Alright, let’s talk about cooperative marketing.

An example of the cooperative marketing is the free flyer method and I’ll explain to you kind of what it’s you need a feel for it. Let’s say you find three other business owners that are in non-competing businesses, but are also doing marketing and they want to get the word out about their business and their name. And you go to them and you say, “Look, what I’d like to do is I’d like to do a co-op marketing campaign with you guys, where we all get together and we do four ads on one piece of marketing. And I’ll coordinate it all, and I’ll collect all the money from everyone, and I’ll make sure it all gets done.” And so what you decide to do is you get a single sheet of paper that you’re going to do like, let’s say, a flyer. And maybe you’re going to do door-to-door flyer marketing, where you’re actually going to pay someone walk door to door, and hand out a thousand or two thousand or five thousand of these. And so you get an eight-and-a-half piece of paper, and you have it sectioned off into four equal sections—top and bottom of one side, top and bottom of another side. And each person gets a quarter of it. When you do your payment, you’re going to divide the payment amount of the printing and the delivery—the door-to-door delivery—into thirds. And each of the other guys are going to pay a third of the marketing cost in order to do the co-op, and your share, instead of paying cash, is you’re the guy that’s going to coordinate and make sure that it gets done. It’s called the “free flyer” method because it’s free to you, you are actually coordinating it. And you are able to get out virtually an unlimited number of flyers, or unlimited number of marketing materials, basically for doing your organization.

And so basically, they pay a third of the printing cost each, and they pay a third of the distribution cost, whether that’s inserting into a newspaper, or doing a direct mail campaign, or doing door-to-door flyers. Any of those three things is one way to get it done. So you collect the third of the payment from each of them when they give their marketing; don’t do it after the fact, I’ve learned that lesson. But you want to go collect the third of it when they give you the marketing piece. And then you get it out for them, and show them the effect of it by doing calls and measuring it. And then, one of the things you can offer is you can offer to run the numbers through your 24-hour recorded information line and show them the response rate. And then you can also see which one of the ads was most effective, and you can have some of that data and use it to improve your ads as well.

So are free flyers usually one-step or two-step marketing? Usually they are two-step, except in cases where you can get your full marketing message out in whatever one-fourth of marketing is, or the co-op is. So a lot of times they end up being two steps—the headline, a couple of bullet points, and then the call the action where they can request for additional information via at your website or your telephone. So how do you get it done? Well, you’re the one that’s coordinating it, so you’d want to go find three business owners who want to advertise. And then you want to talk to them about getting their marketing, how you’re going to do the distribution; whether it’s going to be an insert in the newspaper, whether you’re going to do direct mail, whether you’re going to do door to door—those are usually the three that get done. And then you’re going to go coordinate it. You’re going to have figure out the cost for printing. By the way, if you’re doing an insert into the newspaper, a lot of times they’re going to include the cost of printing in what they quote you, because they want to do the printing and the insert at the same time (or very closely same time) in house. But if you’re going to do direct mail, you’ll probably want to the printing yourself or use the U.S. Postal Service click-to-mail feature. You can upload the flyer directly there, upload the addresses directly there and have it all printed and mailed out right from click-to-mail, so that’s a great way to do it. The only one you’re probably going to need to do printing on your own is door-to-door.

Cost to get it done: figure out the cost of printing, figure out the cost of distribution, whether it’s paying a guy $8 or $10 per hour in order to do door-to-door flyer delivery, or $8 or $10 per hundred, whatever way you want, you figure it out. Or if you’re going to do direct mail, or you’re going to have the newspaper charge you in order to have a flyer in there. I have heard some feedback from people saying that their particular newspaper doesn’t want to do cooperative inserts in the newspaper. They’ll do an insert from one person, but if you have more than a couple of businesses on there, they get concerned and don’t want to do that. They’d want to charge separate rates for it to do it, so just some feedback there. It depends on your paper, some smaller papers probably won’t have a problem, some larger papers may. So if you’re going to do newspaper inserts, just be concerned about that.

As far as scalability goes, it’s pre-scalable to a point. You could scale up until you’re doing a lot of door-to-door marketing. You can do a lot of newspaper inserts, and you can do it repeatedly with several businesses. So one month you could do it with three guys, the next month you could pick three different guys and do the same insert with three different people, and then alternate. And then the month after that they can do it again, and you’ll be in every month, which will be highly effective for you. Or if they all want to do it every month, you could do it that way too. So, just different ways to kind of do scalability. It’s pretty scalable, up to a point. I don’t know if it’s as scalable as some other things we’re going to do.

As far as effectiveness goes, a lot of it depends on your offer and how you’re targeting it. If a normal insert in the paper has worked well for you, getting it in free is going to be more effective, right? So you don’t have to worry about paying for any of the cost if everyone else is paying for it. Same idea if you’re doing door-to-door. If you know that door-to-door marketing flyers has worked well for you, then I would definitely try to test this one to see if you can do a lot more for no cost, just the coordination in, order to get your marketing out. You will see a slight drop in response typically, when you are doing one-fourth of a flyer versus doing a solo flyer. I just wanted to point that out too. So that’s cooperative marketing.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Want to learn specific strategies for using cooperative marketing to leverage your ad dollars and generate more clients for your handyman business? I highly recommend “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.