Results of 7 Forms of Advertising – Forecasting 50

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We tracked that we did seven different forms of advertising in the last decade or so and there’s no question that one of the seven specifically has put us on the Inc 5000 list three of the last four years. I’m going to go into some detail on that one. But here’s the thing.

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Both prepaid advertising and postpaid are excellent methods of advertising. There is a difference and that is, and it sounds somewhat sarcastic, is one of them, you prepay into a platform, a system, if you will, and then you kind of sort of hope and pray it works. And if you hit the right vein in certain prepaid advertising, whether it be, say, radio, billboards, magazine ads, pay-per-click, some of them are just truly explosive.

(0:54 – 2:16)
However, for the most part, and again, we used to do a ton of prepaid advertising, for the most part, to a degree, they’re cost-effective. They’re not very scalable in most cases, unless it’s a national situation, but they work, you know, they work. However, postpay advertising, as you’ll see here, at least in our space, in our case, as this is a case study of our company, postpay advertising was explosive, incredibly scalable, where the others, as you’ll see in a second, were not.

So some forms of postpay advertising would be using affiliates, commission-only sales reps, JV partnerships, paying out referral bonuses if people sent us business. So there’s a very big difference between prepaid and postpaid. What exactly did we do the last decade or so? What methods did we use? What were the numbers? How much did we put in? What exact results did we get out? And I think, even though this is our company, I think you can take the lessons here and the platforms and just scale them into your industry, your business.

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I think you’ll have no problem doing that. So our two companies have two completely different audiences. One is an audience that’s hands-on and they aggressively are looking for more leads for their company.

(2:30 – 2:59)
And the second one is completely hands-off. The first thing that we did is we started doing trade shows. Okay, so we went and pulled a Seth Godin and Seth Godin, who I believe is the greatest living marketer of our era right now, says, if you want to sell something, you go fishing where the fish are, right? So I think most of us know that you can go to Florida, the Caymans, and you can charter a boat and they will guarantee you a catch.

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And how do they guarantee a catch? The first thing they buy once they buy their boat, it’s not fishing rods and fishing lures. No, they buy fish finders. Because if they don’t have the best state of the art fish finder and can immediately race to where the fish are, there’s no point in putting your pole in the water.

So learning from the best, learning from Seth Godin, we knew, hey, we got a very interesting product set here. We have a very interesting audience with specific needs. They want leads, they want this.

We knew there are groups of people looking for leads that would hang out in certain places, certain business expos. Then we also knew there’s certain audiences that want hands-off, just good returns. They can buy a franchise, they can put a manager in play.

(3:45 – 4:07)
They want to run their other company, but they want a second, third, fourth revenue stream. So what did we do? We listened to Seth Godin, we put a booth and we would spend three to five thousand dollars on the booth plus airfare. So this advertising medium of trade shows, our numbers after two years were $5,100 per trade show.