XYZ Barter

How to Attract New Customers without Spending a Dime

XYZ Barter — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 09:50:47 +0000

In today’s economy gaining new customers can be a huge challenge. People are spending less, they are more skeptical, and advertising rates are increasing. What is a small business supposed to do? Well, it is not a widely known fact, but almost every TV or radio station has unpaid airtime. Now, if you would just call them up and ask for the “unpaid airtime slots” they would say they don’t know what you are talking about. If you are aware of the barter opportunities that exist for this airtime, then you will be able to thrive as a small business in a down economy. Here is what one small company did years ago to gain a foothold in retail markets, and become a huge success.

Icy Hot, a brand name soothing gel for your aches and pains was a small company with no advertising budget, and a small customer base. They knew they had a good product though because most people that bought the product stayed a customer for an average of three years, and bought 4-5 packages a year. The product cost about $1 to make a single package, and sold for $3 per package. The company had a lot of extra inventory because not many retailers would sell a product that there was little or no advertising for.

The company took the inventory and went to a radio station and offered them the opportunity to sell the packages for $2 each (a significant discount from any retailer). The radio station would get to keep the entire sale of $2 just for promoting it on the station. The radio station agreed and less than a week later, had sold over 20,000 containers of the product.

This campaign raised over $40,000 in profits for the radio station which they loved, however the big winner was Icy Hot, who gained over 15,000 new customers. The lifetime value of these customers was over $350,000. The company “bartered” their extra inventory (cost of $20,000) for free advertising, which gained them many new customers. The company did this with many radio stations, and before long were getting huge orders from retailers. The total gain over the new customer’s lifetime product purchases was millions of dollars. Not to mention all of the free advertising they received from the radio stations.

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XYZ Barter — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 02:46:28 +0000

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Barter Enchances Cash Business, Not Replaces Cash Business

XYZ Barter — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:13:55 +0000

I’m writing this post because often times the first objection to barter is “well it won’t pay my rent or my credit card or car payment.”

The response is that barter is not meant to replace your cash business. It’s meant pay you in times when you have NO CASH business coming in. It’s a supplement, an addition to cash business. In other words it meant to keep you from getting $0, zip, nada. Unless you are operating at 100% capacity in a cash, then you have room to barter that excess capacity (time or inventory) until your business grows to the point where you can’t handle any more non-cash business. And that’s a good problem to have (at least in my personal opinion).

A hotel that has 10 vacancies on any given night gets $0, whereas bartering those vacancies will bring in full retail in Barter Dollars to spend just like cash. So you have a choice, get nothing or get barter dollars that you can spend on with another companies under utilized capacity. It’s a win-win.

So in essence this assumption is merely an error in the understanding. And unfortunately this error costs a lot of business owners a lot of money in referral business, higher cash prices for items they are purchasing anyway and lower profits and cash flow.