These Old School Marketing Plays Actually Work Better Today

Good morning. As I'm looking through these journals 30 years ago, I'm realizing that these are the good old days. Today is the good old days. I was looking back here and what's amazing to me is seeing all the different playbooks that I was running, all the different like um you know guerilla marketing or things that were designed to use the tools that we had available at the time to do the two most important things in marketing is get somebody's attention eyeballs and get them to listen or pay attention.

Well, we could deliver a message. Now, the way that we did that back then was of course recorded messages, which is really what we had was their undivided immersive attention for 1 minute, 3 minutes, whatever the uh thing was. Some people would use longer recorded messages, but the whole fundamental playbook was to get eyeballs and bring them to somewhere where we could convey a message so that they could take the next step. And as I'm looking through this, one of the strategies that I used pretty often was using little lead generation business cards.

So we would get these little, you know, uh inexpensive like low uh you know thin uh paper uh business cards and you could get a thousand business cards for let's say it was you know $50 or or something along that line. Certainly maybe less than a hundred, but it was like five cents per business card that you could get. Just get them printed on yellow in black and white. And the idea was to wherever you go, almost like I would say to people like get the stack of these every day, put it in your pocket, put a hole in your pocket, and just let them fall wherever you go.

It's almost like you're going around your day and everywhere you go, there are people. And uh so those two things of using the little business cards and using uh flyers, you know, you could get black and white uh flyers on yellow paper that we would post up in the uh supermarket bulletin boards or the library bulletin board or the coffee shop or restaurants. Anywhere there were bulletin boards, you could post these up. And I used to actually I would have my cousin I had a whole like I treated the bulletin boards like a little vending route that I would have these little flyers with a take one box or a take one tab that people could pull off with the recorded message phone number and the headline of what they were calling for.

And we would do things like, you know, uh, Georgetown, three, uh, bedroom homes, zero down payment, free recorded message, and that was the whole thing. And you'd have a picture of some lovely, uh, you know, three-bedroom homes, so that people knew, oh, you can get homes like this for zero down payment. How do you do that? And they would call and listen to the recorded message.

And then we started doing it with business cards for everything. We did Julie's guide to Winter Haven. Here's the easiest way to find a home in Winterhaven, a cover of the guide. Free 1997 guide to Winterhaven real estate.

Then I started doing this same thing with other businesses. Here was a design for a business card for Russell Oliver with the I buy your jewelry. And then on the back the just the basic uh things. I pay top dollar for your gold, diamonds, and jewelry.

And this was a a lowcost way of distributing a message. But I had a realization today as I'm looking through these these playbooks that we are in maybe the greatest time ever to be a old school marketer living in the present day because I know that the fundamental thing that we're trying to do is to get attention and convey a message and Meta and Instagram right now offer the most amazing opportunity for us to get about this much information. I think about static ads on Meta and Instagram are I think the greatest bargain ever for marketing now because you can distribute you know we would say it would take you let's say it cost 5 cents or 10 cents to uh print produce these cards and the idea was you just distribute them all over so it would cost you $50 for a,00 thousand of these and you'd have to manually distribute them and you never know who is going to pick it up. But now for less than 5 cents if you do a static ad in a 15mi radius or in a whatever uh in your town radius that Meta will deliver those to exactly the people that you want.

You could choose men only, women only, age groups only, uh specific interests, job titles, all the things that you can select. They'll get your digital postcard or your digital uh flyer in front of exactly the the right people. And if any small business, any small business can afford it because they you can spend as little as you want. You could do a $100 uh ad.

You could spend $5 a day for $150 and get your basic message in front of exactly the right people. And so I think about this now that all of the things that we've been talking about of the ability to convey your message, to choose the words, to use cash copy, to create the compelling three or four words that convey exactly what you're doing, right? Lovely homes, zero down payment. or I buy your jewelry or stop your divorce.

Any of those things, we got those. With a little bit of headline writing and a call to action, you're in business. And that's never going to go out of style. The opportunity that we have is to get that in front of the right people.

So, I almost thinking about it as a business card like this or a little index card is kind of a great way to hone your thinking to think about what is the the image that you could um would use to convey this message. What would be the headline? What few words would you say to get people to take one action which is learn more or download or get details? I love download nothing.

That's my favorite thing uh to do now for these um for these type of ads. And there's infinite ways to apply that little simple playbook that could get you out of uh out of anything. So, I'm going to there's another idea that goes along with this and I think I'm going to do I think tomorrow I'm going to tell you um all about that one because I I want to explain it and set it up. But for today, this little old school play of getting your message on a, you know, simple delivery device, getting it to the right people and having them take an action to convey your message.

Can't be beat. No time better to be alive as a marketer than today. I got a funny email the other day from Rick. It says, Dean, question.

are you saying you can teach me to make fat stacks by hanging out at a pub drinking coffee like you? And I laughed to myself because I was thinking, you know, yes, I I can do that. That's what I do. is the funny thing.

What I really realized is that every idea that I've had, every dollar that I've made over the last 30 years has gone through my brain, through my pen onto a piece of paper in my journal before it went out into the real world. And if I can turn people on to that activity as a driver for what to do, what to think about, what to ask yourself to draw out, what the next most valuable action is for you, and how to find the most profitable things that you can install in your business. I'm all for it. So this Friday at 100 pm I'm going to do for the first time a 50inute profitfinder workshop and you're going to join me live on Zoom and we're going to go through a 50inute exercise.

Bring your pen. Bring a notebook or piece of paper. And I'm going to guide you through a thinking process that will help you identify where the lowest hanging fruit is in your business and maybe some fruit that you didn't even know was there. But I'm going to show you where to look for it.

So, it's free. It's for you. m. this Friday.

Just watch. Go to What did we call the website, Josh? >> 50inut profitfinder. m.