Marketing as Dating: let's hook up and exchange money for services rendered

lot of people I talk to are in dark places right now. They see excess office furniture and the people who used it carted out on dollies and they panic. Belt tightening can be inevitable. Even the parades of former co-workers dead-man-walking out the front door seems understandable to a degree.

Hands down the most common concern I hear from people contemplating the jump to freelance work or even just sideline freelance work is how to make contacts. Networking is creepy and makes stalkers of us all. Yesterday I heard an analogy that changed the way I think about networking for business contacts. It was a dating analogy, which blew my mind. Dating is all about prettying yourself up and making as many impressions if you can till someone gives you the time of day. It's so obvious.

Be a good listener

The dating scene seems a little quiet out there, doesn't it? Before the economopocalypse, everyone was shouting from every direction and a dollar spent on advertising was worth a dollar. It's no breaking news that many companies have shrunk or collapsed their marketing budgets lately, or as I now look at it, every other guy at the party voluntarily contracted larengitus. It's an unusal opportunity to shove that better looking guy off his feet and steal market share while your competition sits mute and forgotten. I'd say a dollar is just plain worth more when it doesn't have to work as hard.

You can't be afraid to be a hustler

I'm not proud of this next part, but it's only because the looks bad when using the dating analogy. If your client base shrinks by the numbers due to their own internal budgeting, you don't kick them to the curb; you cheat on them. Same analogy about marketing dollars, now is a great time to mad hustle for more clients. And not just regular clients. Consider married clients too. Some clients might get turned on by the aggressive swagger of an upstart leveraging against their AOR's more conservative, respectful stance.

Grow the relationship organically

All that furniture and deadwood wasn't bringing in clients; self-promotion and sales efforts do. A plant won't grow if the leaves all shrink. It needs to grow new leaves. The leaves in this horticultral analogy are one-off projects to help keep client money flowing. Now is the time to propose brave new areas of branding and promoting businesses, now that social media has removed some of the financial hurdles of traditional media. Presenting creative strategies and aligning partners on a project basis, like bringing a squirrel out of a bush with a peanut is what will grow those leaves.

Try, try again

When you're trying to woo someone and they turn you down flat, you don't crawl back in your car and leave, you step up and try someone else. I always tell the story clubbing with an old friend; it was late and everyone wanted to go but before he'd leave he ran out and hit on about fourteen women, struck out fourteen times, and we were off. He believed in the numbers game, and so should you.

On the surface of it, everything I've said follows the rules of common sense, but I believe people need to hear it some times. Getting noticed is the first step to getting laid. I mean, paid.

Marketing your Fight Club: easier than you think

Fight Club has a fantastic "exclusive product offering". It's the only business that offers torn ligaments and abrasion as part of a satisfactory customer experience. The first two rules of Fight Club (you do not talk about Fight Club) make it hard to market, but is it impossible? Let's explore how simple and inexpensive marketing techniques can make your customer experience more profitable and exciting.

First things first, know your client

You know why they come. They had a tough day and they want to snap a tibia to take the edge off, but what else do you know about them? A good marketer takes the time to talk to their target and understand their needs and desires. You would be surprised how often the feedback you get from patrons can inspire and spark an idea that shapes your entire marketing approach.

The simple gift of swag

You might think key chains and t-shirts don't add any real value to your brand, but if your brand has a founding myth, a sense of community, or any kind of tribal initiation, your target audience would likely see these items as a symbol of pride or ritual or fellowship. Just because you might not wear an "I went to Fight Club and all I got was this dislocated jaw" trucker hat doesn't mean someone else wouldn't. Now try to think about more strategic offerings and how you might partner them to differ costs: a carrying case for collecting your teeth at the end of the night brought to you by a local Dentist's office as an example.

Strategic partnering

Whether you approach a national brand like Band-Aid or a local Reconstructive Surgeon, consider what you each bring to the table and how you might cross-promote. Consider partner-branding ideas, and don't be afraid to be creative. Maybe it's a crushed eye-socket, and maybe it's Maybelline. Here's a simple creative exercise to get your thinking outside of the box. Draw the human body (a handy reference here), and indicate an injury to any part of it. Now make a list of every product or service that could benefit from the associative repair of those injuries.

The classic black eye = sunglasses, make up, long brimmed hats, halloween masks

Promotional ideas

So the rules of Fight Club pretty well kills brand advertising and obvious word-of-mouth strategies. This does not mean you cannot market within your niche audience. A promotion of the "$10,000 Separated Clavicle Challenge" sponsored by your local HMO is a great way to generate excitement and trial while offsetting the cost by associative branding. The HMO picks up the tab while you put a map to their clinic on the back of every entry slip. Be creative.

Social media

Fish where the fish are. Nothing spreads a message more effectively and inexpensively than a carefully crafted social media platform. Consider the viral potential of Twitter as a great example. In previous stories I've shown how Twitter has the power to unite a niche crowd into a localized spending frenzy.

@nucklelicious will be handing out hairline fractures in the Mill St. Sharky's Grill basement after 11pm

Bearing in mind the frown put upon open discussion of Fight Club, you can consider a cross media platform like YouTube to share videos or Flickr to gallery images and to help bond your community. Budget permitting, you might talk to a web developer highly adept at social media to creating your own moderated FightBook social network. Many platforms such as YouTube and FaceBook can essentially be bought as a package and customized these days.

On a long enough timline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero, unless you prepare and plan ahead. The first two rules of Fight Club make it hard to market, but not impossible. With a little imagination and guts, even the most inexperienced operator can turn a satisfactory customer experience into a fantastic customer experience!

[author note: I found the ceramic punching mug here]

Suggested reading is Bertrand Cesvet's "Conversational Capital" to change the way you see the customer experience.

Self Promotion: looking for work in all the wrong places

I had lunch today with a guy looking to jump ship and freelance to the shores of independence. Stop me if you've heard this before:

"I'm not an account rep. I love working with people, but I'm not the big sales guy who's going to be landing clients. How do I do it?"

His concern is the lack of a thing I call: successmanship. Don't confuse it with "gift of gab", because this rabbit hole runs much deeper. I already have a grandiose Hail Mary one-stop-shop solution, but I'll return to that at the end. As I pointed out in a previous article, one of the most overlooked sad facts of freelancing is the day you throw your name on that shingle, you now wear every hat of a traditional agency, and you better make them all look good. You want to be a freelance marketer? Your first job is to prove you can market yourself. In a perfect world, the quality of your work turns will turn into an endless stream of positive word-of-mouth and you'll be carried into retirement on the shoulders of your admiring client base. Back here on Earth, we all need help.

The tried and true paths

I know people who've tried the direct mail route, the PR route, and cold calling, and all met with varying degrees of failure. Direct mail gets a glance and 99% of it becomes recycling. PR is good, but again, no guarantee of hitting your bullseye target and generating a real lead, and cold calling is a form of torture for most people. I'll be addressing the need for a good elevator pitch in a future entry, but for now, I'm just going to address the tongue-tied horror that befalls the best of us when trying to pan for gold in a disinterested, faceless caller. Cold calling is essentially telemarketing. All pitch. No foreplay. You hate doing it, and they hate hearing it. Time to get out there for a more organic conversation.

Networking schmetworking

You can certainly find your share of "networking groups" through LinkedIn, but the non-obvious downside is you're mostly meeting and greeting with, that's right, other people looking for clients and not actual clients. Picture a real world model of a sex chat room (is anyone a girl here?) That being said, I think they're a good thing if for nothing else than blunt honest discussions with your peers about their experience finding and schmoozing clients. I look at a networking deal as an opportunity to learn a lot and earn even less.

Dealing with dry-mouthed forked-tongue syndrome

There are plenty of books on the art of schmoozing, none of which I've read, so none of which I can recommend. What I can say is that conversing is easy, schmoozing is hard. Most people have a hard time shoe-horning an agenda into an otherwise well-meaning conversation without being tongue-tied and derailed by their awkward discomfort and guilt. You can quiet the pain of these artificial discussions by lowering your expectations. Lose the stressed-out attitude that every conversation needs to end with a signature on the dotted line. You'll live longer. You have to remember, everyone you meet is potentially three people away from someone you want to know, so don't focus on big wigs, and don't cram a hard pitch into every conversation. Leave off with a "I'd like to talk to you again some time". Meet everyone you can. It's the little people that can more influential than you know. There is a good article here on additional techniques.

How would Ghandi schmooze?

It's likely he would just be nice. It all comes down to finding out how you might be able to help someone with their needs by being an observant listener, being nice, and being helpful. This could even take the form of advising someone that they don't need your services at that time. If you remember my previous article about the benefits of giving away the cow's milk for free, you'll know how well being helpful without the expectation of a reward can work to your benefit. This kind of transparent honesty builds a trust that will carry your good reputation into the future. You're showing people how smart you are without telling them how smart you are. They'll figure out how they can best use you.

And without further ado; the solution to our woes

If you're a new business developer, drop me a line. Here's my elevator pitch.

You work for an agency creating new client leads. It takes time and effort and expense, and not every client is going to fit your agency's needs. I propose recooperating some of your expense by proposing to these clients that although your agency is not the appropriate fit for their needs, having a pool of trusted and recommended freelancers on call is one way to keep the relationship alive. It shows your interest in their needs, and the goodwill generated may one day be returned when their business has grown to a level more lucrative to your firm. And the best part? It wouldn't be inappropirate to collect a referal fee from your freelancer.

Entrepreneurial Idea: Get People off their Asses and right back on their Asses

There was a Thunderdome-style Econompocalyptic melee of the survivors to decide who got my chair when my last full time job went south. All those seats and computers just gathering dust. There's got to be a lightbulb joke about how many people are finding themselves displaced from their offices these days. What a waste.

Then I read Springwise's article on an online marketplace for desk space in the UK that practically begs to come to life here in North American urban business centres. Email me if you're on board.

Desk Space Genie uses a simple online real estate business model to allow a) people with empty office space, and b) people with asses to find each other. Companies with empty desk space, which is all the rage these days, post beautiful pictures of wood floors and tall ceilings, their availability, and ammenities like a rental site, then monetize the space as soon as a qualified applicant shows up with a banker's box full of stuff and the cash. The leasees gain the legitimacy of actual office space and a reason to shower and dress in the morning again.

Freelancing isn't always easy, and people often realize they miss the separation of work and home life, the daily banter of living individuals and the legitimacy of a bonafide office address. Companies realize they also miss the energy and banter of living people and see rentals and sublets as an additional revenue stream. The UK model offers broadband, utilities and security as part of a flat monthly fee. It's also a great way to situate yourself into a network (read: into networking situations) for client and customer alike.

Who wants to help me write that lightbulb joke?