In the early days at Infusion, we did very little marketing.  Consequently, we got very little business.  We did, however, excel at Unreal Tournament.

That’s why we hired Mark.

Mark was on the payroll for a couple of years and helped us out tremendously with our marketing efforts.   During his employment with us, we dramatically increased our lead flow and the number of deals we closed.  The thing about Mark was that he didn’t know anything about marketing – he didn’t  really know anything about anything because he wasn’t a real person.

Shortly after Clate Mask joined the company, he came to us a bit puzzled as to exactly who this “Mark” guy was that we were paying $3,000 a month.

So we explained to him:  “Mark” was the persona we had given to marketing.  We knew that marketing was critical to the success of our young business, but like most start-ups, we didn’t have a CLUE how to market ourselves or our product.  So we decided to start by budgeting $3,000 each month to marketing and that we’d figure things out from there.   Our only rule was that we spend all the money.  Kinda like Brewster’s Millions, only with $3,000 instead of $30,000,000…

And we put him on the payroll to make sure that “he” got paid before we did.

Of course, Clate turned that $3,000 budget into a successful pay-per-click campaign and with the help of influential marketing coaches like Reed Hoisington, Dan Kennedy, and Bill Glazer, we were off and running.

What was your first experience marketing like?  Did you have a coach?  Did you just figure it out?  And what have you found that works for you?