The Really Good Deals

Several friends that are entrepreneurs have commented over the years that marketing is the hardest part about launching a business. How do you let interested people know about your product or service?

How do you get people to win-win with you on your business offering? The Really Good Deal?

We've talked about this problem and how all the avenues for reaching people have been over-used and abused.  Consider the following channels of communication and the resulting status:

1. Television ads. We automatically tune them out, or change the channel. Some use the Internet to download commercial-free shows and get no ads at all.
2. Radio ads. Same for television, but even worse. For music, many would rather pay 99 cents rather than listen to ads.
3. Web browsing. Pop-ups, pop-unders, wiggly animations, “Hello, you've been automatically selected to receive a Walmart gift card” coming over your speaker. All very annoying. People who click on these things usually do it by accident. Google did us all a big favor by making ads text based and relevant to the content on the page being viewed.
4. Mail. The Post Office type. Junk Mail. Now-a-days they are scanned for coupons and then tossed. Very little is even seen.
5. Email. Spam. Want to make people angry? Just send them an unsolicited email. So many of these unsolicited emails have been sent that are scams that use of this channel for legitimate offers that are really wanted cannot get through. There is a whole industry of companies that manage email and block Spam. Now even mail from friends gets marked as Spam.
6. Social networking. Facebook opened a new channel of communication that piggy-backs on email. Who would mark a “poke” from a friend as Spam? Want to play Pirates and Ninjas? If I am any indication of how this is going, I've turned off all notifications and rarely visit Facebook now. I currently have 180 “requests” in my inbox to try this app, join this group, indicate my relationship to someone. Ugh.
7. Billboards. Unsightly clutter on the sides of the highways. Even if there is something interesting, by the time you're back home where you can do something about it, it has been forgotten and replaced by some other attention-getting distraction.
8. Flyers. A paper delivered to your door or stuck under your windshield wiper. The problem with these is similar in that it is a shotgun blast where a single BB would do. 1 out of 10,000 find the offer interesting. Now all flyers are tossed without being read.

Where does that leave us? The last and greatest two methods of communication, with the greatest trust are the following:

• Web Search. People, knowing what they want, use Google or some other search engine to search for that item and then research to see customer reviews, etc. These searches are divided into categories as for where the best place to look is.

Books – Amazon,
Music – Walmart online,
Antiques or novelties – Ebay,
Apartments or stuff in metropolitan areas – Craigslist.
You get the idea.

• Word-of-Mouth. Personal relationship recommendations mean more than all of them put together. Something has to be a pretty good if friends talk about it with friends.

Speaking to these last two points, how does a person buy or sell used items within a locality like a neighborhood or city? That's where localized classified ads come in. That's where NearbyItems.com (Free Classified Ads) provides a service using these last two points of web search and word-of-mouth and helps people buy and sell personally. It can be heavy like a couch or anvil, not worth the shipping cost. It can be items that move fast, like cell phones, coins, and jewelry. It can be items you must see in person, like dogs, cars, or guns. It can be free items.

For the really good deals, you have to go and find them. They are the deals that most do not know about. They are close by. This is the market served by NearbyItems.com.

People cannot easily make use of all the marketing methods of the big sellers, so they need something local and findable. That's how you find the really good deals.

Happy Posting...