5 unique digital marketing ideas for your business

You may be familiar with traditional ways to reach customers online. Whether through search engines, social media ads, emails or influencers. But these channels can often feel overcrowded, making it more challenging to find your audience. Your business needs to find a way to reach your audience while being able to stand out against competitors. Using unique digital marketing methods is a great way to do this. 

This guide will discuss unique digital marketing ideas, including:

• Guerilla marketing
• Stunt marketing
• Stealth marketing
• Audio marketing
• Content marketing

Guerilla marketing is a strategy that can create a lot of attention with a low budget. It uses the element of surprise to promote your business. The crucial part of this marketing is that most digital advertising is from users themselves.

Often, guerilla marketing uses outdoor spaces, public buildings, or events.

Examples can include adding temporary artwork to a street or placing something on a statue. You can place stickers around a train station or fly a drone through a rugby match. The hope is for people to take pictures and upload them to social media. With guerilla marketing a small business to drum up a lot of online attention quickly. Some customers may not appreciate being surprised and people have different tastes for art, especially.

Similar to guerilla marketing, there can be potential for controversy with stunt marketing. While guerilla marketing targets people who will experience or see something worth sharing, publicity stunts take the idea further. This marketing strategy aims to drive attention to your business, but there are no limits to what you can do. 

For this strategy, rather than aiming to surprise an audience, you hope to drum up as much attention as possible. Often enormous ideas work the best. You can seek to shock, impress or entertain. Examples can range from climate activists with fake blood, to KFC putting its logo on a field viewable from space. Another example to inspire you is the dating app Thursday which chained an intern to a pole in Liverpool.

Much like guerilla advertising, the idea is to create a stir online. Publicity stunts can range from inexpensive, like dressing up in the street, to costly giant inflatables. Fake product launches or breaking news are also popular options. Businesses can often use April fools day, like Brains with their ‘Beard Enhancing Beer’.

The stealth marketing strategy advertises your product or service in a subtle way. You promote to customers through methods that don’t appear like ads. For some audiences, this can feel intrusive or unethical, feeding them information without knowing.

One of the most well-known methods for stealth marketing is product placement. Businesses pay to feature their product in video entertainment. It can be films like Skyfall, which featured James Bond handing out Heineken’s. Or even music videos like DJ Khaled’s No Brainer which promotes six different brands. Placements can be expensive though, so take that into consideration.

Another method of stealth marketing is called covert agents. Celebrities are paid to use your product or service in their daily lives. An example would be that if you sell clothing, you pay a celebrity to wear what you sell when they go out in public. The hope is that paparazzi photograph and publish them wearing your brand, which makes their fans want to buy it.

Using audio marketing primarily involved radio advertising in the past, it’s still popular but it can be expensive for a small business. 

Now, music streaming and podcasts have added new ways of audio marketing. The music streaming platform Spotify gives users access to a vast library of songs. It’s popular and offers two options: free with adverts and limited features, or paid without adverts. According to a study, Spotify advertising between songs is 25% more effective than average marketing. In 2021, 220 million users worldwide had the free version according to Statista.

If your target audience includes higher earners though, you may want to consider if they use a paid version of Spotify. Even with the ad-free version to listen to songs, users still have to listen to ads for podcasts. According to Statista, in the UK there will be a projected 20 million listeners by 2024. You can sponsor popular shows so listeners hear about your business directly. Or you can provide catchy jingles or explanatory speeches.

Content marketing is still a trustworthy strategy that’s not going away anytime soon. You can use it to attract an audience for your business’ online presence. Articles, videos, photos, podcasts or written posts are considered content for business. Building a following is not easy, but one of the critical factors is consistency. Users want to see engaging content daily to continue to follow you.

Social media marketing is widespread on all major platforms. Businesses often pay to place their advertising into a user’s feed when viewing their content. The main draw of social media is the entertaining, humourous, inspirational or educational content on the platforms. Many users will quickly avoid marketing to get back to what they enjoy.

Some businesses focus their accounts and adopt a content marketing strategy. Which is not direct marketing, but tailoring content towards their audience. Eventually, users will want to engage with their content by following the company. Potential customers can then see any new posts. Instead of having to pay to interrupt a user’s experience, businesses can become part of what they enjoy.

A good content marketing strategy can include offering the public information or entertainment they can value. An example is if you have a food ingredient service, make instructional cooking videos that anyone can watch. After people engage with enough of your content, they are more likely to look further into your business. That can lead you to build a relationship with customers and they could start to buy from you regularly.

While choosing the best strategies for your marketing, you’ll need to consider your budget. . Opening a separate business current account with Countingup allows you to monitor your spending with ease.

But the Countingup app is more than a business account. It also includes built-in accounting software, including an expense categorisation tool, which can sort your marketing costs using HMRC approved labels. The app will help you organise your digital marketing expenses and make better decisions for your business. .

Start your three-month free trial today. 

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