Offline Marketing
When the rubber hits the road
Rob Vannucci, eCommerce Entrepreneur

Our website, www.HustonGarageSales.net is dedicated to advertising garage sales in the Houston area. There are two types of people we need to bring to our site: shoppers and sellers. Reaching them requires two different kinds of marketing. For us, sellers are the most important since they provide a cash flow; however, shoppers provide sellers a reason to place their advertisements on our site.

We are relatively new to the e-commerce world, so when we decided we wanted to build an e-commerce site, we knew our marketing budget would be limited. So we decided to advertise in the garage sale section of the city newspaper. This provided us with several advantages: large volume of readers, serious garage sale shoppers seeing our ad, and an economical price. 

When we ran the first ad, we definitely got a response - our stats tracker bumped up with traffic. We encouraged our friends who might be having a garage sale in the future to expedite their sale so we could put them on our site. We ran the newspaper ad for a few weeks, and we definitely had the shoppers coming - but no sellers. It DID allow us to have something on our site for the shoppers to see, however, and to attract interest from sellers! 

Our next step was to attract more sellers by calling all of the people in the local papers having a sale. We even tried cold-calling people who had already bought a competitor. Most of the people we spoke to weren't interested in placing an ad. We even tried to give away ads, but there wasn't much interest. The first few weeks were very discouraging. 

Part of the problem with our phone calls was my sales pitch - we was new to it, and we took too long to pitch our site. After a few weeks of rejection, we honed our pitch to highlight what we offered over the competitor's product in 15 seconds. This got us to the point to where people would at least take free ads. However, when I typed them in, I made sure to put in the ad please let us know you found our sale on HoustonGarageSale.Net. 

The next step of our marketing campaign was to attract more site traffic by putting out street signs (10x20) on the corners of busy intersections and neighborhoods. These are the same type of signs that people stick on corners to advertise their garage sales. Each sign cost us about $1.50 and would typically stay up about 4 days before they were removed by the city.

The first Saturday morning we put the signs out, we were pretty discouraged. That day, we saw some website traffic and a few people registered with our site, but no ads. We repeated the exercise the following Wednesday in a different neighborhood. At the same time, we were still cold calling. 

Some of the toughest free ads to give away were with the professional estate sales people. They pay top dollar for their ads in the paper (minimum of $250 per ad), but they were very skeptical of the Internet -- yeah, the Internet is great, but getting people to come to your site is the hard part. 

Our breakthrough finally came when I spoke to a very serious estate sales person (who was not very interested in speaking to me). She told me she had a large email list and ran an ad in the paper for each sale. We placed the free ad for her, and put in our requisite Tell us if you saw our ad on HoustonGarageSale.Net. She allowed me to place their ad on our site for free. If we could prove that we could bring buyers to her sales, we would have a steady seller to place ads out our site!

The following Tuesday, I called back to see how the sale had gone. She was very friendly; she told me several buyers at her sale had found out about her sale through HoustonGarageSale.Net! After showing her we could deliver the goods, she has placed an ad with us almost every week.

To make sure we get the word out to sellers, we have now started sending postcards to all of the garage sale ads listed in the papers. The purpose of these postcards is to at least notify people that have garage sales that we exist, and that hopefully they will remember us when they have their next sale. To date, we have seen very little hits registered from this approach, but we have had some clients tell us they have had shoppers show up for their sales after the shoppers received one of our post cards. We have also received several phone calls from these postcards, and had a few verbal ads placed.

We have also partnered with a business owner in downtown Houston to place a large www.houstongaragesale.net banner on the outside of their building. He is selling his business and in exchange for a link on our site (a banner ad, with a web page detailing his property), he will leave our banner up for 12 weeks for a nominal fee. The traffic that we are exposed to at this location is outstanding, totally approximately 120,000 cars per day. The banner was installed within the last week, so we are awaiting the results. With this type of traffic exposure, it can do nothing but benefit us.

So far, the signs we placed have been one of our most effective marketing tools. While we were finally having our breakthrough first paying customer, we had a couple of surprise ads get placed from the neighborhoods in which we had placed our street signs. This was what we call the residual effect - just because we put signs out doesn't mean we will see the benefit immediately - we may benefit from the signs weeks later. We expect to see a similar effect from the post cards we've mailed and handed out. We have been visiting the large sales and handing out flyers. This has probably been our least beneficial marketing tool. However, we hope the residual effect will kick in.

Don't limit yourself to online marketing and search engine promotion. Get out there and market your site offline. It probably won't be easy, but if you look for the residual effect, keep working at it, and be creative, you will find effective ways to market your site to those who want to buy your services or products.

--  Rob Vannucci, www.HoustonGaragesale.net 

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