Graham McGregor: Lazy marketing strategies

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As a marketing consultant I'm always looking for helpful marketing strategies to increase sales and profits.

And I'm particularly fond of what I call 'Lazy Marketing' strategies.

Lazy Marketing strategies are things you do that take very little effort or money to put into action. Yet can produce huge amounts of new sales when they work well.

Here are two examples to get you thinking...

1: The lazy book publisher

Back in the 1980's, Cindy Cashman saw an interesting idea for a new book called "Everything men know about women."

The book had over 100 pages and they were all blank.

Cindy liked the fun nature of the book and began looking for 'lazy marketing' strategies to sell massive amounts of her book with very little effort.

(She ignored traditional book shops as her book would be competing with thousands of other books for sale.)

Instead, Cindy approached businesses like women's clothing shops and got them to display her book next to the cash register.

Women shopping at these stores would pick up the book because of the catchy title, laugh when they saw it was totally blank inside and would then buy copies to give as gifts to people they knew.

Cindy kept the price affordable and sold over a million copies of her blank book within the next few years.

2: The lazy online music retailer

An entrepreneur named Derek Sivers started a business called CD Baby to help independent musicians sell their music online a few years ago. Derek sold his business for $22 million ten years later.

One of the reasons his business did so well was that Derek was always trying new things to make his customers feel special.

Here's a good example...

One day, Derek looked at his purchase confirmation email and found it said something like 'thank you for your CD purchase it will be sent shortly...'

Derek thought this was a bit boring, so, he sat down and pumped out an email in twenty minutes that he found a bit more fun -

Here is the new email he sent out to confirm a CD purchase to his customers:

Thank you for your order with CD Baby.

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, December 11th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year". We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you once again,

Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby

This email, became so loved by CD Baby's customers that it attracted over 10,000 positive mentions online.

Imagine that! Derek spent 20 minutes creating a fun email and over 10,000 customers commented positively about it on the internet.

The good news is that there are dozens of lazy marketing strategies that could be used by many businesses to produce quick improvements in sales.

The secret is to spend some time each week looking for these strategies and then trying them in your business.

"I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it."- Bill Gates

Action Exercise:

What easy and simple things could you do this week to boost sales?

Graham McGregor is a marketing consultant and the creator of the 396 page 'Unfair Business Advantage Report.' www.theunfairbusinessadvantage.com (This is free and has now been read by business owners from 27 countries.) You can email him at the link above.