In today’s oversaturated online environment, business owners who want to get the word out about their brand need to think outside the box if they want to cut through the noise.
The drawback of paid advertising is that it doesn’t guarantee you’ll get the results you want. There’s a very specific reason for this: people have become desensitized to mass-media marketing.
According to Nielsen’s most recent Trust in Advertising report, 84 percent of respondents said the biggest influencer in their buying decisions was the recommendation of friends or family.
So instead of pushing content through ad platforms, take the time to implement a few of the strategies below and invest in your audience.
1. Start an email course. Most internet-goers are continuously wired into their inboxes, whether on their computers or mobile devices. This is the perfect venue for acquiring new and repeat business, provided you’re upfront about what you’re offering.
Without going into the technical aspects of how to set up an email course, such courses are an underused part of the marketer’s arsenal. Email courses are essentially small, informal classes offered to your subscribers and web visitors via your website. Your email course should offer helpful insights about a topic in which you’re an expert. Your subscribers can opt into your course and receive weekly emails directly in their inboxes, guiding them through learning a specific skill, getting to known an industry, or anything else you’re knowledgeable about.
The main benefit of offering email courses is that they encourage user participation on a regular basis, but they also build long-term customer relationships. When author Paul Jarvis offered a free course called “Write and Sell Your Damn Book,” the response was overwhelming. More than 1,000 people registered during the first 24-hour period, and this ballooned to nearly 2,500 in less than a week.
Though that topic was broad enough to appeal to a large cross-section of people, there’s no reason why you can’t achieve something similar with a much more narrow focus in mind.
2. Offer your audience a free e-book. Unlike self-paced email courses, e-books are typically used as a way to go beyond demonstrating your authority and knowledge in your industry; they provide readers with in-depth information that will help them succeed.
The ability to meet the customer halfway between giving something for free and earning their purchases is what permits this marketing tool to masquerade as a vehicle for entertainment, while also serving the needs of your business.
To implement this particular initiative effectively, the e-book must be tied to your industry, and still be fun and interesting.
3. Provide something for free. One of the quickest ways to generate interest is to offer something for free that used to sit behind a paywall. So when Wired revealed that its catalog of professionally produced images would be free for bloggers to use, heads turned.
What Wired was able to do in one fell swoop was increase the magazine’s public profile, improve its public perception, and call attention to a severe shortage of free editorial images. But as is to be expected, it came with strings attached.
Under the agreement, anyone who uses one of the images must credit the original photographer and provide a link to the source location. Most bloggers and journalists don’t mind linking back to a photo source if the photo is exactly what they’re looking for, so Wired got lots of mentions and links on new sites.
Offer some free photo packs that are related to you industry. Chances are there are people out there writing about similar topics who could use a high-quality image to go with them.
4. Answer questions online. Forums such as Reddit and Quora are behind some of the world’s biggest conversations, and they’re a first stop for anyone looking to solve a problem or find crowdsourced information online. Because of this, they’re considered incredibly powerful marketing tools.
When you answer questions on Quora, your bio information shows up next to your answer. So if you answer a question about technology, and your bio says “Editor at TechCompanyXYZ,” you’ll likely generate some interest in your brand. As a plus, Quora answers occasionally get syndicated to big sites like Business Insider.
Alternatively, you could also aim to get yourself mentioned directly on big websites to promote your brand in a more formal way and with more authority. Both strategies are excellent for the purpose of increasing your brand awareness and, best of all, they can be used in tandem.
If your business is to be successful, it needs to be so on multiple fronts. These initiatives are almost always free to implement but, at the very least, will cost much less than most traditional forms of online and offline marketing. Give one or all of them a try, and see how many people you can get talking about your startup.
Photo credit: Lauren Kallen