UnMarketing. Stratten Alison

and your results. Your goal always needs to be engagement; business will result.

      The same goes for a business where your market is made up of solopreneurs – companies that are a one-person show. If, for example, you are a virtual assistant9, most likely your website talks somewhere about “freeing up your time.” As entrepreneurs running a business, no one knows better than we do that we're overworked, and we know we need the help – that's why we're looking on your site. But for us to give away part of our business responsibility is like dropping your kid off at the first day of school. We're protective and territorial about it and won't just let a person who offers us “One Hour Free!” to step in and represent our business.

      On the other side of that, if you are a solopreneur reading this book, remember that because all points of engagement between your company and your market are potentially UnMarketing opportunities, the people you hire have to be as good as you when they represent it.10

      Other areas that have a huge trust gap:

      ■ Accounting

      ■ Anything to do with kids

      ■ Wellness practitioners

      ■ Life insurance

      ■ Counseling

      ■ Life coaching

      ■ Lawyers

      ■ Many, many more11

      Your entire focus when you try to attract new clients in these areas is how you can build trust to reduce that gap. When was the last time a cold-call increased trust for you? We thought so.

      5

      ROD

      RETURN ON DONUTS12

      Beside a fortune-teller, in a strip mall in Vegas, we found the best donuts in town. Well, technically, Yelp found them. We simply bought 10 dozen and bribed our way to a 9 a.m., standing-room-only, live UnPodcast audience.

      Create great content and the audience will come.

      Create great content and feed everyone Ronald's Donuts, and a packed room of hungover marketers will come.

      We got back from Vegas and into the studio, raving about Ronald's Donuts. We shared our Yelp story of how the donut shop with over 500 reviews and 4.5 stars caught our attention and our hearts. Just what we needed: another thing to miss about Vegas.

      Fast-forward a few months later to another studio day. We were just getting ready to leave when Alison noticed a box sitting on our doorstep. A box of Ronald's Donuts, with a note attached from someone we'd never met – Petrus Engelbrecht, a real estate agent from Sotheby's.

      Petrus had attended a talk Scott gave to real estate agents and decided he wanted to be our Realtor. The talk gave him all the tools he needed to get noticed, so he decided to do a little research. He listened to the podcast, heard about our love of Ronald's Donuts and decided to have a dozen flown in by a partner in their Las Vegas office. And then, he just left them on our doorstep.

      Now, one of us would never eat random doorstep donuts (Alison) and one of us had eaten six before we got to the studio…

      We weren't in the market for a house. We hadn't even mentioned looking for one online. Too often in business we focus only on those ready to buy. If someone isn't ready, with money in hand, we ignore them. It's buy or good-bye. But great marketing is about more than that. It's about staying in front of your target market, so when they're ready for your product or service they choose you.

      And no one has demonstrated this better than Petrus.

      Scott has lived in Oakville his entire life, surrounded by ads for Realtors. Their faces on benches, the backs of buses, flyers in newspapers, and on lawn signs. Now we're just spitballing here, but we'd say there are about 10,001 real estate agents in our town whose faces we've seen (and sat on from time to time), but when it came time to look at houses, there was only one we wanted to talk to. Not only had we never seen Petrus on a sign or business card, but he was new to the area, to the continent to be exact. And he was new to real estate.

      Not only was Petrus' approach creative; he gave without asking. He didn't check in the day after dropping by our house to see if we wanted to buy a house now. He had an idea and took a chance, and it worked. A few months later, we bought our dream home and Petrus got his Return on Donuts.

      Since then, Petrus and his family have become friends and we've referred him to many others. He is a great agent, which is actually the real point here. No amount of donuts in the world will help your business if you're not great. The donuts opened the door (literally) but it was his passion, intelligence, and skills that kept it open.

      He took the whole thing up another notch when he brought over a gift for Scott during the holidays. Knowing Scott's passion for comic books and specifically Wolverine, and his hatred of QR codes, Petrus had a one-of-a-kind piece commissioned by local artist Mike Rooth, as you can see in the image provided.

      6

      RESTAURANT THAT DIDN'T GET IT

      When you open a new location-based business that relies on a specific geographic clientele, the biggest hurdle you have to overcome is getting people to come to your business the first time. New customer acquisition is where start-up businesses spend most of their marketing dollars. Why not get people to come by using the foundation of human nature – making people feel special?

      A friend of Scott's who runs a graphic design firm brought him in to speak with one of her clients about marketing a new restaurant. She was designing the restaurant's menus and had been asked if she knew anyone who could come up with some unique ways to market the place. He was excited to work with a place that was open to doing things differently. Well, he was wrong about that.13 But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

      They sat down together for an awesome lunch,14 and they told Scott about their vision for the restaurant. They were in a downtown location on the western outskirts of Toronto's core, which is an area with many restaurants. They knew it was going to be a battle to build a customer base.

      They discussed a few different things and ideas that they had. They all agreed that their biggest challenge was going to be getting people in the door to try out the food for the first time. The owners had a lot of faith in the quality of their food and service and knew that if we could accomplish getting people to try out the restaurant that they would come back for more.

      Perfect! Let's get ready to UnMarket!

      Here was the proposal:

      We need to get a buzz going about the place, but also make people feel exclusive. People love to be made to feel special. Two new condo towers just opened a block away from here, filled with potential customers. I will approach the property management company and let them know that we are going to set aside one night each for the buildings where the residents would have exclusive access to your restaurant.

      So far, so good. The owners were smiling.

      Here's the kicker. You won't charge them a cent.

      Previous smiles were now gone.

      You will have two sittings on each night, and people who are interested will have to reserve in advance. When they arrive, they are given your chef's choices of a variety of your best dishes. Not full meals, but enough collectively so they will be full and content. Since you can seat 40 people at a time, with two seatings a night, we will get more than 150 people in here on two weeknights, which wouldn't be busy anyway. These two nights

9

It's like having an administrative assistant, but they work from home. We've used them for years. And suggest you do, too.

10

“Represent” does not have to mean direct client contact. If the person you hire works on research, formatting, or e-mail filtering, it can still affect your brand.

11

This is the great bullet-point cop-out. When someone writes to us and says, “You forgot this one!” we can just reply, “Yeah, that's what we meant by many, many more!”

12

This is a new chapter to the second edition of UnMarketing. If only we'd known Petrus back in 2009, we might have lived in a nicer house.

13

Most business owners who say things like they want to “think outside the box” actually want to do the same things in their box, with better results. It takes courage to do something outside the norm. Most owners like the idea of courage, but few display it in business.

14

They gave him the lunch for free. We think we have to say this is now due to the new FTC, FCC, NAFTA, and Geneva Convention laws.