The POPstart Affordable Marketing Offer

An Affordable Marketing Offer That Gives Beyond The Season

It’s the season of giving! To many that means giving presents. To some that means giving our time to help others. And to a few, it means finding a way for a business to improve the community. For POP, we have a program for helping our community all year through our introductory affordable marketing offer for new businesses – the POPstart Program. 

 

POPstart helps new businesses to get access to marketing that normally only established businesses can afford.

We don’t claim to be running a charity. We obviously get benefit from being able to offer our services. But it is a program that we use to help our community grow entrepreneurs. So now, in this season of giving, it seems like the perfect time to discuss POP’s program for helping out our community – the POPstart Program, our affordable marketing alternative.

Sometimes You Can Give Too Much

 

Coming up in the non-profit world, a spirit of community has always been important to me. When I started POP, I knew I wanted to use POP’s services as a way to help the people who most needed them. But when I first began, I was a bit too generous.

At first, I gave away quite a bit of my labor to business owners who told me they needed the help in exchange for future work. I had an offer that included a free website upfront if you signed up for a year of social media.  Unfortunately, that led to some unscrupulous business owners taking what they could get for free and then breaking contract.

You live and you learn. But it was a disturbing experience. It led to questioning what we could do to help others while still protecting ourselves. 

As POP came up through the Gauntlet business incubation program  I knew we needed to find another way to give back that would keep me protected. After discussing it with my wife, the solution we came up with was the POPstart program.

What is the POPstart Affordable Marketing offer? And How Did It Begin? 

With POPstart, we allow select new businesses (business established less than a year ago) to start with a full-service monthly marketing package but work up to market value prices.

Business owners that get the POPstart package begin at about half price for the first 6 months then go up incrementally until they are paying full price. 

We had considered alternatives in which we offered an introductory package that included less marketing work but this struck us as wrong for both POP and the customer.

For the customer, this went against our 2QC formula. POP would be providing Quality and Consistency but not in the right Quantity. So, we felt that our customers would not get the most benefit from this.

Further, the largest amount of work is done upfront for POP when we establish, learn about, and onboard our clients. So even if we weren’t writing the same number of posts, we still were doing the biggest portion of work that needed to be done upfront. 

So even if we were doing less monthly, the difference in effort would not equal the difference in price. 

Why New Business Marketing Packages?

When a business is starting, that business is most in need of marketing and the least likely to be able to afford it. 

When you start with mistakes, in marketing or anything, the patterns you establish when you begin can be hard to shake later even if you realize your error and try to correct. So we didn’t want business to try to start by doing it on their own and then bring us in later. 

To help business begin on the right foot, our introductory affordable marketing package was just the trick to allow us to serve the people we most wanted to serve without making it price prohibitive.

It also allows for a win-win situation because as we help the business grow, it makes more money and is eventually able to pay POP full price. At POP, we love win-wins.  

 

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