A $40 Million Dollar Little Known Referral Strategy
Would you like to know how a car wash chain with only 12 locations has cleaned over 33,373,975 cars and has an annual revenue of over $40 Million (that is not a misprint) using little to no paid advertising? Well, sit forward because I'm about to tell you. The company name is "Car Spa" and here's how I discovered their brutally effective referral strategy. I often go to Taco Bell to have lunch and read a book. I noticed a little flyer next to their cash register. A few days later I stopped in with my family to get a frozen yogurt and right next to the cash register was the same flyer. The next day, I took my family to our favorite buffet restaurant and low and behold, there was a stack of Car Spa flyers. I then started asking the people at these locations what the deal was with the Car Spa flyer that they had next to their cash register and they all said that some old guy comes around every week and replinishes their stack. I asked them, "Do you have some type of reciprocal arrangement with Car Spa?" They all said, "No... they asked if they could put their flyers there as a gift to our guests and we said sure." Here's a copy of the referral flyer that Car Spa uses to drive traffic.
http://www.marketingbestpractices.com/temp/car_spa.pdf Pretty simple. Notice the 48 hour guarantee. They're All Over the Place! Before you knew it, I started noticing their little discount flyers ALL OVER THE PLACE. The copy center I use had a stack of Car Spa flyers. The barber I use had a stack of Car Spa flyers. The oil and lube place I use had a stack of Car Spa flyers. The local handicraft shop my wife goes to had a stack of Car Spa flyers. My son's dentist had a stack of Car Spa flyers in his office. My local chiropractor friend had a stack of Car Spa flyers in his office. An apartment complex office I visited had a stack of Car Spa flyers. Everywhere I went, I saw a stack of Car Spa flyers. It was amazing. The have these little "referral lead generation magnets" all over the place. So I Finally Visited Car Spa And it wasn't any surprise that they were so busy that it took about 15 minutes of waiting just to get my car into their car wash. I then went inside their office to wait for my car and noticed that they did NOT have one flyer from another business inside their office. They were able to get all those other businesses in the area to send them referrals without having to do one reciprocal referral arrangement. And they did it simply by asking the business owners. That's all. Car Spa probably gets 100 times the amount of referrals of any other business in the area as a direct result of this simple referral tactic. If you have a brick and mortar business, what's stopping you from doing the same thing? All it takes is a couple of hours a day and a handful or referral flyers to pass out. Copyright 2005 David Frey David Frey is the author of the best-selling manual, "The Small Business Marketing Bible" and Senior Editor of the highly-acclaimed, "Small Business Marketing Best Practices Newsletter." To get your free lifetime subscription simply visit
http://MarketingBestPractices.com
Related News
|
 |
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Radio Interview 101
Different Types of Station Contact
3 Simple But Powerful Off-Line Advertising Strategies
There are several ways to advertise and get the word out about your business online and the best of them include f-ree search engines, pay per click search engines, writing articles, utilizing press releases, doing joint ventures/ad co-ops, and posting to message boards and forums related to your target market.
3 Things Every Yellow Pages Advertiser Needs to Know
Too many business owners and marketers know that Yellow Pages advertising has an incredible amount of potential? but they don't quite know how to take advantage of it.
The First UK Man To Become a Human Billboard an Interview
Advertising on humans using tattoos is rapidly kind of freak niche that is definitely growing. It all started about two years ago (to the best of my knowledge) when a guy ran an ad on eBay offer his forehead as a billboard. He basically put up an eBay auction offering to wear a temporary tattoo on his forehead to advertise for whoever was the winning bidder. Well, a year or so later this is starting to become a phenomena and is rapidly growing. I got a chance to interview a man from the UK who currently has an auction up and he is getting a permanent tattoo ad. This is kind of taking the whole body advertising to a new level.
Increase Business By Being Nice
I have been reading articles on increasing sales using search engine optimisation as well as writing them for a very long time and I have not seen many which point out the best way to increase sales.
11 Ways To Make Your Business Cards Work For You
1. Spend money on decent quality business cards. Home made cards just don't compare to the quality of professionally printed cards. Your cards reflect your business - do you really want your cards screaming cheap!
Advertising on a Budget -- Part 3: Frequency, Frequency, Frequency
This is the third article of a three-part series. I'm illustrating
the marketing challenges of PrescottWeddings.com, a
small business.
Secrets to Profitable Mail Order Products
Generally speaking, everybody either in or wanting to get into mail order, feels that they have the final answer to what the general public will beat a path to their door to buy. The problem is that once they've invested a good deal of hard-earned cash and countless hours, their programs don't sell quite as well as they had hoped they would. Thus it is that these people begin to feel that they've left something out or perhaps not doing "some little thing" that they should be doing.
Direct Mail Catalogs & Brochures: Write Captions That Sell
Many prospects skim through catalogs and brochures, glancing at the photos and reading the accompanying captions only when a particular image arouses their interest. That's when you have their attention. And so that's when you sell them.
How to Breathe New Life into Your Advertising Campaign
If you haven't made many sales or perhaps none at all, don't be discouraged. Use this 10-point checklist to breathe new life into your advertising campaigns and improve your response rate.
Direct Mail Rules of Thumb
First and foremost - You should identify your target market. Target your direct marketing lists. Identify who you are selling to, and why they should buy from you instead of your competition. Keep in mind that placing your offer in front of 100 targeted response leads that have shown an interest or have a history of using your product or service can be much more effective than marketing to 1000 non pre-qualified leads.
If You?re Tired Of Adverts That Don?t Work And Letters That Don?t Sell, Then You Must Read This
Over the 32 years I've been involved in sales, marketing and management, I've discovered that there are two fatal marketing mistakes made by business owners. They are?
6 Must-Have Elements of a Powerful Brochure
Most brochures that businesses put out today end up doing little to impact the sales of that business. By applying the 6 must-have elements listed below you will transform you brochure from trash can lining into a powerful sales tool.
Why Most Advertisements Stink!
Question: What do you think the most important part of any ad is?
The Graphic Problem
Digital printing has revolutionized the sign industry. Current printers can reproduce an image at 1440 dpi (dots per inch) at virtually any size. But they are worthless if the original image is of low resolution. We define resolution using pixels. A pixel is commonly thought of as the smallest individual unit of an image (tiny dots if you will). If the pixel content is low, the image will look fuzzy. Anyone that has blown up a picture in a popular program like Adobe Photoshop has experienced the pixilation of an image. The most common way to express the resolution of an image is via two integers: the first is the number of pixel columns or width and the second is the number of pixel rows or height. Another common way to express resolution is by giving the total number of pixels in the image (usually expressed as megapixels). It is determined by simply multiplying the pixel columns by the pixel rows.
What the Newspaper Ad Person Won?t Tell You
Newspapers are considered the PRIMARY advertising
medium by 99.4% of all retailers. Newspapers have
been there in every step of the typical store
owner's life from the very beginning. Newspapers
covered his birth, his high school graduation, his
engagement, his marriage, the death of his parents
and everything else.
Three Keys to Crafting Successful Print Ads
Want to create print ads that get results? Below are three
keys to get you started.
The Internet and Beyond - 12 Tips on Writing Better Brochures
Every year thousands of online businesses fail. None of them begin with the idea they'll fail, in fact they have high hopes of success, but they fail all the same. One of the main reasons for the high failure rate is an over reliance on one marketing channel?the Internet.
Whats The Frequency?
The more things change, some say, the more things stay the same. When it comes to marketing, I tend to agree. Consider the following list of how advertising frequency equates to advertising effectiveness. Thomas Smith wrote this in 1885:
What Makes Advertising Successful?
MANY INDIVIDUAL ELEMENTS COME INTO PLAY MAKING A SUCCESSFUL AD: 1. PERSUASIVE SELLING COPY. The wording is the single most important element in determining a successful ad. What counts most is what you say and how you say it.
|
