Innovative Strategies to Enhance Your Marketing Efforts

Looking for more innovative ways to boost your marketing efforts? It is certainly timely to do so, given our current context.

In today’s digitally-enhanced market environment, consumers are practically bombarded with advertisements from all angles. Advertisements are everywhere: on streaming services, scattered throughout social media feeds, and popping up with clickable links on websites.

Consumers encounter marketing efforts everywhere and thus have become particularly adept at screening them out; using ad blockers, pivoting attention elsewhere when commercials start running, and avoiding sites with too many pop-ups.

For marketers, the prolific nature of digital advertising and shrinking consumer attention spans pose unique challenges. To properly stand out to the consumer enough to secure their attention, hook them for longer than the average ad experience, and convert them into active customers, marketers have to think differently.

In this article, we’ll dig into a variety of innovative strategies you can use to establish a strong ethos, hook customers, and convert interested browsers into concrete leads.

Thought Leadership

First, let’s take a look at thought leadership. Thought leadership is the production of content geared at consumer interests that is designed to position your organization as an authoritative voice.

This strategy is perhaps less direct than some of the others we’ll cover, but no less valuable, as it allows your organization to showcase its industry knowledge in a way that builds trust with consumers. Additionally, unlike some of the other strategies we’ll cover, thought leadership content is likely to be organically sought out by consumers interested in topics surrounding your business.

Thought leadership content performs at its best when proper steps are taken to introduce assets to would-be customers. Promoting thought leadership assets through social media and optimizing content for search engines are therefore key to ensuring your content doesn’t get buried by others’ content. You also will need some way to measure the efficacy of your thought leadership efforts; tracking views, page time, and other metrics through an analytics platform give you a solid grip on consumer engagement, though you can also leverage email sign-up and “contact us” authorization walls to more directly connect views to sales.

Useful thought leadership assets include:

• White papers: 8-10 page research papers that break down a complex issue in your industry. White papers work best when they cover an issue that consumers in your industry find broadly interesting, such as industry trends. However, they should be produced sparingly, as they require quite a bit of effort to put out, and should be reserved for special interest topics.
• Blogs: 800-1000 word blog posts that cover leading industry topics. These are much faster to produce than a typical white paper, allowing you to give your take on the hottest industry news rapidly. Aim to produce these semi-frequently, such as two or three times a week.
• Webinars: Online events where a chosen speaker breaks down a complex industry topic. Webinars have the built-in benefit of requiring guests to sign up, and building a list of potential contacts for further outreach. Produce these quarterly, and aim to include interactive elements to maximize guest participation.

Thought leadership is one of the most valuable marketing tools you have, as it allows your company and your content to be discovered naturally by consumers who haven’t heard of you before. Create these assets and optimize them properly, and you’ll see a return on your content marketing investment.

Community Events

Next up, we have community events. Community events offer the opportunity for consumers to engage with your business in a personal, fun, and friendly forum. They’re unique because they break down the artificial walls imposed by digital forums and allow consumers to know you as people; authentic, kind, and capable of delivering on consumer goals. Moreover, they also provide additional benefits, such as:

• Showcasing how your business is engaging with the local community
• Creating positive memories associated with your brand
• The ability to distribute branded swag, an effective marketing tool in its own right

That being said, community events are a significant lift to pull off, especially for businesses taking their first steps into event hosting. If this describes you, follow this step-by-step plan to create an event that generates leads:

• Define goals, target demographics, and the type of event hosted: Conduct some background research on which event type is most associated with your brand image, who is likely to attend, and how you’re going to measure event success.
• Do the logistics work: Put down deposits on an event space, partner with local businesses and vendors, and assign personnel to manage the event.
• Outline an event marketing strategy: Chart out how you’re going to market your event, which materials you’re going to bring to the event with you, and what assets need to be designed specifically for the event.
• Hold the event: Take advantage of any opportunities you have on the day of to reach out to the local community. Speak with partners and vendors who helped facilitate your event to see if they would be amenable to future collaborations.

Community events are powerful because they put a face to your brand, and allow you to actively show the local community how much you care.

Ongoing Training

Finally, we come to training. Marketing best practices are constantly evolving; just look at how the time-tested spokesperson ad has become influencer marketing. Keeping on the pulse of emergent marketing tactics and understanding how to use them effectively is key to producing relevant advertising, and there’s no better tool to facilitate that understanding than ongoing training.

Ongoing training unlocks a greater degree of efficacy for your marketing team, keeping them aware of what’s working in your industry and allowing them to produce innovative new spins on tried-and-true tactics. Moreover, offering training can be a marketing tactic in itself, as it shows your dedication to growth within your company, boosts retention, and draws talent. Supporting continued learning is an essential back-office investment that will translate to greater degrees of creativity, efficacy, and productivity.

We hope that this brief guide gives you insight into how to make your marketing future-proof. Produce effective, optimized thought leadership, hold community events, and unlock your team’s creativity with training, and you’ll find your organization stands out among the noise of advertising.

Charlie Fletcher is a freelance writer from the lovely “city of trees”- Boise, Idaho. Her love of writing pairs with her passion for social activism and search for the truth. When not writing she spends her time doodling and embroidering. And yes, she does love all kinds of potatoes!