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How to get free sponsorship worth $1000s to promote your business
Here's how we did it. My brother wanted to start a database business promoting parties and stuff like that in our local nightclubs and on the island across the water. He wanted me to help him out, and I thought it sounded like a laugh, plus he's my brother.
Our local university was starting a new semester, so all the students were coming back from holidays, and would be gathering at the main lunch area in large numbers during the first week, which they did at the start of every semester.
Me and my brother walked down to the street where all the popular night-clubs were in our town, totally empty-handed . All we had was the idea that we would do a promotion next week at the university, and we would tell those university people that our sponsors were awesome while we asked them to join our database. In exchange for this ridiculously basic... but highly effective form of word-of-mouth advertising for our sponsors, we wanted the sponsors to give us free stuff as a kind of payment. We would use that free stuff as prizes in a competition. To get in the competition, you had to join our database. That was the basic idea.
How we got our first sponsor - the 5 minute meeting We walked into the first club we came across, where we happened to have met the owner before while visiting his venue on Friday and Saturday nights. "Hey," we said... "Uni is starting next week, and all the students are coming back from their holidays. We are going out to the uni next week to promote our new business. We will promote your club at the same time, face-to-face to these people.. Hundreds of people who go out on weekends will hear about your club. Can you give us anything to give them as a prize?"
He thought about it, and said "Well... yeah... um... what about if I give a free dinner voucher?" "Aww yeah," we said. "How much is it worth?" "How about a $50 voucher?" Bingo. We told him to print it up, and we would pick up the voucher next week. It was as simple as that. In and out in just a few minutes.
How we leveraged that first sponsor into getting the biggest sponsor in town - the 2nd five minute meeting We walked out of the first club, and it just so happened that the next club on the street was the most popular club in town. We walked around the back of the club, and up these dingy run-down steps with water pouring across them from out of a broken pipe. Into the upstairs offices, and rang the reception bell. A super-hot chick materialised from out of nowhere and asked what we wanted. Out came our sales pitch... "We are going out to the uni next week to promote our new business. We will promote your club at the same time. Hundreds of people who go out on weekends will hear about your club. We have already got the club around the corner to join and give us a $50 dinner voucher. Can you give us anything to give them as a prize?"
The hot chick listened, smiling in a super-attractive but vacant kind of way... Then simply turned... and looked at another desk further inside the office space. The real manager stuck his head around the partition wall, and said "Nah... not interested... (pause)... What exactly are you guys doing?" We explained our concept - that we would build a database of people who like to go out for entertainment on weekends, then send them emails promoting various events and venues. If the manager wanted, we could send out a free promotion for him to advertise his club, once we had the database built next week. He was warming up to us, but said... "Nah... we don't need advertising. We are the most popular club in town. We pack the place out every weekend. I don't see how it could work." We said, "What about if we advertise to our database and tell people to come here during the times when it is quiet and there are no people in your club yet? You would make more money than usual. We can do that for you for free." Silence for a second.
Then the manager dude said, "Alright. I'll give you guys a $50 drink voucher for you to have some free drinks when you come here." We looked at each other in horror! "No, we don't want anything for ourselves," we said. "We just want stuff to give away to our database, to get them interested in joining so we can tell them about parties like the ones you do here in your club. " The manager suddenly came alive - he suddenly got it, and understood what we were trying to do. "Oh!" he said. "Oh, well... what about if we give you a free keg of beer for your people, and half-price drinks, and we'll give 'em free entry to the club. How does that sound?" "Yeah... that sounds good," we said. (Thinking.... Thankyou, Mr Manager. Over $300 worth of free stuff from the #1 club in town? That's exactly what we need.) Now that the manager guy had given us heaps of stuff, to the tune of about $300 worth of stuff, the hot chick (who was standing there vacantly looking like a blond sex goddess) chimed in... "Yeah, well I manage our other club, and if he's giving you all that stuff, I'll do something similar. Probably 600 x $10 drink vouchers or something..." Holy crap! Over $6000 worth of stuff? "Yeah, ok... that sounds pretty good," we said. And off we went.
We visited about 12 more clubs. Did anything negative happen? You bet. It wasn't all rosy. We walked into a few other clubs and got knocked back immediately, and had to leave with nothing, feeling like cheap-skates for trying to ask for free stuff when they didn't want to give it to us. We received a strong, almost-abusive letter from one entertainment venue, severely demanding that we not use his business name, logo or anything to do with his business at all, in any of our promotions... ever. He was really rude. My brother rang him up to try to explain and to find out why this guy was so extreme, and was practically abused over the phone. We had some managers look at us in disbelief when we explained what we were going to do. For some reason they just couldn't understand our awesome logic that propelled us to boldly and openly ask them if they had any free stuff we could use to promote them - well, actually... mainly to promote us. And so on... Most managers simply didn't respond - they weren't there when we visited, didn't answer our letters or emails, and wouldn't receive our phone calls. But who cares? We had a few hard-core, very positive, very generous managers who had joined our cause... ...and given us $6,400 worth of free stuff. So all those negative dudes were just dumped in our mental wastepaper basket, and we continued happily with our awesome promotion to build our database.
So here's how we used the $6,400 worth of stuff in our first promotion to start building our database and our reputation...
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