Ignite Your Creative Marketing Strategies

The Only Hard & Fast Rules Are The Ones You Make Up For Yourself

You know this. It isn’t a brand spanking fresh idea you’ve never heard of. It’s just one that begs refreshing every so often because of our tendency to let clarity slip away. Revisiting it, at the least, will be useful if it re-ignites even a sliver of everything you already know and are forgetting to remember. At most, it might be a kind of boon. [Tweet “It could catalyze your active reawakening to an online strategy and kick you into action.”]

If you’re casting about, not making headway establishing your online presence or if you’re nervous about getting started, you may find that it’s helpful to ignite and re-capture your imagination. If, on the other hand, you’re confident that your actions are purposeful, your strategy well-defined and you think you don’t need to re-engage with the vastness of ideas available, by all means, skip this one. But here’s a question:

With so many moving parts, satellite options, constant changes and new arenas continually popping up online how do we take full advantage of what’s available to us to forge a cohesive online presence?

Guerrilla Marketing – Power In Your Attitude

Jay Conrad Levinson introduced the term Guerrilla Marketing in 1984 in his book ‘Guerrilla Advertising’. He borrowed from guerrilla warfare to fashion a point of view primarily for small business to market and promote their products and services using unconventional, imaginative maneuvers. A means by which our ideas can broaden. Methods and the mindset to combat the marketing restrictions we faced due to limited economic resources. [and naturally, in practice it hasn’t been limited to small business]

Rather than cash, it requires a particular kind of energetic focus and imagination as a get-around away for achieving results without using conventional and costly marketing approaches.

Each marketing activity/effort is an invention of sorts classically meant to take place in the public arena to attract as much attention as possible. [and if you apply the concept today, think internet, email and social media]

Its tactics naturally stand out for being unconventional and resourceful. And the goal is to directly connect the marketer with their potential buyer, (unlike broadcast marketing or advertising), in order to create an emotional connection and reaction. That emotional reaction then prompts people to regard brands in ways that are new and different from what they’re used to. Fresh.

“…achieving conventional goals, such as profits and joy, with unconventional methods, such as investing energy instead of money.” Jay Conrad Levinson

Creative Marketing Opportunities

One of the most interesting disconnects we seem to have is this-

Pre-web, small businesses understood the importance of connecting to people and other businesses within their communities. And they understood the idea that unforeseen benefits to their business growth might occur in places that are under-expected and under-utilized. They realized that opportunities might occur outside their obvious and specific areas of expertise, service or product; in fact, basically anywhere. They understood that every commercial enterprise had needs related to those that they had the ability to fill. That they could create uses for, derive add-ons to or topics of interest from just about anything thus creating extended sales potential. And diverse streams of potential customers.

Local merchants, services and professionals used every means necessary to become known and get good referrals. They took what amounted to inventive, low-cost risks because they had to find creative ways to reach customers. They knew what would grow and garner the seeds that spread their names throughout the community and one way or another would lead them towards becoming a household name in their locale. Becoming the one that would solve and fill the need their customers had. The business people would turn first to.

They understood the value of cross-niche marketing and advertising.  Free newspaper “services” listings. Flyers in store windows. Grocery store bulletin boards. Circulars in the newspaper thrown into neighbors’ yard every morning. The barbershop. Beauty salon. Supporting local high school sports, hometown minor league farm teams, church socials. Chambers of Commerce, Free Masons, Rotary Club, the networking groups one can find in every town. Think of Welcome Wagon goodie-boxes, realtors that give homebuyers their precious list of personally endorsed local resources. Schmoozing: hanging around and chatting it up. The list goes on.

People understood how networking and relationship provided extra bonus beyond even direct gain. It gave them the chance to share the gems they unearthed, the businesses they did business with and share in some of the credit passed on by referrals. The gratitude and indebtedness. Extra gain.

Distraction Comes Easy

And here’s the disconnect – [Tweet “The still-shiny-new of an ever-evolving web and social media are creating a new kind of confusion. “]The sheer magnitude is distracting people into forgetting what we already knew from offline living and buying- methods that are ongoing and still viable. Somehow it seems like the rules must be different online. But really, they’re not. Not when it comes to ingenuity and using multiple approaches. Cross-pollination. Varied platforms.

Get Creative

There’s really no limit to pro-active measures available to us. Good old-fashioned, but freshly hatched 21st century, time appropriate concepts can be applied online in ways that run parallel to those “good old days” offline. It just takes some mind shift into a creative approach across the big board of the web. And then to fit those into the containers of social media, content marketing, email marketing etc.

Your Website

Your business website is the obvious place to start. It’s your most valuable piece of real estate online but it shouldn’t be your entire universe. Rather, it’s your hub, your anchor. Reaching your presence out beyond that property, creating what you can think of as your website satellites is critical to building your solid online presence.

Unravel the perceived tangle of options. And once you’ve gotten a handle on what interests you, choose the venues that suit your business in a way that is logical, consistent and true to the character and solutions your business has to offer. Leave breadcrumbs back to your website so everyone can find their way. And in that fashion, draw the connecting of the dots that becomes your entity cross-web.

Be inventive, energetic and creative in your approach. Research and locate where the people you want to engage with or want to learn from are. [Tweet “Find where your ideal customers are gathering and get to know them, let them get to know you.”] Listen carefully and when you’re ready, join into the conversations, make your mark and begin to build relationships and your website satellites.

 

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Photo Credit: iStock, Re-mix by Gina Fiedel

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