A lot of marketing advice has just been recycled over and over. You’ll find the same marketing strategies and tips across the board no matter what “expert” sites you frequent. While some of these ideas may work great, following tired old strategies is not the way to increase exposure in the market. You have to be different. You have to shine over the monotony.
It can be remarkably difficult to build a brand in today’s world because of a simple, yet blinding, issue: saturation. Everyone is looking to make it big, and everyone is desperately seeking an easy and surefire way to do it. Most likely, this is why the same overused and decrepit information is being passed around. Most of it worked in the past sure, but eventually the novelty will wear off.
To stand out, you’ll need to be different – you’ll need to be innovative and fresh. It’s a bit scary, but the best way to do that is to adopt some rather unconventional tactics. To get you in the right mindset, we’re going to share a few strategies that are, well, let’s just say they go against the grain.
Remain Honest and True to Your Word
True honesty is something a lot of brands and companies choose to ignore. To market your own brand, you can be different by remaining transparent. Don’t be afraid to open yourself up to criticism and scrutiny. In fact, if you try to squash negative feedback completely, it will almost always drag your brand down.
Buffer, a social media management tool, uses this idea to disclose revenue with their customers. On their open blog, they publish marketing and revenue reports every month, without fail. In the same reports, they allow customers to see how much money the company made and even reveal traffic information. In a recent move, the company published salary information showing off how much its employees made. Many publication sites including Quartz, The Huffington Post and The Next Web saw this information and praised the company for being bold. In turn, this generated a lot of attention for Buffer by increasing both the customer base and exposure of the brand.
We’re not saying you need to publish the same exact information. We’re merely pointing out that transparency and honesty can do a lot in terms of marketing when used properly. You don’t need to deceive your customers in order to make a sale.
You Don’t Need to Blog Frequently
It’s important to note that consistency is still important. For example, you don’t want to go months without publishing a blog or new content because then everyone will forget about you.
That being said, you don’t need to publish something every day, multiple times a day. (Especially for brands, like Evisupply Solinst Pumps, whose main target audience often don’t go online to read blogs.)
Most readers and customers don’t have time to check a site that frequently anyway. Because of this, a lot of sites, especially content heavy ones, end up publishing content that never gets looked at. Not only is this a waste of resources, but it also takes up valuable space on the site that could have been used for more important and more effective content.
You can move past these issues by posting rather infrequently. When you do this, each piece of content becomes that much more important. This also encourages fans to read everything that you publish instead of skimming over irrelevant topics.
Renowned blogger, Peter Lewis, wrote about this in his article “In Praise of Infrequent Bloggers.” The strategy works, because it encourages customers to continue checking the site in question for new content. Furthermore, when said content does arrive, everyone knows it will be worthwhile, and they devour it happily.
Offer Customers an Experience
Instead of going out of your way to get every potential customer to notice you, spend time creating an experience for those who do.
Audi used this strategy with their Spheres Project. They used digital showrooms in Copenhagen to set up a rather unique experience for their audience. In the showrooms, they used a planetarium-like setup to show off how their new interactive control system works. Instead of focusing heavily on marketing, they simply showed off their product to interested parties in a pretty cool way. The project got a lot of attention, partly because the spheres displayed all over the city, but also because those who were able to interact with the demo carried the experience out into the world with them. This is exactly why viral marketing is so effective, audiences love to share their experiences with others.
Offer your customers and audience a remarkable experience they can’t pass on. Don’t try to deceive them into feeling something with cheap slogans and dirty marketing tactics. Instead, just create a memorable experience.