I just read this BBC article and it reminded me of the strangest experiences of my life.

It happened this very week in August 2019.

I drove West from London… into Wiltshire… across the desolate Salisbury plain… and entered a ‘military only’ gate where the barriers had been temporarily moved.

I even took a photo of it:

From there I passed the burned-out tanks as I rattled down a dirt road lined with ominous barbed wire.

Eventually, I reached a compound of block-built buildings, walls riddled with bullet holes from sniper fire, and a domed metal hangar.

This was a place used by the M.O.D for military exercises…

But for one day and night only, it was home to the ‘Delaware Road’ a music event, filled with outsider electronic musicians, avant garde rock bands and DJs.

It was very weird (and a lot of fun) listening to music in a military installation…

Late on Saturday night I ended up Dad dancing in the hangar to a prog-electro DJ

(If that sounds utterly bizarre, look up his amazing career as an analogue synth player and DJ!)

You can see photos and a review of the event here: Delaware Road

But Steve Davis spinning obscure vinyl records in a military base wasn’t even the strangest part of it…

The Ghost Village Bus Tour

The next day, we went on what has to be the WEIRDEST bus tour ever.

You see, the music event coincided with an annual tour that happens on just one day of the year.

A fleet of 40 vintage Routemaster buses travels in a red convoy across the nearby stretch of Salisbury plan to the ‘ghost village’ of Imber.

This remote village used to be home to hundreds of residents, with a pub, a church and a town hall.

But it was sequestered by the British Army before the D-Day landings in 1943.

Its inhabitants were told to move… temporarily, at first.

But they were never to return.

The abandoned village became a permanent site for training exercises – mainly sniper practice and simulations of close combat in urban buildings.

Later, they even built a fake housing estate in the village to mimic scenarios they might face in Northern Ireland.

The only concession the army made was that it would open up a few times a year for relatives of former residents to access the churchyard and the Grade I-listed St Giles Church, which is still intact, albeit battered by bullets.

One is at Christmas, the other is in August, when the bus tour operates for one day only.

Tickets cost £10 for adults and £2 for children…

And this is a hugely popular, sold-out tour.

Yet when you get there, you cannot enter any of the buildings for safety reasons.

There’s no café, no gift shop, and no mobile signal.

Just the windowless shells of houses.

In fact, if you remove the historical context, and look at what people actually pay for, here’s what the ‘service’ is:

An old bus takes you to a place with no shops, no electricity, no mobile signal and virtually nothing you’re allowed to enter.

But when you add the story, it looks like this.

A vintage Routemaster… travelling across normally forbidden military land… to Britain’s mysterious lost village… accessible for ONE DAY ONLY.

Suddenly, you’ve got a serious marketing proposition!

Now the tour sounds really desirable, and you can easily imagine why people would feel an urgency to grab a ticket sooner, rather than later.

This teaches us some very good lessons about marketing any product or service.

Scarcity increases urgency

Nobody urgently NEEDS to see a remote abandoned village.

If the promise was, “Imber is open every day – pop in whenever you’re passing” you’d only get a few passengers each week, and it wouldn’t make a profit after petrol costs.

It’s the fact that you cannot normally see this strange phenomenon that makes it such a compelling draw.

The road is open for a few days each year, and the bus tour runs only once, so if you want to see it, you NEED to act immediately and book the tour, or you’ll miss out.

You can apply this to business marketing too.

For example, limited-opening enrolment periods… annual special reports…. occasional digital vault openings… one-off events.

You could offer..

• The Christmas Amazon Bestsellers Report.
• The September Substack Publishing Challenge.
• 48 Hour Access All Area Pass to Your Personal Trading System Archive

Make sure you emphasise that these are rare, scares or perhaps even ‘never to be repeated’. Then put a firm open and closing date on it, so that people can see there’s a narrow window of opportunity.

Suddenly, the perceived value shoots up, and the urgency to buy intensifies.

Obviously, you cannot do this with every product, but it’s ideal for premium services with limited memberships, live events and occasional special offers.

Exclusive access is highly desirable

There isn’t much to do in Imber. It’s a small village surrounded by dangerous countryside that you’re forbidden to explore upon pain of death.

So visitors generally spend only around 30–60 minutes there, looking at empty buildings from the outside.

Which means they’re not buying the ‘content’ of the tour as much as they are paying for rare and exclusive access.

Information businesses can do the same thing.

Offer higher levels, tiers, or private membership clubs where people get more than just content…. they get rare insider info, access to experts, or special privileges.

Or you can get a similar effect through the way you frame your marketing promises.

For example, rather than “Here are 12 videos about Facebook advertising” you might say, “Come inside and see exactly how I built one of my campaigns from scratch.”

And rather than saying “I’ll give you 3 bonus reports about bestselling Amazon products” you might say, “For three days, I’m opening my private research files to show you what I have pinpointed as this year’s best-sellers.”

You can even use this method to get followers on social media, Patreon or Substack.

To get people to subscribe, offer ‘behind the scenes’ peeks, exclusive content and reports on those channels which you don’t share with the public.

Use Open Loops

Imber is a “lost village”… “abandoned since the war.”… located in “forbidden military land.”

This makes it mysterious and very intriguing.

Because you might wonder….

What does a lost village entail?

What might it look like?

What buildings will remain?

Why is the land forbidden?

Will it feel spooky?

Thoughts like this make people feel compelled to find out more by going there.

In marketing you’d call this an ‘open loop’.

It’s where you tease the reader with a story that hasn’t (yet) got an ending or an explanation.

A classic example is, “They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but then I began to play…”

The reader wonders, “what happened next?”… “why was everyone so surprised”…. “How did they become so good at the piano, suddenly?”

Another is, “What NEVER to eat on an aeroplane.”

This headline makes you think, “What could that food be?”… “Do I eat whatever this food is on aeroplanes?”… “What will happen if I do?”… “Am I in danger?”

So when you create a sales promotion, webinar or email, try not to answer every question that a reader might have right away… and don’t give the game away too early.

Tease with a story, or a promise, that whets their appetite…

• “Later in this presentation, I’m going to show you three key steps that can double your sales in 7 days – but first…
• “The most valuable Etsy advice I ever got came from an unexpected source. And it changed everything…
• “What if I told you that you’ve been breathing the wrong way for your whole life? I think you’re going to find this shocking…”

This will compel the customer to stick around and find out more.

Constraints can become selling points

The temptation in business is to offer everything you can possibly offer, because you’re worried about limiting the customer’s options, and therefore losing sales.

But look again at the Imber tour…

• It’s once-a-year only…
• You have to go on the vintage bus…
• There’s no wi-fi and no phone signal…
• You have limited access to buildings….
• You can’t wander outside of the prescribed area..

These actually become selling points, because they enhance the feeling of remoteness, danger, privilege and exclusivity.

You can use similar techniques in your business, adding constraints and making them part of the sales proposition.

For instance, you’re a busy person with lots of clients, which is why you can only offer a one-day per week window to answer emails or give feedback.

Or perhaps the information you are selling is so sensitive and rare that you can only offer it to 50 people.

Maybe you use your lack of social media presence as a selling point, because it means that you only communicate with a privileged select few via private email.

You can even make the buying process more constrained…

For instance, customers have to join an invitation list if they want to get more info…

Or clients must pass a basic test, submit a proposal, or sign an agreement before they are allowed to join.

These might initially seem limiting.

And yes, you might put off a few more people…

But some customers will feel that these constraints prove that you’re the real deal.

Anyway, if you do get the chance next year, I highly recommend a trip to Imber!

There’s not much to see, or do… but it’s amazing!