BoxTofu

8 Things we can Learn From Homeless Marketing

Posted on 11. Sep, 2009 by koichi.

When you walk by a homeless person on the street, do you ignore them? But, do you ignore all of them? My bet is that some of them pique your interest, and sometimes you give them money.  This, my friends, is homeless marketing.

Think about it. Most blog owners are very happy if a mere 1% of visitors click on their ads. Online stores are happy if 1% of people buy products. It doesn’t take much, and if a tweak in the way you market something can get you another 0.2% success rate, you’d be very happy. Yesterday, I stood across the street from a homeless guy with a pretty standard “Any help appreciated” cardboard sign. Approximately 0.7% of people gave him money, but of course, his sign was pretty blah.

After doing some extensive research (and by extensive research, I just mean walking around San Francisco for a month), I’ve come to realize that the homeless use marketing tactics that are very applicable to all kinds of businesses. Believe it or not, there are some pretty bright minds “working” in homeless advertising right now, and I guarantee you some of them have 5% or better conversion rates. I even know of one person in particular that has an avid repeat customer (me!). He does one helluva job.

I’ve been examining their tactics  and reverse engineered them for you and your business. Whether you’re the writer of a small blog, or the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, these may be useful for you. [...]

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