In a Marketing Rut? Get Innovative!

You’ve optimized your website keywords, populated your social profiles with content, and maximized your print advertisements and direct mail campaigns… but your traffic and revenue still hasn’t increased.

If this sounds familiar, you may be stuck in a marketing rut. Rather than continuing your same old, same old marketing tactics, utilize a few innovative ideas to jump-start your campaigns and start increasing your revenue.

Get Strategic with Email

You’ve got a customer mailing list already, and you’ve automated your system to send out regular announcements, coupons, and personalized messages to your customers.

Unfortunately for your email marketing campaign, Forrester Research has found that the number of marketing emails a customer receives each year will reach 9,000 by 2014. Contributing to email overload isn’t going to cut it anymore – you need to try something different.

• Take advantage of third-party e-newsletters that are already being sent to your target demographic. Don’t buy access to their email list, though – instead, buy an advertisement in their newsletter.
• Placing an ad in another company’s newsletter helps you reach qualified subscribers without having to send a separate email. Your ad’s placement in the e-newsletter lends your company greater authority and increases your click rates, as opposed to an unsolicited “cold call” email tactics that lead you straight to the trash folder.

Get Creative with Video

Create a promotional video about your company and its products and release it on popular internet video sites. Link to it on your social media profiles as well as on your website and in your promotional emails.

Diversifying the ways that you reach customers – online versus in-person, text versus video – can help you connect more with your target audience.

• Your video should be interesting, memorable, and relevant to your business’s services and industry. Check out the most popular videos currently floating around the internet and consider what makes them so interesting to viewers – why do viewers constantly share and quote those videos?
• When making your video, try to connect your business with other topics that interest your target demographic. The music, video style, subject, and content should correspond with your target demographic’s style and tastes – but don’t be afraid to toe the line in order to make it interesting.

Go Guerilla

Guerilla marketing campaigns are non-traditional, attention-grabbing, and often surprising tactics that generate a lot of buzz and attention when correctly implemented. For example: a Scottish radio station’s guerilla  advertisement for “Free Air Guitars” dates from at least 2007, but is still popular all over the internet.

With most styles of marketing, you want to reach your prospects in a place where you are most likely to influence their purchase. Not so with guerilla campaigns – they pop up where people least expect, and the memory they create lasts long enough to influence purchases much further down the road.

• Examine your products and services. How can you present them to your target audience in a clever and unpredictable way, to create a lasting impression? Don’t be afraid to brainstorm without reservation – some of the most successful campaigns probably sounded ridiculous in the board room.
• Many guerilla marketing campaigns are customized for a specific space and placement – billboards above a specifically-shaped building, posters along a certain walkway, a certain place on a bus or park bench. Look at your traditional advertising spaces with fresh eyes in order to spark an innovative idea.

The key to breaking out of your current marketing funk is to look at your advertising campaigns with fresh eyes. Step out of the box and find a different, innovative approach to presenting your products and services to potential customers.

Megan Webb-Morgan is a web content writer for www.ResourceNation.com. She writes about small business, focusing on topics such as business sales. Follow Resource Nation on Facebook and Twitter, too!