Business owners are always looking for ways to stand out from the crowd. Of the many ways to do that, one that is often overlooked is creative marketing. By engaging in marketing tactics that few others in your market space use, you stand a good chance of reaching prospective customers that your competitors are missing. Here are 8 creative marketing ideas that can help boost your business:
4 Ideas for the Real World
Get yourself out there – literally
There is still a place for distributing flyers house to house, billboards and posters, and even some chalking on sidewalks or other temporary signage. These tactics are obviously most effective for locally oriented businesses, but they can work for anyone.
Unique sponsorships
Cities of any size offer some unique marketing opportunities, if you’re willing to think outside the box. When most business owners think of sponsorships, sports teams immediately come to mind. But, if you think creatively, you’ll discover all kinds of unique sponsorship opportunities. For example, you could create and sponsor a young inventors program in your town, or a transportation program similar to citi bike.
Seminars and workshops
Although webinars have become a very popular marketing tool, there are still some people who prefer the human to human element of a seminar or workshop. There are also some subjects that are better-suited to a “hands-on” approach. An example of this is the Home Depot workshop program.
Send snail-mail once in a while
Everyone uses email these days. But, according to Marketing Charts, only 53 percent of emails are looked at by the recipient for at least 8 seconds. From on online marketing perspective, that’s actually pretty good. But, if you want to set yourself apart from your competition, develop a habit of sending handwritten holiday, birthday, or thank you cards to past and current clients, valued partners, people in your referral network, connections who have helped you, and anyone else you can think of who might help you in your business.
4 Ideas for the Virtual World
Get real and go live
Businesses are certainly aware of the effectiveness of social media marketing, but many have yet to embrace the idea of posting real-time video content on their various social media pages. Whether it’s Facebook Live, Twitter’s Periscope, YouTube’s Live Streaming, or some other medium, live video is a tool with great promise. That’s because people can relate better to the unrehearsed “you” than the contrived, polished version. That’s not to say professionally produced video is dead. Far from it. But a pinch or two of your brand behind the scenes or engaging with customers puts a human touch that’s not otherwise possible online.
Offer webinars and how-to videos
As effective as live seminars and workshops are in the offline world, webinars and how-to videos are great online marketing tools. Yet many businesses whose products and services could be effectively marketed with webinars and how-to videos shy away from them. That makes these tactics fertile ground for marketing virtually any business, even if your webinar is nothing more than a digital sales presentation.
Translate your website into multiple languages
We live and operate in a global community, and that community is multi-national in terms of language. Although English has long been the international language of business, that doesn’t mean it’s the universal language of consumers. So, even if you do business primarily in the United States, you probably has prospective customers for whom English is a second language. By translating your website into other languages commonly used in the U.S., like Spanish and Chinese, you’re making it easier for people to do business with you who read those languages better than they do English.
Publish an online magazine
Before you run and hide from this one thinking you haven’t the time to continually create content and do all the other stuff necessary to keep an online magazine going, relax. Publishing an online magazine is as easy as sharing relevant content on social media; and, if you’re not already sharing curated content on social media, you should start. But publishing an online magazine takes content curation to a whole other level. Content curation and publication tools like paper.li make creating and distributing your online magazine simple and easy.
Hopefully, you’ve read something here that you can use in your business, or we’ve managed to stimulate your own creativity. If you’re already using some creative marketing tactics, or you’ve thought of something today, we invite you to share those in the comments section below.
To learn more about how to improve your marketing strategies, give us a call at 661-702-1310!
