3 Sure-Fire Ways to Create a Buzz About Your Center

I love this paragraph from Jay Conrad Levinson’s book Guerrilla Marketing:

If your business is exceptionally well funded and you have stockpiles of money allocated to marketing your products, you might take the standard approach and handle the marketing functions with the big bucks and textbook tactics. But if you can allocate only a modest amount of money to marketing, I advise you to take a radically different approach and handle the marketing function with big ideas and guerrilla tactics.

When times were really good, order-taking was the mindset. But in today’s times, most executive suite owners must find a way to get creative with their marketing budget while generating as many leads as possible to keep the sales funnel full for closing deals.

Here are a couple “guerrilla marketing” strategies for you to consider:

1. Host seminars and promote the heck out of them

The best way to close more sales? Increase the foot traffic in your center. Plan a series of seminars and host them at your center. It doesn’t matter whether you have a 12-person conference room or a 30-person meeting room, use what you have and work with it.

Find several experts in your community on varying business topics and invite them as guest speakers. Most will do it for free for both experience and the chance to spread the word on their expertise. (Warning: do your due diligence to make absolutely SURE that your speakers will provide value…and not just sell their stuff.)

Promote the seminar series like crazy. Create a group on LinkedIn and Facebook. Send fliers to all tenants with a note “bring a friend and get a free hour of conference room time!” Send info to your local networking groups. Visit neighboring businesses with brochures. Post fliers at local coffee shops. Send a press release. GO BIG in terms of promotion. (Notice most of this won’t cost you much other than maybe $75 on printing costs and bottled water/ snacks at each session.) You could offer these sessions for free but require participants to RSVP to reserve spots due to limited space so you get their hard commitment to attend. Then…create the “wow” experience when people walk in to your center. Give away a coupon or gift card to come back and use your space at a significant discount. It’s a no-brainer way to get people in to see your center and educate the community on what you provide!

2. Get a video online

Having a short video on your website is an easy and low-cost way to drive targeted video traffic to your site. Video sharing sites like YouTube.com are among the most high-ranking websites on the Internet and you can not only educate your prospects in a more enticing way (as opposed to having them read lengthy text paragraphs), you can increase your search engine rankings as well. According to research done by OfficeBroker.com, having “differentiated artwork” (aka video listings) can increase the number of visitors and click-through ratio for more information by as much as 100% to 500% in the various markets they tested. “In nearly all of the markets we saw double the click-through on the differentiating listings versus the standard listings,” says Billy Knauss, Vice President at OfficeBroker.com.

3. Become the "go-to" within one target market

You may have several target markets. Attorneys, financial advisors, mortgage brokers, insurance consultants, or others. Choose your primary target market and then get visible within that market—beyond putting a classified ad in the trade association publication. (Though that is a good idea, it isn’t enough.) You need to think in terms of total penetration into this market so you become THE go-to office solution provider in that market. Where do they hang and with whom? What establishments do they frequent? What networking groups do they belong to? Where do they meet their clients? Find a way to get visible in those areas.

Take attorneys as an example.  Offer up your conference room for the local trade association monthly meetings. Establish a relationship with a golf club that attorneys frequent and place a business-card size ad on the scorecard with a special deal or have the golf course give coupons to all attorney golfers for a free beverage at the end of their round in exchange for a business card.  Interview an attorney in the area that is doing something new and exciting in their industry and send out a press release to the local papers with a mention at the end that you offer low-cost space to attorneys as an alternative option to traditional space. And the list goes on…meet with your staff to brainstorm with low-cost ways to get visible within that target market and then implement away! Continue to do what works and drop what isn’t getting you results.

We talk about these types of strategies on our teleconferences and more in-depth on our private mastermind calls…but one thing we know for sure: the operators that are really getting the results right now are those that take an idea and run with it. Determine what guerrilla marketing strategies you intend to implement and then have at it. Success breeds success so when you find something that works, stick with it!

For a complimentary Part II of this article with three more guerilla marketing strategies specific to the executive suite industry, email info@revvedresults.com.

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