If you read my book or watch my videos on CEO Warrior TV, you will at some point read or hear me mention about something I call “stackable marketing”. It’s a concept I developed as I was testing marketing strategies and seeing what worked and what didn’t, and people frequently ask me what stackable marketing is. So in this blog post I want to give you a high level view of what stackable marketing is.
First, let me explain how most people market: A service business owner wants to advertise his business so he creates a brochure and then sends it out to as wide of an audience as he can afford. And then he waits for the phone to ring. When it doesn’t ring as often as he wants, he wonders if there was something wrong with his brochure or with the zip codes he marketed to, so he gets new brochures printed and he sends them out to different zip codes. Again, the phone doesn’t ring as often as he wants. So he repeats the process a third time, and a fourth time, and a fifth time, etc. Perhaps at the same time he puts up billboards or bus bench signs, hoping that he’ll reach even more of his audience.
The cost? Probably thousands of dollars. The timeline? Weeks or, more likely, months. The effectiveness? Minimal, sometimes not even enough to breakeven. (But he does it anyway because it brings in some customers and those are better than nothing).
Now let me explain how stackable marketing works: A service business owner wants to advertise his business so he first identifies an area that he wants to target. If he doesn’t have a big budget then he might select just one street. If he has a larger budget, he might select a neighborhood. Rarely does he start bigger than that.
Then, he sends postcards to this target area. A couple of weeks later he sends another set of (different) postcards. A couple of weeks later he sends brochures. A couple of weeks later he acquires the phone numbers of the people in that area and calls them. A couple of weeks later he puts up signs in the area. A couple of weeks later he sends flyers in a targeted mailout.
And his phone starts ringing. Customers start calling. He starts serving people in that area. Other customers, who have been receiving these marketing pieces, start seeing trucks in the area and the brand is further reinforced, so they start calling too.
The cost? Often substantially less than the “conventional” way of spread-out marketing described earlier. The timeline? Weeks (and an added benefit: each marketing piece builds on the last). The effectiveness? Highly effective. This really works because the frequency of the message has an impact.
Rather than spreading your marketing out too thin and only sending out one brochure once in a while, choose a smaller marketplace and hammer them with marketing over and over again, with the goal of dominating that small market. With stackable marketing, you’ll see huge results at a lower cost from a smaller market.
