In setting to work to generate as much free publicity as possible for the rocking horse business, I focused on the unusual nature of the occupation and skill-set required.  I began by pitching local press and relevant magazines. A rash of local newspaper articles ensued, plus profiles in Australian Country Collections, Rick Rutherford’s Country, The Land, Sydney’s Child, Australian Country Style, Australian Woodworker, Australiasian Toymaker and Retirement Living.

Once I had some success and a taste of free exposure, I got brave and began pitching suitable TV shows. Appearances on “Our House”, “Totally Wild”, “Burke’s Backyard”,  “The Morning Shift”,  “Sydney Weekender” and “Huey’s Cooking Adventures” came in fairly quick succession. There is very much a snowball effect in media. Once one journalist/producer judges you ‘worthy’ to do a story on, you show that story to the next one and they tend to follow. It’s works like a ‘media testimonial.’

When we restored the Westmead Children’s Hospital 126 year old rocking horse for free, this brought a new round of articles in the Telegraph, Parramatta Advertiser and others.

The story of our treechange, senior’s tours, the property itself, the small business angle and particularly the classes as the ultimate hobby holiday for baby boomers added to the variety of attractive angles for the media. How many angles has your product got?

Being bound to the workshop most every day meant my partner listened to a lot of radio.  He would call into to talk back shows and the Saturday morning “Woodies” show when the topic was relevant to what he did. It was surprising how many people told us they heard him on the radio at some unusual hour. All this as a result of a spontaneous share on talk back radio.

The seniors and special interest group tours were great public relations for the business and consumed much less time than say having 20 individual visits. Over a two hour tour groups of 15-50 persons could visit the workshop and learn about old horses and construction techniques of new horses, visit the B&B, pram collection and hobby farm and enjoy an old fashioned morning tea for $15 per person.

We developed an annual open day to be held at our property in October. It had lots of stall holders from the region with the theme “Handmade Homegrown”. This capitalised on pre-Christmas rocking horse ordering habits, impulse buying and provided another opportunity to promote class bookings for the following year.

The year we had Huey cooking at Rocking Horse Lodge we had 105 people on our waitlist for classes for the coming year and got 7 subsequent TV appearances from the filming that was done!

In a later blog I will talk about the pitching process for press, magazines and TV.

For the first couple of years in business, we used a full colour, full bleed photo business card with black print reverse. I needed to make the business card work harder for the money I was spending on it and felt I could not get across all that I needed to say about our business on a tiny card. I wanted it to be a glossy DL promotional brochure but simply did not have the money for such a piece.

I decided to upgrade to a custom colour postcard which was not that much more expense. The postcard has so much going for it. It has greater visual impact than a business card; I could fit so much more on it; it would not be lost or thrown away as readily. As the photos were attractive and unusual, it was more likely to get attached to the fridge at home as a ‘wish list’ reminder.

My first postcard had one full bleed photo of six rocking horses, the final form of the postcard was still full bleed, but with five photos and told the whole story of our business to my satisfaction. I used them for a quick response for telephone enquiries, especially for older customers who were not computer literate and still had a need to see and hold something from you before they felt comfortable enough about your product to act.

I never went anywhere without the postcards. I carried about twenty-five in my handbag and the in the dashboard of the van.  I gave them to people who were reading the promotional sticker on the side of the van in shopping centre car parks and streets all over Australia. I passed them out the window of the van to a mum crossing an intersection with three children under five in tow while I was waiting for the lights to change.

The additional benefits of the postcard are that no envelope is required; the address is handwritten which is a more personal touch; it promotes your product as it goes through the postal service; and if we were in the US it would be several cents cheaper to post than a normal letter. Some people would ask, “Can I keep this?” when I handed it to them. They didn’t expect even a colour postcard for free!

Some people would argue that a better size and layout advertising piece for our business would be a portrait design DL card or DL folded brochure that sits in neatly in a DL perspex or rotating wire brochure holder. Our postcard sits sideways in those holders and is shorter than the DL pieces in a brochure stand. This is another advantage of the postcard – it sticks out from the crowd – a ‘purple cow’ if you will.

And guess what? Now direct mail is making a comeback! Just think how cool it is to get something in the post now that everything from, bank statements, invoices, utility bills, school fees, child care fees, loyalty card statements are all online. Getting a postcard in the mail is so retro, its positively trendy.

It was not possible to make a living just selling finished rocking horses, the market simply wasn’t and isn’t big enough. If you make, people expect you to be able to restore and a large part of a rocking horse maker’s reputation is built on restorations.

People get a kick out of being able to meet the man who made or restored their horse and in many cases they asked to have the grandchild or child’s photo taken with the maker.

The work hours in the beginning were 10 hours a day 7 days a week in the off season and 16 hours a day in the lead up to Christmas.  A decade later it was still 10 hours a day 7 days a week and 16 hours a day in the lead up to Christmas.

The horses were made with hand power tools and a carving disk, not a large and expensive copy carving machine. This means three things: no two horses are exactly the same, there is not a great deal of competition given the physical stresses and long hours and there was always a limited production capacity.

Before our partnership the business made about 100 horses per year and several dozen restorations. Per year, together we made about 200 horses, did 75 restorations and made another 50 as we taught students at our catered 3-Day Power-Carved Rocking Horse Making Classes. We also sold plans, accessories, carving aids and kits by mail order.

While this diversity of activity helped with the seasonality of the business it also suited the gentle shift created by the baby boomer’s access to money and leisure time. They were into classes, DIY, cultural exploration and education . My working life at the time was made so much more pleasurable sharing it with appreciative, like-minded individuals such as those.

Shoestring Marketing is the common name for a style of marketing which could also be described as: “More-Brains-than-Bucks” Marketing; “More-Sweat-than-Silver” Marketing; “More-Chutzpah*-than-Cash” Marketing or “More-Drive-than-Dosh” Marketing. You get the idea.

My form of Shoestring Marketing developed from the pressure point of having no cash for marketing and advertising to grow the business. I knew that unless I made our business very successful, I would never be able to reach my goals.

My goals were and are probably much like your own – to give the children the best education we could afford, live in a nice house in a rural region, eliminate commuting and working long hours for someone else; to pass our working lives doing what we love and our winter years in pleasurable pursuits such as travel & culture, enjoying good food, a few decadences and meeting interesting people. In short – the “good life” or as it’s now called a “treechange lifestyle”

I had big dreams and no way to realise them unless I did something radical. The appeal of Shoestring Marketing for the treechanger is that it is based on smart and low cost marketing so that you can realise your goals and sustain the lifestyle that you crave.

Prerequisites to being a Great Shoestring Marketer

There are seven prerequisites to being a great shoestring marketer and conveniently, they all start with “P”. The following definitions of the seven ”P’s” relate specifically the characteristics of successful shoestring marketers:

Poverty Mentality – means you proactively avoid spending on the traditional marketing avenues – that is: paid for advertising in the press, radio, TV, magazines, commercial trade shows, lavish printed materials, $50,000 websites etc.

Poise – means self-assurance, self-possession, self-confidence, self-belief, self-reliance, aplomb. Marketing your business is your responsibility. No one else will do it for you. You will need all the “poise” you can muster to move forward and take the inevitable knocks and disappointments – and the aplomb to handle the successes and the self-belief to handle the disappointments appropriately.

Passion – My personal favourite of the seven ‘P’s  means fervor, excitement, enthusiasm and zeal. I can’t teach you this one, you either feel this way about your business and your dreams or you don’t. If you don’t, change your business or find a new dream you can be passionate about.

Professionalism – means to be dedicated, committed, savvy on how to approach customers, suppliers and media in a way they respond to, expert on every aspect of your business, thorough in your approach and follow up and emotionally appropriate when dealing with them all.

Persistence –  means to be determined, dogged, diligent and just a teensy bit pushy but in a nice way..

A Powerful Pitch – This means you’ve done your homework and you know the hot buttons and appeal of your business to your target market  and can put the correct spin on it to interest different media on the different angles.

Persuasiveness – expressive and articulate in getting your ideas across. The natural result of the successful application of the above six “P’s”  is that you will in fact be very persuasive.

Positive Marketing Momentum

It is largely unknown or not understood by the new small business person that marketing momentum used positively means that over time you will need to spend less and less on your marketing program.

Marketing has its own momentum. If you stop marketing for two, three or six months, you will have a corresponding soft patch or trough in business sales and enquiries further down the track. How much further down the track and how much effect is largely to do with the location and type of business you have. But ultimately your business will die a slow and agonising death. There is no such thing as a business staying the same – same is death. A business is either growing or it is dying.

Negative Marketing Momentum

For the rocking horse business a stop of all marketing activity for a period of 2-3 weeks would result in a noticeable downturn in business in 2-3 month’s time. Telephone and web enquiries dropped off gradually to a trickle.  Reduced enquiries, reduced business, reduced income and so it goes.

When times get tough, it is instinctive for many small businesses, (and many large businesses) who rely exclusively on paying for their promotion and marketing, to radically curtail or stop spending on marketing and substitute it with  – you guessed it –  nothing. They then wonder why business continues to slow. Their attitude is “Whew! We survived that month with no marketing expenditure, maybe I can get through the next month.” It continues until you are flattened financially with no hope of regaining any momentum because your own and/or your staff’s morale is in tatters on the floor. One of the most important prerequisites to being a good Shoestring Marketer and business person is self-belief – see the 7 P’s of Shoestring Marketing and Poise, so morale is big deal.

When there is an economic downturn, do not assume that “better” economic times are around the corner and you can run the business on the smell of an oily rag until it picks up. In the last few years the economy has slowed, and slowed, and slowed. It slows, then it slows some more and you’re still in “oily rag” mode, working impossible hours making less money. You don’t have the energy, time or inclination to work “on” the business because you’re so buried “in” the business. It’s a recipe for self-destruction.

Managing Supply & Demand through Marketing Momentum

Rule 1 – Never stop marketing. If you have a business, you should always be doing some from of marketing. You may wish to vary the type and intensity of marketing when your  efforts have been so effective that demand outstrips your ability supply and you risk disappointing or annoying potential customers with long waiting periods or inferior product.

Waiting lists or back orders can be great for your entrepreneurial ego, but no good for your business long term as they threaten your business credibility. Part of being a good shoestring marketer and business person is about matching demand and supply in an acceptable time frame to your customers. When we had more demand than we could supply, we slowed things with a careful combination of price increase and reduction in marketing activity, but we continued to take up and pursue any free exposure opportunities that presented themselves on our laps.