Every Thursday evening we do a Twitter chat on B2B marketing. Recently, the topic of online advertising came up – Google Pay per Click (adwords), Linkedin ads and Facebook ads.
The question posed was this:
Which advertising strategy works best for you? Google adwords, Linkedin or Facebook?
Our answer: None of them.
When the participants heard of our company policy – they were shocked. “Find New Customers does zero paid advertising?” They did not understand. Every business spends a fortune on advertising. Why not? That’s needed to get leads.
How do you make it work? How do you uncover potential business without advertising?
No paid ads has been our corporate policy from Day One. You will never see a Pay Per Click ad, Linkedin ad or a Facebook ad. You won’t see us on TV or hear from us on radio. Find New Customers is not in newspapers, trade journal, signs at events, etc.
Why not? Because our business strategy is to develop legions of fans who talk about us and refer us to their friends. (When the folks on the Tweet chat heard this, they were wowed!) Folks like Paul Dunay, Don F. Perkins, Arthur Germain, Margaret Malloy, Jim Burns, Dan Paulson, Doug Kessler – all industry experts who support us. Happy clients (Aprimo, Act-On, a local insurance agent) also refer us.
While we don’t advertise, we do publish great content on B2B demand generation, content marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring and more, write a wildly popular blog and stay active on social networks. We also have a presence on YouTube, Google Profiles, FourSquare, Crunchbase and every other online site. Find New Customers is on Facebook and Linkedin too. We rank highly for our keywords too. In fact, the #1 source of traffic to Find New Customers is organic search.
What do you think of this policy? Do you applaud it or think it is a mistake? We love comments and those who share.