There are many ways to make the most of digital marketing for your company, but often thinking outside the box. So what can you do to get your message out there and get noticed? Here are some things to consider.
1) Tell everyone, all the time
The simplest way to get your message across is simply to tell everyone you meet all the time about your products, business or service. Advice from many small business sites is to always have an elevator pitch practiced and ready so that you can regale everyone you meet with details.
Also have business cards at the ready and, if its practical, ‘product’ that you can show people. Simple, boring, repetitive – but word of mouth starting with what comes out of your mouth is one of the most effective ways to market your product.
2) Give it away
In addition to telling everyone you meet about your business and/or products, give away free samples. Not only do give aways let people try out whatever it is that you are selling, but it also has a feel good factor: who doesn’t like to be given something for free? This sort of thing also helps start the word of mouth marketing that has always been very important – especially in the social media world we now live in.
3) Help a reporter out, cultivate a blogger
Telling people all the time and giving freebies away are very effective strategies, but if you can get in with someone of influence then this process has a much bigger impact. Finding relevant journalists and bloggers who specialise in the market you are operating in or attempting to get into can have huge impact.
Louise Knowler, founder of Distinctive – the first designer fragranced washing powder now on sale worldwide – knows this only too well. “Pick out the little things that are interesting about your product and put out PR or blogs on them and bloggers and journalists will often find them and help you,” she says.
“After a series of tweets I had put out got a tweak back from Steve King, Channel 4’s male beauty blogger. We sent him some product and he loved it and wrote and tweeted about it. His audience was 102,000. His tweets reach a lot of people.”
4) Viral videos
YouTube is a powerful place and if you can get an amusing or interesting video out there – even a low budget ‘home made’ one you can create a lot of interest in your brand. If you have an amusing parody or thinking you can turn an amusing idea around your product into a proto-video advert then look at how you can do this on a budget.
Companies such as Videobaby Media offer low cost video production, or you can try and recruit your mates and family members to create a video yourself.
But YouTube is a crowded place, so it is worth looking at paying per view to get someone like eBuzzing, a video distribution platform, to target it for you to the right geographies, the right sorts of media and the right users.
5) Unusual swag
Free gifts such as pens have long been a trusted way of marketing – especially at events and trade shows. But everyone hands out pens and USB keys (useful as they are) so think laterally. I have been given sunglasses, fridge magnets, branded chocolates, and once sweatbands.
The more unusual the better, as it again gets people talking. If its useful – particularly in the place or event where you are handing it out – the better. If it can be nicely branded and wearable, then let the people you hand it out to be your walking talking advertising. Stress balls are great, but a t-shirt or something wearable is even better. Its like a walking ad.
6) Flyers #1
“If you have a small business that focuses on a particular area, flyers are a great way to advertise,” said Nathan Letourneau, co-founder of CampusBooks4Less. And they needn’t be expensive. Chances are you have someone in your company, or a friend or family member, who can help you design the flyer inexpensively (or for free) – and you can print the flyer in house or find an inexpensive printer.
As for distribution, “hire some high school or college students and have them put the flyers on parked cars, attach them to house entry doors and distribute them inside area businesses (to employees and on any bulletin boards, if allowed) and apartment complexes,” he advised. “We saw huge increases in traffic after having students distribute flyers on parked cars in our target areas.”
7) Flyers #2
Why not take the idea of ‘flyers’ more literally? Balloons can be a great way to publicise what you do – especially if you can stretch to hiring a mini-blimp or radio controlled drone to tow your advertising message around larger venues, or even outdoors. It certainly gets you noticed.
But be warned: you have to get the right permissions to do this, unless you want to go down the guerrilla marketing route and cause a stir and hope that the adage “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” holds true.
For those with a bigger budget, getting advertising towed by light aircraft or on an airship can work very well at getting you noticed around specific locations or events. But they take planning and cost not only in terms of hiring the aircraft, but it getting the banner or other collateral made.
8) Generic domain names
If you are just starting out your URL can be a useful marketing tool – especially when you put it on the materials and give aways listed above. And this week a whole raft of top level domain names have gone live, so that now you can have a web and email address that ends with .photography or .cakes or pretty much whatever you can think of. While these domain names might be a nice thing to have on printed material, they can serve a potentially huge benefit when it comes to getting searched online.
According to Adam Bunn, director of search engine optimisation (SEO) at leading independent digital marketing agency, Greenlight, these so called generic top level domain names (gTLDs) open up the possibility that the TLD could be an important ranking factor in the future, particularly for the truly “generic” gTLDs (i.e. not brand gTLDs).
“For example, you can imagine that sites on a .london domain could conceivably be rewarded and rank better for queries containing “london” and also queries identified as being about London or having regional relevance to London. The fact that the application process is controlled so you must be a business actually based in London, makes it more likely that search engines will consider this,” says Bunn.
“For this to happen, the gTLDs will have to become a broadly used and widely available ‘standard’ for companies operating in a certain sector or location, administered by impartial companies, organisations or associations. For this reason, the search engines will understandably want to see how gTLDs play out in the next year or so before making a decision either way. If Google does use the TLD as a ranking factor, this will most likely be used to categorise the topic of a site.”
So far Google has said nothing, but its worth thinking about.
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