Have you found that your passion for marketing has fizzled recently? We’ve got just the thing to re-ignite your marketing love affair!
It’s totally normal to get bored of doing the same old, same old with your marketing campaigns. But if you’re getting bored, imagine how your audience feels. Mixing things up is a great way to make things exciting again, but it’s also the key to more engagement from your key audience. We’re sharing some creative spins on tried and true marketing tactics to help you fall in love with your marketing efforts all over again — and to help you generate, nurture, and convert more leads.
Grab a box of chocolates (heart-shaped preferred) and dig into these crafty ideas for kicking your emails, social media, and content marketing up a notch.
How to Keep the Marketing Spark Alive
Email Marketing Ideas
Done well, email marketing can have a major impact on the success of your overall marketing plan. Done poorly, it can be a waste of time for you and your leads and negatively impact your email deliverability. Perk up your performance with these email marketing tactics designed to keep the clicks coming.
- Progress updates. Raising funds for a good cause? Getting ready to launch a new product? Keep your audience informed with newsworthy progress emails. These will continually renew interest in what you’re doing while making subscribers feel personally invested in the outcome. They’re a great way to incorporate fun copy and visuals and showing the exciting things happening with your brand.
- Easy setups. Integrate new customers into your existing community by sending a follow-up email that walks them through how to get the most out of their new product or service. It’s at this stage of the relationship that your audience is the most engaged, so double down on that piece of knowledge with informative content and great graphics, making your installation directions fun and appealing.
- Acknowledge anniversaries and birthdays. Set up automated campaigns that reach out to subscribers when they’ve been with you for a year, two years, and so on, or to celebrate a birthday. It’s one of the easiest forms of personalized outreach — and a great way to strengthen your relationship and show your customers you care.
Aside from the above-mentioned email marketing methods, try spicing up your emails by changing up your design. Look into free email templates, or switch to an email marketing tool with a strong email builder, like Benchmark Email, that provides tons of email design options.
Social Media Marketing Ideas
Social media is a fantastic place to put a creative marketing strategy into action. And with so much social content out there, the more you mix it up, the more likely you are to see increases in your engagement.
- Host a contest. Few things garner interest faster than giving away something for nothing. Though in this case, you’re not exactly getting nothing — you’re getting a huge lead generation boost. Try partnering up with other brands to increase the prize value and the size of your audience.
- Share user-generated content. Happy customers love to share their experiences online, and they really love when brands see those posts and share them with their own followers. Make a point to incorporate more user-generated content into your social marketing strategy. You’ll incentivize more people to share and get double the benefits out of the content.
- Run engaging polls. Pretty much all social media platforms allow you to put together a quick poll, and this type of content is super useful for encouraging engagement. As a bonus, they’re a way to learn more about your audience — including what they like and what they respond to — which is information you can put to use in future campaigns.
Content Marketing Ideas
When it comes to creative content marketing, the sky is really the limit. Think outside the blog post and wow your audience with some of these out-of-the-box ideas.
- Trend predictions. Trend prediction posts offer a few significant benefits: they’re timely, easy to skim, great for linking and make ideal gated assets. They’re also useful for other brands to link to in their content, which will award your content with more backlinks. Just make sure to update trend pieces when their timeliness has passed.
- Go behind the scenes. The best kind of brand-audience connections are personal connections — and nothing is more personal than a behind-the-scenes look at what you do and how you do it. Give a tour of your R&D department, take readers along on a promotional trip, or introduce your adorable office pets. All of these show that there are real people behind your product or service and that they’re passionate about your brand.
- Bring on guest bloggers. Guest bloggers bring a new voice and new ideas to your content — and they also provide you with an opportunity to tap into not just your own audience but theirs as well. Pursue guests with established followings, reputable experience, and great writing skills instead of just seeking out whoever wants to contribute. This will give you a chance to run your blog like an industry publication, earning your more credibility and high-quality content to share with your leads in the process.
- Revise and refresh. Creative content marketing doesn’t always have to mean new content. It’s hugely beneficial to go back through your archives and capitalize on existing pieces by updating them for a new time period (and possibly a new audience). Not only does this help you keep up with the ever-moving content mill, but it’s also great for your SEO.
Just like relationships, marketing strategies need to grow and evolve. Keep the spark alive by continually looking for ways to get creative, and don’t be afraid to try new things. You won’t know what works best until you test it out, so aim big and see what happens when you think outside the box.