Eight Creative Marketing Strategies
You might not want to admit it but businesses need to be focused on marketing at all times. Even if you have a full client roster or you think you have enough customers, you should keep marketing. However, marketing doesn’t just consist of banner ads and selling. It consists of so much more. If you are stuck with the same old marketing ideas, take a look at how you can make your marketing better with these strategies.
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1. Develop Your Elevator Pitch
When people ask you what you do – whether you’re in an elevator, queuing at the supermarket, at the doctor’s surgery with your children or at a business event – it’s important for you to be able to explain what you do in a succinct way that invites more questions.
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Your elevator pitch isn’t just a 60-second monologue reserved for networking events. It should be more like learning different ways to answer the same questions based on the audience you’re speaking to. You need to leave them understanding what you and your business is about.
2. Get Involved Online and Offline
Get out from behind your computer and get involved in offline events. Go to meetings, business events, and conferences. In addition, participate in webinars and social media. But do it all in a proactive, involved way that advances your business goals and, especially with social media, helps others.
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Before doing any event, online or off, ask yourself which goal being involved in this particular activity helps you achieve. Then, base your participation and how you communicate with people at the event on reaching that goal.
3. Develop Relationships
Finding a person to collaborate with is a great way to improve your business and find new ways to market. By creating short-term joint ventures with individuals and companies who market complementary products and services to the same audience, you can expand your reach.
Don’t form these alliances randomly, though. Each venture and each relationship need to have its own goals involved which align with your overall marketing goals.
4. Write a Book
You’re smart and you know about your niche. You either know how you became successful, or you know a lot about a particular subject that you can share with others. With all the tools available now writing a book, and getting it published can be a simple process. All it’s going to take is time. Be sure that your book has an ultimate goal aside from making money.
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It’s unlikely book sales alone are going to make that much money. But a book used as a creative marketing tool to sell other products and services can help increase your net worth substantially.
5. Speak in Public
Once you’ve written a book, you can leverage it to engage in public speaking at events. Find events that are attracting your target audience and simply go tell them your story. Create a “one page” to market your speaking and subject matter to event leaders.
At first, you may need to do some events free (get permission to record it) and later you can actually make quite a living out of public speaking if you want to go in that direction. If not, the act alone can be a great marketing strategy.
6. Give Your Opinion
Another one of the creative marketing strategies you can use is to find ways to get your name associated with expert status. Use the service Help a Reporter Out (http://www.helpareporter.com/) to find journalists who need answers and who will use your quotes in stories. The more you’re quoted, the more you will become known as an expert. You can do the same thing with targeted and focused guest blogging, expert panels, interviews and more.
7. Ask for Creative Testimonials
Go straight to your current customers and clients and simply ask them to write, record or make a testimonial for you. You can even have a contest to make it more interesting. For instance, “Create a meme about how great my product/service is, share it with friends, get the most votes, and win a £100 gift card to use towards my services.”
8. Break the Mould
The final creative marketing strategy if you really want to differentiate yourself from the crowd, is to find a way to break some rules. You don’t need to be unethical to push boundaries and break rules. Many people believe they have no right to take a leadership role without having first been a follower. That’s not true. You can be a leader without having been a follower first. If you are good at what you do, there is no reason you have to punch any cards or push any particular buttons to be at the top.
Doing some creative marketing means stepping out of your comfort zone and doing something different to your normal activities. There are always new marketing techniques to try, so why not do something new every quarter?
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I’d love to hear of any creative marketing ideas that have worked for you – let me know in the comment box below.
