When the economy is in shambles, small business owners have no choice but to get tough, that means they must work harder, smarter and do better in marketing to attract customers. Much of the competition goes for a low-cost high-volume strategy and that makes it even tougher, making it nearly impossible to make a profit while you’re in the middle of a price war. It’s a giant shakeout, and the last man standing makes it through the recession and is able to really make hay with less competition as the economy returns.

Still, business cycles come and go and it’s just the way things are, it is the nature of the beast in business. With less money to spend on advertising, small business owners must be creative and figure out better ways to advertise that don’t cost as much money. One trick that I used to use was to advertise on my customers cars and trade them for free services, free products, or $20 a month. Here is how I worked it.

I would tell my customers that wanted to participate in my program to show up at a certain location between 10 and 2 PM. Then I would have my sign guy there who promised to give me a discount for a large volume. He would put vinyl letters on people’s cars that would advertise my business with tricky little slogans. The prior week I would write down slogans that I thought of, which were catchy and fun, and even had my customers write out slogans they thought were interesting as part of a contest.

Each customer whose car would be lettered could pick any slogan they liked from the pile. And they would get free services each month, or free products simply for driving around their normal day with my advertising on the car. Please consider all this because it worked during the last recession.

Lance Winslow is a retired franchisor – Lance Winslow’s Bio. Lance Winslow is formerly the CEO of WashGuys family of franchises for instance one of Lance Winslow’s favorite companies on the team; http://www.windowwashguys.com/links.shtml/.

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