Marketing success goes beyond driving traffic and churning out calculated advertising campaigns – it is more than meets the eye. Marketing covers the entire spectrum of promoting, selling, and distributing products and services. While people have explored hundreds of notable strategies to advance their corporate objectives, we shall examine 5 effective unconventional marketing strategies that you can adopt to succeed in your marketing goals.
The unconventional marketing strategies we shall examine will not necessarily cost you much money, but they require some creativity, imagination, and courage to rack up. If done correctly, they will serve to drive your sales through the roof, put you a step ahead of the competition, build your customer base, and make you stand out from the crowd.
Here then are effective and unconventional marketing strategies to explore for a successful business:
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Use Reddit
People often underrate the marketing influence of Reddit – it’s like undermining the combined power of Instagram and YouTube. Thousands of Reddit subreddits center around notable niches, with millions of conversations going on around the topics of interest in the niches. You can create or join a niche related to your products and services to harness the conversation around your business. If done effectively, millions of traffic will channel to your business website, with thousands of websites mentioning your products vis-à-vis related conversations.
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Give Out Awards
Businesses do not necessarily give out periodic awards because they are head over heels in love with the recipients, but because award ceremonies are powerful marketing events that catch the attention of the mainstream media. When local newspapers and online news outlets as well as credible bloggers report on your award-giving ceremony, it rubs off on you as a credible and formidable business organization.
You can do this by asking the public to nominate recipients or by simply choosing persons who are already making spectacular efforts in a given area. If you market eco-friendly products, you can give awards to persons who make notable efforts to protect the environment.
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Hijack A Social Movement
This marketing idea is similar to the one above. If there is a powerful movement going on that is related to your business, you can jump on the social campaign to harness engagement with your products. For instance, if social activists and governments are campaigning on the need to protect our environment, reduce carbon imprints, stop climate change, and clean up our oceans – you can ride on the strength of the environmental campaigns to draw attention to your business and products if they solve the problems of these environmental issues.
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Get Mentions From Influencers
Do you know any social media influencers with millions of followers? You can get them to talk about your business and mention your products. There are social media personalities with 19, 30, and 42 million followers who can revolutionize your business by just mentioning what you do. You can even get them to hold up your product for the world to see, or to demonstrate its usage and highlight its benefits as testimonials – it can change the face of your business forever. It must however be pointed out that you might have to pay the influencers for their service.
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Leverage On Transparency
Most customers want to know things about the businesses behind their favorite products. The more customers know about your company, the more likely they are to patronize you for the foreseeable future. Some of the notable things that customers want to know about companies behind the products they use include –
- Some of the key executives
- Process of making the products
- Overall annual revenues
- Number of branches across the country/world
- Dealing with customer complaints and suggestions
- Monthly visitors to websites
When you are able to highlight some of these things in your newsletter or other recognized public channel, people will view your business and products differently; and your transparency will motivate them to engage more with you. This is one subtle marketing strategy that you may want to consider for your business.
Final Thoughts…
There are several other guerrilla marketing strategies out there that you can try out. Just explore alternative marketing techniques that are cheap, consequential, disruptive, and overwhelmingly creative. With unconventional marketing methods, the end will always justify the means – it’s all about thinking outside the box.