You can make advertisements for things you’re working on!
Maybe this seems obvious, but on several occasions it hasn’t occurred to me that I have a lot of marketing options available, and that some would be totally worth it. Attention (and printing) is a lot cheaper than you might think.
Examples
Printing out leaflets, handing them out to people
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I stood outside my secondary school and advertised my tutoring business on an open evening. This led to at least two new clients.
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I printed out 1,000 flyers for a matchmaking event and put them into student’s pigeon holes.
- In total, the time cost of doing the advertising was a couple of hours.
- So the printing costs (£30 for ~1,000 A5 leaflets) are practically nothing
- I spent ages shopping around the first time I bought flyers, chasing not very large savings. To help you avoid that, you could just go with Solopress, which is what I now use - it seems to be pretty good on price and delivery speed.
Promoting posts on Facebook
- You can get in the thousands of views and hundreds of clicks from a £10 order-of-magnitude budget
- On the other hand, you have to deal with the Facebook bureaucracy :(
Putting up posters
- Print things out in A3, get them laminated (60p per page where I did it in Oxford; practically free!)
- Oxford has a thing of having lots of noticeboards with ads for concerts out on the streets.
I didn’t see any reason why these couldn’t have my adverts too.
- Apparently colleges own the noticeboards, so I just went and bought my own from B&Q (£5 each, fits 3 A3 posters).
- Along with a staple gun from Amazon (£12, they’re super cool and I would totally read an industrial history post on the evolution of staplers), I could then put up my own ads wherever I wanted.
Assorted thoughts
One thing I forgot to do the first time I ran an advertising campaign was doing tracking of where people reached the sign-up form from. This was quite annoying, because it meant I had no idea of whether word-of-mouth, or posters, or messaging in group chats was actually the most effective. It depends a bit on what you’re funneling people towards, but I think there are tracking methods for most things.
This is the other reason I think doing advertising is valuable - you get to see a company’s perspective. Of course businesses want to collect metrics on how I reached their website; probably it’s very frustrating to them that I withold that from them (with ClearURLs). The ease with which you can do Facebook targeting is slightly unnerving.
“Isn’t advertising just a classic Moloch problem?” I’m torn on this. On one hand, the more and leaflets in my pigeon hole, and posters on the streets, and newsletters in my inbox, the less attention I pay to any particular one. Equally, how else do you get the word out about a great new product? I think I have more sympathy now with startup founders who seem to constantly talk about what they’re building. If you’re convinced that it is a solution to a real problem (and my impression is that you’ve got to be, if you want to find success), then it’s hardly surprising that you bring it up in conversation whenever there’s the chance.