Last week we told you we were taking a stand at Village Mall, and that rather than guessing afterwards whether it worked, we had written down what we were going to count. We also said we would publish it either way.
So … Either way it is.
The day itself
The gazebo went up at eight. The banners looked good, the screen ran all day, and two of us stood behind a table at Checkers Court from nine until three with a box of capture cards and a great deal of optimism.
Six hours later we had handed out two flyers, signed up one person to our newsletter, and had a lovely conversation with a woman who brought in an old laptop to ask whether it was worth keeping. (It was, just about.)
We were also asked for directions. Several times. Where the pharmacy was, where the bank was, whether we knew if a particular shop had moved. We are an IT company. For one Saturday we were also an information desk, and we would like to think a helpful one.
No cards filled in. No enquiries.
Here is the thing though — nothing went wrong
That is the part we keep coming back to. Nobody overslept, the equipment worked, the screen did not fall over, and the team was there early and stayed late. If you had walked past, you would have thought we knew exactly what we were doing.
The problem was much simpler, and the clue was in the directions.
A shopping centre on a Saturday is full of people buying groceries.
We sell backups, security and Microsoft 365 to business owners. A business owner pushing a trolley with two children attached to it is not thinking about backups. They are thinking about whether they remembered the milk.
Right place for footfall. Wrong place for us. And we could have worked that out from a chair in the office, for free, if we had thought to ask who would be walking past.
What it cost, and what we got for it
A Saturday, the space, and a bit in advertising.
What we got for it was not an enquiry. It was the end of an argument we would otherwise have had every few months for the next two years — "should we do another stand?" — answered properly, with numbers, for the price of one Saturday.
There is a version of this where we never find out. We run a stand every quarter, each one feels busy, nobody counts anything, and three years later we are still doing it.
The bit that did work, which we did not expect
Two adverts ran behind the stand, same budget, same audience, same week. One was about POPIA. The other was about three local businesses using AI to do something ordinary — statements going out on their own, orders coming through ready for packing, a shop that built its own website.
POPIA: R148.53 per conversation. The AI one: R26.13. Nearly six times cheaper, for changing nothing but the subject.
We only know that because every one of our adverts opens WhatsApp with a different word at the start of the message. When an enquiry lands, that word tells us which advert sent it. It costs nothing to set up and it is the difference between knowing and guessing.
And the best thing that happened all month cost nothing at all. We phoned a clinic up the road, had a conversation about their website, and they asked us to build it. No gazebo required.
What we are doing in November
More phone calls to businesses near us, where being up the road counts for something. And the gazebo is not going in the bin. It is going somewhere the people walking past are the people we sell to — a business expo, a chamber morning, anywhere the room came to meet suppliers rather than to buy bread. Same gazebo, better address.
If you are spending money on marketing yourself, steal the only two habits that made this post possible: decide what you are going to count before you spend anything, and make sure every enquiry can tell you where it came from.
We will keep publishing these. November has a few things in it we think will go better — and if they do not, you will hear about that too!