How to Secure Marketing Deals Without Risk

The magic word in marketing is test. With any marketing project you're doing, make sure you test it out on a small scale without losing a ton of money before you expand it. Otherwise, you could go broke spending all your money on something you think is a great idea but you never tested, and you end up having to close down your company. Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. I believe that hungry entrepreneurs deserve help. And today I'm answering a question from one of my readers, Carissa, who wrote in with a huge email. Carissa, this is crazy. And she ends with, "P.S. Sorry if this email was too long." So we have to work on condensing. Anyway, it's a great question. So her problem— I'll summarize. Her problem is she sells these great notebooks. She makes them herself, and she's made a deal potentially with a magazine that wants to send her notebooks out in their magazine for free as a sample to 40,000 subscribers and give her a 2-page spread in their magazine. Problem is, it's gonna cost her money to make these 40,000 notebooks, and she's worried she can't keep up with it. And she said, "It could potentially destroy my business if I cannot keep up. This scares me." Carissa, this scares me, and I'm scared for you. I, I love taking on big deals, I love looking for new opportunities, but you also have to focus on survival for your company. I hate just launching into a huge new marketing effort with without testing it on a small scale. This is low risk for the magazine. Okay, you think it's a great deal, but it's not costing them anything. Two-page advertisement, sure there's a cost to it, but a lot of times advertisements in magazines are not being filled up, so really there's no cost for them, and you're out having to make all of this inventory for them. Who knows if it's gonna work out? My main problem here is, are the people on this list going to then buy your notebooks? Because if they are, it's a great deal. If they're not, then you're just out 40,000 notebooks and it might sink your business. You have to find a way to test it out. You have to get a little more skin in the game from the magazine. Make this deal a little bit more fair, 'cause right now it's not costing them anything. I would have them commit to give you some kind of advertising before. Say, I need to make sure that your readers are my target audience, that they're gonna buy from me, that I'm not just gonna waste 40,000 of these notebooks going out. Have them give you some advertising before. Maybe it's one page, maybe it's two pages, maybe it's half a page, whatever it is, something to show you that they have your target audience. Send it out one month before and see what the response is. If people see your ad and start calling you and start buying your notebooks, then it's worth doing. It's worth testing out because you know it's gonna work. If they put out the ad and nothing happens, don't take the deal. You've just saved yourself a huge amount of money and heartache. That's what I would do with any marketing initiative. See if it works on a small scale, and if it does, you blow it up. If this works on a small scale, it doesn't just have to be this magazine. You can go to every magazine that might be a potential fit. There's tons of options for you. The companies that I saw when I was doing venture capital, the ones that had the best chance of success, the ones who we could fund, were the ones who already figured out how to market themselves on a small scale, make some money coming in. They had some kind of system. They weren't making it rich, but they had a way that made them a little bit of money, and they needed money to expand that. That was safe money to give out. They had a good chance of having a lot of success. And the same thing applies to your business. Show that it works. Prove to yourself that it works on a small scale. Have the magazine give you some kind of commitment. Say you're willing to do this, but they have to give you something. They have to test it out with you first to show that it works. And if it works, you could bust that out to every magazine you can think of. Using the same model. Test and then expand. And soon you could have so many customers that you gotta figure out how you're gonna source all these things, which is a good problem to have. And it's great to think about the upside, but you have to protect the downside. For me, losing my business, that's not an option. Losing my business over a marketing test is not an option. I'd rather not do it. I'm not willing to gamble my whole company on one marketing initiative. And if the magazine isn't willing to do a small test for you, then they're probably not the right partner to talk to anyway. Because it's costing them nothing and they have no skin in the game. Okay, good luck. And this applies to any marketing initiative you're doing. Anytime you're spending money, you wanna make sure you're gonna get a return, and that starts from testing small and expanding from there. Good luck, great question. I hope I answered it in time before you went out and made that deal. Uh, for those of you watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. It makes me wanna do more for you, and I wanna hear from you. Please leave a comment below. Let me know what you think of this video, and if you have a question for your business, I wanna hear it and I will answer it, make a video reply for you. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next episode.