5 Unorthodox Marketing Methods to Get Your Business off the Ground
A lot of modern advertising techniques originate from the 60s and, frankly speaking, they didn’t change all that much since then. But the world itself changed, and changed drastically – leading to the decline of traditional marketing methods, such as print and TV advertising, direct mail and suchlike. People are too used to them, they’ve become too savvy to believe anything they hear in advertisements, they’ve learnt to automatically sift them out. Ironically, competition for advertising space is growing stronger, and as a result we get growing prices and diminishing returns.
In such a situation, it is only natural to look for less orthodox ways to bring your brand to clients. Let’s take a look at some of them.
1. Content Marketing
With the emergence of new Google algorithms that render a number of less savory online marketing techniques useless, content marketing has turned into, arguably, the leading trend. However, the ways to use it may differ wildly. You can simply offer some free advice concerning your main business, or provide video manuals, or enroll people on seminars teaching how to use your products.
2. Guerrilla Marketing
Guerrilla marketing is exactly what it says on the tin: small-scale, low-budget campaigns that rely more on ingenuity than on the sheer amount of resources to achieve its results. It is amazing how far one can go if one simply discards the preconceptions of what advertising is and what it isn’t, what it does and what it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter how mundane your product or service is – if you manage to make it look and sound interesting, like this company selling mail-order razor blades, the success is in within your grasp.
3. Posting on Freelance Sites
Freelancers, due to their very nature, have to click on job posts and read their descriptions with a certain degree of attention – which means that if you market through such sites, you get almost 100% guarantee that everyone who clicks on them will read your posts. Bonus points if freelancers comprise the majority of your target audience.
4. Don’t Be
Unless you create something completely and entirely new and original, there are supposed to be dozens (if not hundreds) of similar offers on the market. Here’s an easy way to stand out – don’t be a typical representative of your category. Change the packaging, the online experience, the marketing materials to make it look unlike what it is.
5. Sell Purple Cows
Purple cow as a term was introduced by a well-known modern marketer Seth Godin – it means making your product so unique, unusual and just plain weird that people can’t help buying it or at least telling their friends about it. Tennis ball textured sneakers. Sandals with bottle-openers in their soles. In other words, anything that would make your clients stop in their tracks and wonder what it is.
Modern marketing ventures further and further from well-trodden paths; and very often your success or failure depends on how far away you are ready to step.
Image from shutterstock.com
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