Pumpkin-Patch Marketing: How To Attract A Blizzard Of Clients With No Budget, No Advertising And No Connections

This is absolutely brilliant. Maybe your photographer didn’t even plan this, but it is still brilliant.
Actually I was thinking of going with the calling card idea from a previous post, as I have just moved to a new town. I especially liked the puzzle idea… but that’s off-topic… nm

The second podcast actually had Dickie Adams talk about how he approaches clients to do work for them and to me it really gives off the same vibe as the photo lady you discussed..

I’m a PHP programmer and personally I find it really hard to apply these type of tactics to my area.. As it stands I only just ventured into the freelancing thing part-time to get a feel for it, I enjoy it but my expertise doesn’t exactly host for a very easy market to apply this on. Aside of the fact that I’m from the Netherlands and the market over here isn’t as big as it is in the US so I can’t really directly access a lot of my potential clients either..

Just my thoughts tho, if anyone has suggestions on how to do this I’d love to hear em!

This is absolutely genius! It’s a totally disarming, genuine, and human way to build clientele while doing stuff that you enjoy. I was at a Home Depot looking at tiling and flooring, and this guy noticed that I looked perplexed. He asked me what my project was and offered excellent suggestions, walking around Home Depot with me for about 20 minutes pointing out colors and textures and bargains. I told him I was learning to tile and wanted to do it myself, and he sat down on a cement bucket and taught me the best way to plan it out and to calculate what I needed. After helping me pick out tile and grout and all that, he offered to email me information about how to lay the tiles properly, as well as to pop in when I was working to make sure I was doing it right, and he actually did! So who do you think I recommend to anyone who needs tiling done now? The project I was doing at the time was a small bathroom, but when I need my kitchen tiled next month, you bet I’m going to be calling him!

Great strategy. It’s all about being prepared, and then following through, as you said, with the delivery, because people remember that.

Johnathan, your excellent example is another proof that it is all about being creative. There are plenty of great opportunities and people who expand their horizons always win!

Rian, there are a few things you can do but you need to wrap your skills and create a product with meaning (click on my link, the last post is about building value). As I wrote, it is about being creative:

1. You should not limit yourself to your area. You have this great opportunity to offer your services to the whole world, especially the US. And there are many places you can use techniques described above. For example, you may create an interesting Facebook application, create a group of Freelancers from your area, spread the news, go viral…

There are so many events taking place in the Internet that you can be everywhere without leaving your country. There are plenty of programmers in the world but only few create real value and change the world with their skills. Your talents are precious.You can also save some money and go to London, which is not so far from you and attend a conference, do some networking etc.

2. You can create a nice portfolio and start building small and simple apps that will make people’s life easier and spread them virally (blog users, site owners etc.).

3. You may contact other freelancers – graphic designers, flash experts etc. and form a partnership to have a stronger position when looking for clients.

4. I had the same problem in my area. Market wasn’t very attractive. I know live in Manchester (UK) and a lot of agencies say that finding the right employees is very difficult and even harder is to keep them. That is why they employ people all around the world to meet dealines. We have skype, emails, do we need anything else? Imagine there are a lot of companies in the US or UK that need your skills. How will you approach them?

To summarize, first of all – think about value, meaning, product you can create, and second, be clever in offering it to people. I know it is hard but the world is waiting for you out there. Grab it!

That’s pretty cool. I take it the quality of the shots didn’t go against her business, and the potential quality of her work?

This is a fantastic idea. I tried something similair a little over a year ago but it wasn’t meant as a marketing ploy.

I’ll be definitely giving this idea some thought.

Interesting article and idea. I like the prospect of the no-push freebie.

I suppose an equivalent to the snapshot and deliver with no sales push would be to maybe make a mock up of what their site could look like and email or hand deliver it printed, no strings attached. Maybe even use a generic layout that would work with multiple businesses and then once you’ve got them hooked you can discuss a custom look and feel.

Walking into a business and talking to the owner/manager, giving them this print out and a smile with a handshake with no sales push and your card attached might net you a lot of business. Never thought about doing that before. Would work from mom and pop shops to small businesses for sure.

Great analogy and article! I agree with the fact that you have to be creative in promoting your business. Having been in a few ventures before, money is tight when first starting out and this is where your creativity will make or break your business.

One of the methods that I use is just talking to people about what I do and let them know if I can ever help them or anyone they know, to give me a call. I have gotten a couple of leads this way.

Another method for any business is to leave your business cards where ever you can. In a restaurant, on a bulletin board, on a counter in the car repair shop. You never know who might pick one up, plus the cards are generally cheap enough to do this.

As for the pumpkin patch, great analogy since I was just there with my daughters. I should have taken my camera, gotta remember that one for next year!

Ahh! But did it really work? Are you still doing business with her? Do you have future projects planned to use her skills? Or, did you just take the freebie and run?

I think that most people probably just take the freebie and say thank-you. It would be interesting to hear about follow-up, though.

Funny one.
Actually, as I am aslo a photographer, I already tough about this in a hiking day 2 years ago…, took a shot of a couple and send them by email… thinking that was a nice move of mine to maybe get a new client – a least a visitor on my site. (in the eamil, I had put a link to the jpeg photo hosted in my site instead). But that was me giving them the card – they do email you for a free memorable moment on “film”

This is not really new thinking in marketing. It’s simply a combination of what we call ‘personal selling’ and ’sales promotion’ with subtle advertising.

Personal selling, as the name suggests is approaching the potential customer in person in order to sell to them.

Sales promotion is presenting the customer with a special deal or offer that persuades them to try your product/service. It quite often takes the form of a free giveaway that allows the customer to experience the benefits of your product or service without paying anything.

The advertising comes in when she sends you the email with the photo. It is both an example of the quality of her service and a pathway to her website.

This kind of strategy is not new to corporate marketing, but it’s interesting to see a freelancer use it so effectively. It’s a very smart bit of marketing on her part.

Any ides on how this kind of approach would work for a writer? Seems like anything free that involves copy, would take longer than a quick photo snap and an email. Trying to figure that one out

Hey Gang,

Okay, some answers. I had the pictures in my inbox when I got home and they were pretty good. I immediately clicked on the link to her website to see what else she did. Here’s where it fell apart, the site was…well…aweful. Very unprofessional and the portfolio pictures that were up there did not draw me in. BUT, had the website been higher-quality and the portfolio solid, I would have definitely considered following up with her for portrait work.

Love the example about the tile guy in Home Depot, too, similar idea!

Hi.
The strategy you’ve described is very effective. I’ve founded about that myself.
I always do couple of layouts for the project – and client buys just the one he choose.
So after each project I stay with couple of layouts – so I figure out that I’ll start to give them away.
As soon as I’ve started the “download free layouts here” section on my site – more and more people started to ask me about new projects. (and beside that – you feel very good when sharing).
Cheers

Hey Gang,

Let me throw this out for next week’s column – I’d love to mix in some mini-case studies and solutions, so if anyone wants some free help from me (and, of course, from our awesome family of readers), just e-mail me, sharing who you are, what you do and what your marketing/sales challenges and goals are and, if it works for the column, I’ll use you as a case study and offer specific strategies to implement.

You can get me at jonathan [at] jonathanfields dot com.

Have a great weekend!

Jonathan

This will work nicely with what I do. I am a freelance photographer. The thing about having a nice camera is that I get stopped by random people asking what I have there, giving compliments and such, this automatically attracts potential clients for business. Then again when another photographer without their camera approached me, and start talking about how much he loves Canon it can be distracting…

This is a great example and another excellent article Jonathan! It works perfectly for photography, where snapping and emailing a few photos is very quick and easy for her. However, I’m having trouble finding a parallel in my field of web design. First of all, there isn’t one place where a bunch of people all needing websites will be gathering. I do business with individuals, small business, and big businesses in all different industries. I suppose a could target one small group that I wanted to get more exposure with (let’s say I wanted to do websites for musicians) and I go could to local gigs and find where they hang out. But rather than targeting my market (people who need websites, or who’s current websites need to be redone!) I’m targeting an industry that I’m interested in but may or may not have any connection to what I’m offering. It’s not nearly as direct or effective of an approach. Then, even if I find the right people, what can a present them with? I’m not the kind of person who does no-spec designs just for the chance of a potential job. While emailing them a photo would take a few minutes, emailing them a free design for their homepage would take hours of work. It just doesn’t seem practical in this industry.

But, I absolutely love the idea. If anyone has any ideas for how to make this work for web design I’d love to hear more ideas.

Hey Guys, your Feed is broken in my Firefox Live Bookmarks. Just thought I would let you know.

I co-founded a nightclub photography business with a partner in Sydney and we are contracted to take peoples photos from Wed to Sun night at various club events around town. It got too much so we took on an additional 2 subcontractors to fill in the gaps.
We upload an average of 100 photos per event and usually cover an average of 15-20 events a week and are paid by event promotors or nightclubs. Each person is handed a card to find their photo online and thats our business.
Recently weather it was consciously or sub consciously I was in search of more money and decided to branch out into a t-shirt community website on my own. The traffic traffic generated from the photography site is fed through to the t-shirt site via an advertising banner and is specifically targeting the market I want.
So essentially what this turns out to be is me being paid to advertise my own products.
Genius? …i thought so.

@Benek: I clicked through to the comments to see if anyone had mentioned ideas for this wrt web design. I’d be interested to see if anyone has ideas about this. I’m a pretty creative guy and am having trouble thinking up ideas.

great post… hmm… albeit a bit harder to do, but maybe I could do it with video

What you said are nearly the same with what Joe Girard said in his book “How to Sell Anything to Anybody” which is using subtle, soft way to advertise/market – don’t advertise when there is no need to.

Like Pumpkin-Patch Marketing post, you said that you thought she want you to pay her but that’s not what happened but she managed to offer you something irresistible and that is a portrait of your daughter and yourself.

Instead of offering you her service (which you need to pay), she offer to help you take picture and send it to your email address and she sold something more valuable, which is your trust and how good she is. I’m sure she is in demand right now.

What a great way to illustrate such a smart marketing concept! Nice job!

but shame on you, for still calling mp3s albums…

Hey Rian,

I’m looking for php programmers. If you had added a link to your comment post I would have contacted you.

I find this principle impossible to apply to other disciplines than photography or video (”instantaneous” work)… how would you make this work with graphic design, illustration, php programming, writing (as one reader already pointed out), etc.

Or did I miss a point here? To me this seems to be off topic for most of the freelancers reading this.

For online work, I’d think it would be better to hang out and soft-sell in online communities. Like the Home Depot example, hang out in communities where people ask each other for help like Experts Exchange, answer their questions, follow through, and then at the end you can drop the name of your business. Or like the pumpkin patch example, you could hang out in a virtual community like Second Life, go to the right places, and wait for people in need of web design to come to you.

I’m a freelance Yoga Instructor. I loved the concept of how you provide value free of cost in a casual manner.. and then pitch your service as a follow up.

I’m sure other have this same question, but how can one apply it to a service such as writing, artist, etc..?

My guess is to simply offer advice if you have something other than photography that you do. And then hand people your business card as their about to leave?

Any other ideas?

Interesting. Personally, I find that it’s not for me as it seems too much like speculative work and that’s a trap for web designers that I’m not crazy enough to fall into. That said, I have to admit the networking value in this concept and I can see it as a valuable method for other kinds of professions.

I don’t know if this is an example of – or a warning about this kind of marketing approach. Through a strange series of events arising out of the dangerous combination of chasing a pretty woman and honoring a drunken bet I found myself in the student union of a university writing 5 minute poems for people.

A very large guy liked the doggerel I wrote for his girlfriend and asked if I was good at term papers. Just two years out of my masters, and cocky, I said yes. It doesn’t take that long to research and write a B level undergrad paper of 300-500 words. That led to being his term paper writer for a couple of years. I was careful and didn’t ghost write for many other jocks and actually wrote original papers, dumbed down appropriately, so there was little danger of getting caught. I actually love to do research, so had fun, made good pocket money and got great tickets to a number of games including an NCAA regional basketball tournament. The large guy got off academic probation and ended up playing in the NFL for a couple of years. We still keep in touch.

Debate the morals of the situation as much as you want. Being public with your skills will result in work if you follow through and produce.

Just off the top of my head, for example, as a pencil portrait artist you could still take a photo and offer the free email photo and when they went to your website you would of course have stunning examples of your artwork, advertising that you can turn their favorite photo into a treasured portrait.

michael,

I like your response because it demonstrates that this strategy does work. I like what you say:

“Being public with your skills will result in work if you follow through and produce.”

More than anything, it’s the follow through that makes the difference!

What I find inspiring about this idea is it raises my awareness around the abundance of casual marketing opportunities we could be seizing.

It sounds like she placed herself there on purpose but how often do we just let great opportunities go by when we could shamelessly flaunt who we are and what we offer?

Read the topic & all the remarks so far. And I for one will implement a strategy similar to the Pumpkin Patch example.

Many have commented about the difficulty of using soft marketing in their specific industry. And I acknowledge some of them may be in industries where this would not work for them. But for many others it is still possible to transform the Pumpkin Patch idea to work for them. As an example writers, web designers, php programmers, lawyers, researchers, dentists, dance teachers, toy designers, etc… can and could benefit from using soft marketing. But it will take ‘out of the box’ thinking.

Let’s use a freelance ‘researcher’ using the pumpkin patch example to explain just one of many possibilities. Researcher attends a book signing event for a new book about the ‘building of Disney’. Many large ‘disney’ character cut-outs are displayed throughout the area and people with ‘book in hand’ are standing around admiring the characters. So researcher with camera in hand does the pumpkin patch and takes pictures of persons with their favourite character, gets their email address, gives them his business card so they will recognize his email address when they receive his send (just in case it goes into spam), he forwards a LOW resolution picture via email with a ‘time-sensitive’ link to his site where they can download the FREE HIGH resolution picture. Of course, the researcher has created a SPECIAL page to introduce his varied research services from ‘high-tech’ to ‘family-tree’, offers a newsletter or blog sign-up to keep them informed, and makes it very easy for them to ask you to contact them. All this on ‘one’ quick-read page, with a ‘one-click’ link to download their picture – after all, the visitors are expecting a no-strings attached free picture.

So what has been gained by the researcher: trust from those responding, visitors to site which ups google search numbers, visitors finding out a bit more about your services, permission to update them with newsletter or blog, possible now or future client, now or future referral – since they trust you they may offer leads as thank you, community awareness, etc … Now also keep in mind the 6-degrees theory and you have just turned say 100 visitors into a multitude of possible clients all by who knows who associations.

That seems awfully good to me for a fairly ‘low or no-cost’ marketing program.

Don’t have time to manage the program – perfect time to hire your teenage computer geek and keep it all in the family. See it just gets better and better.

Thanks for the great starter article! I will never look at pumpkins again without thinking about this strategy.

I got one of my best clients in a similar way. i was dropping my dog off at a very reputable kennel in Austin, and i’d been dying to redo this kennel’s website (hoping at minimum for trade for kennel services). The owner happened to walk in talking about a banner she’s designed that she just hated and why didnt it look right? so i said “well, let me take a look” and i showed her how it was off balance and by moving this here and that there, that it would flow more evenly. I offered to run home and mock up what i was describing. She was thrilled, especially bc as the owner, she didnt have time to mess with a banner. so i promptly returned the banner via email with a link to my online portfolio, and 5 years later, she’s still a great client and friend. And yes, i get paid AND trade for boarding services

This idea works well within certain industries. I’m an automotive photographer and have occasionally shot car shows. If I get a good shot of someones car that’s in the show, I’ll show them and give them my business card. I’ve had many people contact me to have a dedicated shoot for their car… it’s worked great cause they are my exact genre of work.

Great post!

I really like this idea and its adaptable for almost all types of work and person.

As an example, cards and whats known as “junk mail” sent out around the country and on average, 95% will throw it away, that means 5% will open it up and read it and its about 1% that will buy the product or whatever the company is selling. So even though only 1% buy, the company still makes a decent profit. Therefore, if the lady at the pumpkin patch was to send 10 people the pictures with her portfolio attached, there could very well be a good chance that one of those people will use her in the future, which means she has a 10% return rate, compared to 1% and shes doing all free.

Something like this could work for web. Imagine taking a photo of a family and asking for the mom or dads name. Next email them with a PURL (Personal URL). That way when they get to the page with there photo, there is other content that has there name in it. “Hey John, thanks for letting me take your photo! I set up this web site so you can see the photo and email it to your friends. Enter there name here____ and there email here ____ and ill send them a link.”

Then that form emails a new PURL to that persons friend. Rinse and Repeat.

Here’s the clincher, the confirmation message is the sales pitch. “Thanks John! I’m sure Sue (name entered in the form) will enjoy your photo!
Did you know i do web design? Yeh i designed this system for YOUR photo. If you or some one you know might be interested in web design, you can contact me here.”

You get the idea.

I guess the email to the Friend could have some sort of sales pitch in it referring to the site you designed and set up for there friend.