If you’re a small business owner, you’re certainly not alone. In the United States, the Small Business administration estimates that there are roughly 30 million other small operations operating within the country’s borders.
That number goes up every year.
What does that mean for you? Well… Mostly nothing good.
Lots of small business owners mean that a lot of people are competing for your customers. The more competition there is, the higher chance you have of fading into obscurity.
In order to stay ahead in today’s impacted market, you’ve got to start getting creative with your marketing tactics.
To help you with that, below, our team has laid out 10 unique marketing idea favorites that can get you (and keep you) on customer’s radars.
1. Follow Up Postcards
We all know about follow up emails. Customers buy something, a few days later you send them an email telling them to buy more.
That’s all well and good but if you really want to stand out, try sending a follow-up postcard.
You already have your customer’s address after all. So, send them a postcard thanking them for their business and give them a coupon code to buy something else.
2. Street Art
If you’re brave, the whole world is a giant billboard for you to promote on.
We walk down streets every day where people have put up flyers with their business’ name on them. Heck, we’ve even seen chalk art on walls and on the sidewalk pushing Twitter handles.
If getting street-wise with your marketing tactics is a good fit for your brand, go for it. Just know that some areas might have specific regulations against doing so.
3. Create Infographics
Infographics are great because they’re visual (which consumers love) and communicate a ton of information. If you haven’t tried your hand at infographic creation yet, get on it.
Don’t have the artistic talent that creating infographics requires? Neither does anybody else.
Use free tools like Canva to get the job done.
4. Repurpose Your Blog Content
You’ve got 100 blog posts up on your website. Great.
Start making those blog posts work overtime by creating videos that communicate the same information. Then, post those videos on YouTube.
The more places that you can recycle your old content, the better!
5. Add Numbers (and Gusto) to Your Blog Post’s Headlines
A blog post titled “Great Fish Tanks” isn’t going to get anywhere near as many hits as a blog post titled “5 Incredible Aquariums That Are Begging You to Buy Them”.
Our recommendation… Give your blog posts a once over. If you’re noticing dull-as-dirt headlines adorning your awesome work, update them to something more catchy.
That’ll improve your CTR (click-through rate) which will boost your sales.
6. Make Your Webinars Evergreen
We all use webinars for marketing. They take a lot of work though which can pull you away from other lucrative business opportunities.
Fortunately, making your webinars work on autopilot comes down to leveraging one unique marketing idea.
Pre-record your webinars and allude to them being live (without actually stating that they are).
Pre-recording webinars that seem live can be achieved by leveraging software like Everwebinar. Everwebinar is pricey though and doesn’t really work well on mobile devices.
A better option would be to use free tools like Wistia to achieve your goals.
7. Allow For Guest Posts
Blogs are a great way to boost your organic marketing efforts. Keeping up with them takes a lot of time though.
Get the best of both worlds by having people do your writing work for free in exchange for backlinks to their site. This is called “guest posting” and if you find a solid guest poster that can create great content for your audience, you’ve struck gold.
8. Cross-Promote
A great unique marketing idea that we’re seeing pick up a lot of traction lately is cross-promoting.
A good cross-promotion strategy usually looks something like this:
Develop a relationship with a related business that doesn’t sell your same products (for example, if you own a car wash, find a car dealership to partner with). With your relationship in place, have the business you’ve partnered with refer their customers to you and you start referring your customers to them.
You can even add each other’s businesses to your website.
9. Engage Your Social Media Audience
Social media is a two-way street. Your followers expect you to follow them as much as they’re following you.
So then, to enjoy more traction on your various social platforms, start liking, reposting and commenting on what your followers share.
This sort of organic engagement will make it so you appear to be more involved in your community which will translate into deeper engagement with your posts and more consumer affinity for your brand.
10. Upgrade Your Packaging
Don’t just ship your products to customers in a regular old brown box. The shop here and other brand experts say that you should be leveraging your packaging as a billboard.
Throw your logo on your boxes, use branded tape and do anything else that you can think of to make your packaging pop.
Small adjustments here could net you big returns in the way of boosted visibility and sales.
Wrapping Up Unique Marketing Idea Suggestions
We hope that the unique marketing idea suggestions that we’ve laid out above have inspired you to put more thought into how you’re engaging with customers.
If you’re looking for more inspiration, we suggest browsing more of our business and marketing related content on MENA Entrepreneur today!
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