering from its competitors. And my brief was to build up the audience again.
Just to test me, the large media group that owned the station gave me this budget...
Zero dollars? Thanks for nothing, guys
NOW I can see this was a blessing. It taught me the power of bootstrapping. Where we had to do our marketing using only the existing resources in the station. I learned so many valuable business lessons.
The way you market a radio station is different from the way you market an MSP.
You need an easy direct marketing strategy, such as my 3 step lead generation system:
- Build audiences
- Grow relationships
- Convert relationships
For radio marketing 20+ years ago it was about getting the name and address out there. The name of the station, the type of music it played and the FM frequency.
So we did car stickers and had a couple of promotional vehicles. But I couldn't afford billboards or any kind of advertising. Yet I wanted to dominate the city.
Then one day, someone on my team came up with the most brilliant idea ever.
We were discussing how dirty the pavements (aka sidewalks) were in our city, and how they needed a good jet washing (aka pressure washing).
One colleague joked "maybe we should clean them"... then another said "what if we DID clean them, but used a template so it left behind our logo on the street?"
🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩 🤩
Today this has a name - clean advertising - here's an example I found online...
The logo is the only bit that's been cleaned
Clever, right? And the internet agrees it's legal, at least here in the UK.
But when we did this all over the city in 2002, the local council had a different idea. They went... beserk! Perhaps because we'd shown everyone how dirty the streets were.
I received a series of daily angry phone calls. One council officer even threatened to send the police to arrest me for vandalism.
Hilarious!! I didn't take those threats seriously
(unlike the time the Diplomatic Protection Police were going to arrest me for a radio publicity stunt we did at an embassy... but that's a story of total stupidity best saved for another day).
And to complete the story loop, yes the audience grew. This stunt kickstarted the best 2 years of my radio career. Including winning a Sony Award, the UK radio equivalent of an Oscar.
How can this story help your MSP?
As I said at the start, this is a lesson in lateral thinking and how powerful it is to have zero marketing budget.
You don't need money to market your MSP. You just need a desire to get new clients, some ideas, and a little time to implement.
To help, here are 6 bootstrap marketing ideas for MSPs.
