Marketing is a brand tent. On the one hand, it involves the kind of over-the-phone pitching that we usually associate with sales, and on the other, it encompasses long-term strategies regarding company vision, values, and personality. As such, even marketing teams that feel that they’re in the know might be missing out on some key strategies that could help them boost the performance of their marketing efforts. This guide’s about some of those strategies, sharing with you overlooked and under-appreciated forms of marketing that you might not have tried before.
Guerrilla Marketing
This one is for the imaginative among you. Guerrilla marketing, as you might be aware, is a form of marketing that doesn’t actually try to get in people’s faces – which might seem counter-intuitive to marketers who are trying to do that all the time. Instead, through a gradual, subtle, and “underground” approach, these marketers run campaigns that try to arouse the curiosity of consumers, who in turn seek out an explanation on their own.
You can see several incredibly successful examples of guerrilla marketing online. Some of them ran off very small budgets compared with the large-scale advertising campaigns that you may be used to running. The secret ingredient is always a dash of imagination – and this can come from the more creative parts of your team, who will take inspiration from case studies to form your own exciting campaign.
Reputation Management
If you’re marketing a consumer-facing brand, then the chances are that it’s been reviewed across several platforms and channels on the internet. The most obvious, perhaps, are the likes of Google and Facebook, which offer consumers the chance to leave their feedback on the company that you’re working for. A 5-star review can really encourage other consumers to trade with you, while a 3-star review, while not damning, can certainly put someone off deciding to trade with you.
Given the primacy of reputation online, it’s surprising that few firms take the time to clean up their online reputations, making them as sparkling as possible. There are firms out there to give you a helping hand in this regard. Find an ORM company (that’s “online reputation management”) to help you understand the ways in which you can tidy up your online reviews, looking fantastic when someone searches you online in the future.
Email Marketing
Thousands of companies don’t market via email because they don’t have a database of email addresses to contact. There’s a very simple solution to this issue: ask for the email addresses of your customers. You can offer them a discount if they leave their email address with you or let them know that you’ll send them exclusive offers and discounts that your store is running, via email, in the future. Many consumers will be happy to participate in that transaction.
Email marketing is still seen as something that isn’t incredibly effective – especially since the advent of the spam folder. But for the cost – often just a couple of hours of someone’s time – you can send a shedload of emails out to your followers. If only 5% of those followers actually click the link you send them, you’ll still experience a decent return on that very small investment – something to bear in mind for your future marketing endeavors.
Website Editing
When you conduct an SEO campaign, the chances are that you’ll focus on backlinks and keywords. That’s understandable, as they are two of the main tenants of SEO. But there is a third major tenant that marketing teams tend to underestimate, in part because marketers don’t possess the technical skills to perform these tasks themselves. That comes in the form of website editing: making a website as easy for Google’s algorithms to trawl through as possible, which gives you a better chance of finishing higher in Google’s search results pages.
In the absence of a skilled programmer or website designer on your team, you should consider bringing in outsourced talent to give your website the once-over. That’ll help you really maximize your SEO efforts, putting your website in the best possible place to impress Google’s algorithms, have its data read thoroughly, and climb up the Google search results, generating more clicks and revenue in the process.
Influencer Marketing
It’s fair to say that influencer marketing has hit the mainstream. Still, there are brands that don’t consider themselves to be “influencer material” in the same way that makeup brands and fashion brands can easily tie in with Instagram influencers with thousands of followers. Instagram is far from the only platform where influencer marketing can take place, though. Think of the small-scale adverts on YouTube as an example or the podcasts that take a short break to promote a partner. These could be targets for you to expand the reach of your brand.
You’ll want to choose your partners carefully. A poor partner could actually tarnish your brand if they end up being involved in a scandal that’s in the public eye. Meanwhile, you should also match your brand, as far as possible, to the content promoted by the influencer you choose. Garden equipment will match an outdoors influencer, whereas a crypto website will match the profile of a trader or technology enthusiast.
Offline Marketing
The vast majority of marketing spend is now directed towards online marketing and advertising. That’s unsurprising because the vast majority of the world’s attention is focused on the internet, whereas a provincial billboard is unlikely to be seen by more than a thousand people. Nevertheless, there are important, effective offline marketing techniques that you may still benefit from.
One of them is to concentrate your spending and your activity on the radio and on television. These media have become far cheaper to advertise on in recent years and yet reach a very wide audience. Posters, flyers, and other small-scale physical marketing techniques also work incredibly well for local businesses that are attempting to market, at most, on a state-wide level.
There you have it: six forms of marketing that your team might be yet to try, yet which may well return on the investment that you place in them.
