Creativity and Marketing

I was talking to a friend who owns Pointe Pest Control in Chicago, Illinois.

He shared an experience that teaches one of the most important rules to good marketing.

Kyle is an avid baseball fan.  So when he and his partners started their pest control company five years ago, they found a little league baseball team to sponsor and put their company name on the back of the kids’ jerseys.

It turns out it was useless for advertising purposes.  Not a single sale came from sponsoring that team.

Later they had an invitation to come to a school and educate the kids about bugs.  So they took coloring books to the school and taught all about bugs.

Their coloring books had a call to action – they had a coupon for their pest control services in the back of the coloring book.  Six new customers resulted.

They still were doing a community service, but instead of recreation they focused on education.

Baseball doesn’t have much to do with bugs and certainly doesn’t have anything to do with pest control.

Here is another example of what not to do: The Houston Texans NFL team plays in Reliant Stadium.  Reliant is a utility company operating only in Texas.  They put their name on a stadium that gets national exposure but can’t add customers outside of Texas.

Your best marketing adds value to your community and has a call to action – an invitation to purchase your product or join your email list or something else that puts them in your potential customer pool.

The creativity comes in seeing how you can relate your value proposition (what you sell) to your community contribution (what you give away for free).

When you can give away (or deeply discount) something valuable in order to sell something more valuable, you win and so does your customer.

Tags: Community Involvement, Creativity, Marketing Plan

This entry was posted on April 15, 2010 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Case Studies, Marketing Plan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.