Want to Spend Less On Marketing? 10 Cheap Marketing Tricks to Know

Want to Spend Less On Marketing? 10 Cheap Marketing Tricks to Know

by Robert Clough

Are there any marketing tricks and free advertising ideas that work?

Contrary to common knowledge, mostly all traditional marketing tricks work. Sure, we’ve had to change things because of the internet, but the same basic principles are still there.

Read on for ten marketing tricks that are tried, tested, proven and will still work to get you more sales.

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1. The Classic UpSell

Upsells are still a great way to sell services on the Internet. Why do you think services do things like this: 10 units for $40, or 20 units for $50.

What they are doing is up-selling. They draw you in with the cheaper price that looks fantastic on comparison websites and then they ask you to spend just a little bit more for what appears to be a great deal.

The deal only appears great in comparison to the first price. If the $50 offer was on comparison websites and review websites, it wouldn’t look so great.

2. Sample Services and Measure Your Conversions

There are some internet marketing services that have very affordable plans that enable you to test the services. If the affordable package converts into sales, then start paying for their bigger plans and scale up as your conversions increase. There is no need to spend thousands right off on marketing services when you can try them out a little in a small way beforehand.

3. Free Referrals from Customers

Exploit customer pride. On the “sale completed” page, display links that say, “Show off your new XXXXX to your friend.” The links post to the user’s social media accounts.

When you send the email receipt, put the same offer on there. People will share their purchase just to show off, which will encourage others to buy from you.

4. Pay After Sales Referrals

These sorts of referrals will cost you money, but only after you’ve made a sale. The referral system is explained in detail in this referral article, but here is the gist. Let’s call your customer “Person A” and your customer’s friend is “Person B.”

You offer “Person A” store credit if they get “Person B” to buy from you. “Person A” offers “Person B” a link. If “Person B” uses the link, then “Person B” gets a special referral discount, and “Person A” gets their store credit.

5. Guest Posting on Other Websites

It is true that guest posting doesn’t have the search engine power that it used to have, but not only is it still important, it is darn-near vital to websites that wish to scale upwards.

No matter how hard you try to stimulate interest, the search engines will not reward your website over the long-term unless people are linking to you, and you need backlinks from top-quality content, such as the content you write for guest posts.

The effect of them may not be obvious right away, but in two or three years they will earn you an unshakable position at the top of the search engine results pages.

6. Create a Blogger Website

The great thing about a Blogger website is that you can put shorter articles, image-heavy articles, and media-heavy articles on it without having to pay a penny, especially if you use the BlogSpot domain name that they offer for free.

You can stimulate interest with your Blogger blog and provide extra traffic to your website. It’s essentially free advertising.

7. New Customer Offers

If your customers have to sign up for an account in order to buy from you, then a new customer discount is almost mandatory. If you’re making people go through extra steps just so they can buy from you, then they need a reward as an incentive.

8. Price Cuts (Not Special Offers)

A note about being original is made in the conclusion, and it relates to this point. Most websites show a price and then show how it has been slashed in a limited-time offer. Few people show their price and then show that it was lowered permanently.

They do not offer permanent price reductions because they think it is a tired old marketing trick that is overused by grocery stores. However, genuine price reduction marketing is used so infrequently on websites that it is almost original.

9. Frequent Buyer Marketing Tricks

Some of the best PC and console games have users leveling up their characters and they will grind for hours to turn their character from a mercenary to a god-like assassin. So popular is the concept that many Millennials are open to gamification when buying. Turn your frequent-buyer discounts into a leveling system.

For example, each time your users make a purchase, it is recorded on their account. More than ten purchases and they become level two account holders who are entitled to 5% discounts on future purchases. They keep buying until they reach 25 sales, at which point they are level three account holders, and level three account holders are entitled to a 10% discount on all future purchases.

10. Sell the Sausage Not the Sizzle

Before getting to the conclusion, a final note on how you market your services and products. Most people think the line “Sell the sizzle, not the steak” is a fantastic line; it certainly seems to make a lot of sense. However, it is terrible advice.

People who are selling the sizzle are the ones who have the worst steaks. Sell the product/service in the plainest and most simple terms possible.

This notion seems to be lost on people, and it has been lost on people for years. Even the Muppet movie made fun of people trying to sell the sizzle. In “The Muppets Take Manhattan” (1984), the marketing team are coming up with all sorts of slogans for Ocean Breeze soap and are failing, and Kermit takes the marketing world by storm with the tag line, “Ocean Breeze Soap, It gets you clean.”

Mark Joyner wrote a whole book on the subject called, “The Irresistible Offer” which proves how keeping it simple is the most effective way to sell.

Stop Trying to Be Original

We humans have a very odd form of GroupThink, that is almost a cultural Zeitgeist Think, and “originality” can be used as a classic example. Whenever you ask somebody to come up with something original, they come up with something outlandish, something very different, something bold or overt.

This notion of originality is so common that it is not even close to original. It is like the young man trying what he thinks is a brand new approach of insult comedy in order to attract a woman, only to discover she hears the same “original” material so often that she longs for the guy who walks up and simply says hello.

What does this have to do with advertising ideas and marketing tricks? You may have noticed that almost all of the tricks listed in this article are pretty tried and tested. There is nothing striking or unique, and that is because being original doesn’t get you sales.

When you think of tricks, do not think of something new or original. Think of something that has worked before and will work again (like the marketing tricks listed in this article).

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