Guest Column: A Frugal Marketing Success StoryInspiration! A success story from a fellow frugal marketer. (Shel Horowitz's Frugal Marketing Tip, February, 2001) By Dave Hunter, author and publisher of "Along the I-75" Persistence Pays Off: How I got Into Publishers Weekly--and Got Lots of Sales in The Bargain EDITOR'S NOTE: Once in a while, I will take a frugal guerrilla marketing success story as a guest tip. I think we can all use a dose of inspiration. I won't do them too often, because I know you want my usual stuff. For independent publishers, getting into Publisher's Weekly is huge! it's the most widely-read trade magazine in publishing, and it's wildly tilted toward BIIIG publishers. In fact, I kept Dave's story long enough that some of the information changed--Sorry, Dave! If you'd like to share your success story, feel free to e-mail me. --Shel And now, Dave Hunter in his own words: I returned from a three week business trip in late January and while catching up on my reading, found to my delight that our website had been held up as a shining example (complete with a colored screen shot) of what a support website for travel books should be. We have been submitting material to "Call for Information" for more than four years with no success (my book is too regional for national attention) - but we sure got them with our website. At the time of our success, we had it set up with a password; the whole procedure was designed with a devious bit of applied psychology (a.k.a. marketing!) in mind. When you first encountered the "toll booth" page on our site, it told you that the password is the four letter word in the top left corner of page 113 (this changes with each new annual edition). Now came the devious part . . . people who haven't bought the book learned that lurking behind the password is all sorts of neat information - current interstate gas prices, daily construction zone updates, real-time traffic reports, etc. - that they want without buying the book. To reach it, they must get the password (or hack their way in). Most people nipped down to their local bookstore and asked for it by name (builds lots of title recognition with bookstore staff). Once located, the non-purchaser checks out page 113, gets the password and then became seduced by the interesting material around it (eg. article on the Top Secret F-22 Raptor - the fighter plane of the future). Different color page bleeds ensure that a browser is going to then look at other sections . . . and before he/she knows it, the book is off to the cash register. My feedback is that we did a lot of bookstore browser conversions this way. Many people e-mailed me, with pride (confession?) and confessed to buying the book as a result of the password search. It's the ultimate compliment. It warms the cockles of my heart! In spite of this success, the entire site has been redesigned and I now have a media center as well as the regular I-75 material. None of it is password protected . . . I decided that from a marketing point of view it was better to let anybody get to the "good stuff" . . . they have to pass a promo for my book each time, though. Thank you reading this back issue of Shel Horowitz's Monthly Frugal Marketing Tips, published every month since May, 1997; please click here to view the complete archives, grouped by subject. Shel is an internationally known copywriter and marketing consultant, author of Grassroots Marketing Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and several other books, and creator of the Frugal Marketing web site. Please click here to contact Shel.
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