🍰How to bribe your customers

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Happy HumpDay and all that. Glad to have you along today for the Feature Story. It covers how to make your marketing efforts 10 times simpler — using food. This basic technique is also perfect if you don’t have much of a USP - unique selling proposition.

After that, nibble on the following sections: 

• The Knowledge Base  

• Self Help (shrink talk) 

• Facts & Stats (audiobook boom)

• Get Hacking (Ad Man Goggins) 

Appetizer: Ad of the Day - blast from the past.

Ok, let’s pop the top on today’s Feature Story…

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Feature Story

Simplify Your Marketing with Food Bribes

Bribing your target customers with food is smart. Good food, obviously.

It’s the simplest way to market a business that a dummy like me can think of. Works for any industry.

Because everyone eats. Everyone loves delicious food. 

Sure, handing out flyers or posting a sign is simple. But not as memorable as handing a shopper a sweet red velvet cupcake that might lead to a climax → a sale. 

Get your mind out of the gutter😁.

Think about some of your favorite foods for a minute…

Bet you can remember a decade or more in the past when you ate the best versions of those foods. Yet, you can’t recall three advertisements of the 3,000 you saw last night — can you?

5 of My Memorable Food Moments off Top of My Head:

1. Blue crab claws, Destin, Florida around 2008 (band playing was Carson & Poole)

2. Brown sugar inside a butter biscuit, Grandma’s table, middle school

3. Red velvet cupcake from Leesa - bank teller who sold them as a side-hustle

4. Best pizza I’ve tasted, Clayton, Georgia, May of 2024

5. Buffalo chicken dip, Super Bowl 1999, Falcons vs. Broncos

Can’t tell you one YouTube Ad I saw yesterday, though. 

This is not my wild theory, either. 

Last year, I wrote about some start-up that handed out $15k worth of free pizzas. The result?

Around $1 million dollars in new revenue if I recall right. I’ll try to dig that story up by the end of this section….

Giving away food to draw attention to your business or thank your current customers is simple. Any business owner can do it.

Plus, memorable food giveaways can set a mundane business apart (something a popular marketing concept cannot always do).

Food as Your USP - Unique Selling Proposition

I love the concept of StoryBrand. Great for getting people excited and involved with your brand.

It can be used even in businesses that seem pretty basic.

However, it isn’t easy to tell a hero story about selling printers. Or lawn maintenance. Or soap.

Sure, a creative person could come up with ways to set your printer business apart from the other 50 in your area. 

Even then, many of your potential customers will still see one printer company as the same as the other 49 companies.

What if you’re the only company that drops off hot donuts to local businesses, though?

Pretty sure that’ll make yours the most memorable. 

Not like you have to drop off the food every week. Twice a year will be twice more than your competitors. They’ll be too busy trying to tweak their complicated funnel or flywheel or learning to twerk to go viral on TikTok.

Sorry if I’ve not convinced you that marketing using tasty food is simple, smart, and effective. Fun too, if you’re into that kinda thing. 

If you are convinced, see the following tools and platforms to experiment with this straightforward marketing technique. 

5 Platforms for Buttering Up Your Customers with Food Bribes

1. Goldbelly. Ships signature dishes from famous restaurants nationwide, great for impressive client gifts.

2. Harry & David. Classic corporate gifting with gourmet foods, very professional presentation.

3. Snack Crate. Wide variety of snacks from across the globe.

4. Universal Yums. Name says it all.

5. Williams Sonoma. High-end food items that make strong impressions.

If local food drop-offs are an option, buy from local bakeries.

Know a local baker or chef who ships their goodies for gifts? Let me know. I’ll shout them out in next week’s Inbox Hacking.

That free pizza marketing success story is here (source: CNBC).

Alright. Let’s get to The Knowledge Base below…

Self-Help

Do I know lots of stress busters? Sure. However, I couldn’t have said it better than this shrink when it comes to pile-driving anxiety.

Too long to read? Main takeaways:

1. Inactivity lets anxiety fester. Work it off with action.

2. Action with a friend feels easier and you double the well-being benefit (study showed walking up a hill with a buddy makes it feel less steep).

Facts & Stats

Bonus: What percentage of audiobook listeners are male vs. female? Answer at end of email.

Get Hacking

A specific strategy to implement today

Marketers. We’re a big-brained lot. 

Those brains trip us up, though. 

Keep us from doing the simplest things to make people aware our business exists.

Also, simple rarely means easy. 

So, overcomplicating things is a good way for us to procrastinate too. Gives us an excuse to avoid the hard things below — even though it’s simple to…

• Introduce ourselves to a local business owner

• Test a funny Facebook Ad to stop the scroll

• Send a cold email

What could you do today to tell one more person about your business? If you don’t want to… you should definitely do it. 

Don’t believe me? Ask my favorite psycho (NSFW).

ALT Hack: You don’t have to personally get in front of a giant audience to boost your business. Just aim to get mentioned by someone with a big audience. Research podcasters who are into what you write / talk about. 

Book sales boomed for this author long before he appeared on Rogan’s show. Because Rogan simply mentioned the book (book wasn’t even new).

Thanks for reading Inbox Hacking. Please share it with your peeps - it’s sugar-free but stings a bit.

Shane McLendon - Copy Kingpin

Bonus answer from Facts & Stats section: The majority of audiobook listeners are male (56%), but females make up a nice chunk (44%).