I’m sure you’ve heard the life blood of any business is sales. True, but without great marketing there wont be any sells. You have to be able to draw your potential prospect to your offer and that takes marketing.
So, how do you market? How can you find the right formula to get a flood of traffic to your website? Where do you start?
First off marketing these days takes finesse. You probably could have thrown up any kind of marketing piece in the 90’s and got away with, but not today. Customers today are more sophisticated, and they gotten hip to some of the tricks.
You’re told now you have to create an avatar of your ideal customer. You need to find out what your ideal customer complains about, what are their problems and what are their pain points.
Needless to say, if you’re new at this; you’re probably like; I need to give them a name, need to know how much he/she makes, what kind of degree he/she has, how many kids, married or unmarried, hobbies, and the list can go on and on. You’re told by the time you finished you should have a dossier worked up that would rival anything in the CIA.
Create Your Ideal Customer Avatar Using This Free Download
But if you’re still not sure about this avatar thing you should go and download the free customer avatar worksheet at DigitalMarketer. They’re also calling it the swiss army knife of marketing.
The download is very comprehensive. It touches on every aspect of creating your ideal customer avatar. In a nutshell you’ll be impressed with this download.
However even after you’ve created your ideal customer avatar, what now? Now it’s time to market. The truth is most marketers are one trick ponies, but the marketer who has a variety of marketing techniques at his disposal will win.
I’ve put together a list of marketing ideas I believe you’ll find useful for years to come. At this point I should let you know I did not create these ideas. I’m just putting together a list of what most of the top-level marketers out there are using.
These marketing ideas have been around for years they’re nothing new, but I dare to guess the average marketer may not know about most of them. Let’s get to it shall we.
Marketing Ideas To Take Your Business To The Next Level
- Newsjacking: The practice of taking advantage of current events or news stories in such a way as to promote or advertise one’s product or brand.
What’s going on in the world right now? Well plenty! Ride the coat tails of current events to promote your brand.
- Scamper: Is an acronym formed from the abbreviation of: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify (Also magnify and minify), Put to another use , Eliminate, and Reverse.
Use what you see around you create marketing ideas.
- Challenges: Create a challenge and have people create videos of themselves. The best video wins. If done right could create virality for your business. Remember the “Ice Bucket Challenge?”
- Holiday Calendar: There is some type of holiday in every month of the year. Whether it’s a holiday we celebrate or not take advantage of it.
Put to use days like: Earth Day, Siblings Day, Teacher’s Day, April Fools Day, Tax Day, etc. Use your imagination to come up with creative marketing campaigns.
- The Random Word Association Technique: Your objective is to create associations that connect the meaning of each random word to your subject in some way.
Each new association represents the seed of a new idea so the more associations you create – the better your chances of generating useful results.
- The Buyers Club: You create a club where your customer can by a product through auto-ship at a discount for life. This is different from a regular auto-ship. The Buyers Club makes your customers feel special.
- Refer-a-Friend Discount: Refer-a-friend marketing, or referral marketing, uses the influence of existing customers to attract new business. Referrals work because people tend to trust recommendations from someone they know.
Do this right after a campaign. Tell your customers if they refer a friend you will give them back a portion of their money. This will boost your profits.
- BOGO: A sales promotion in which an item is offered free or at a reduced price when another item is purchased at full price
The top grocery stores are notorious for using this sales technique and it works.
- Anniversary Discount: On the date of your customers first purchase send them an email offering them a special offer for doing business with you.
Your customers will eat up because most businesses don’t do a great job at taking care of their customers. Which leads me into…
- Customer Appreciation Day: is an event where you choose to create as an excuse to shower your customers with appreciation and nice gestures.
Then, you treat the day as if it’s an annual holiday and celebrate it with your customers every year – as a designated day to express your gratitude.
- Birthday Discount: You offer your customer a product at a discounted price on their birthday.
If you are not keeping track of your customers birthdays and thus not implementing this idea, you’re leaving money on the table.
- Loyalty Points: A loyalty points program is a marketing strategy designed to encourage customers to continue to shop at or use the services of a business.
Why do you think so major companies use this idea, because it works? It will create customer loyalty to your brand.
- The Puppy Dog Close: It’s a sales technique, allowing prospective buyers to “try out” the product for a few days before deciding; it consist of offering to the prospect free trial or test period before agreeing to make the deal.
This a great technique of the car salesman. The car salesman understands if he lets you keep the car overnight, after driving it around, your neighbors seeing it and how it looks parked in your driveway. He’s confident you’ll buy and the majority do.
- New Version/Edition: A form or variant of a type or original. How many times have you been to a store and seeing a product label saying “New and Improved?”
And it flies off the shelf, and I doubt if it’s really different from the original. Haven’t you noticed how sellers of digital products have 1.0 and 2.0 etc. Because everyone wants the latest and greatest.
- Sell The Same Product To A Different Market: Say if you had a product that helps high blood pressure patients. Diabetics can damage arteries that lead to high blood pressure.
You can sell the same product to both the high blood pressure market and the diabetic market. Research where your product may have uses in other markets.
Conclusion: There you have it, 15 surefire marketing ideas to take your business to the level. You must know your target market. You’ll know them better by building your ideal customer avatar.
The carpenter is nothing without his tools. And so is a marketer without marketing ideas for his campaigns. I’ve have only given you 15 marketing ideas for your marketing campaigns, but there are many more.
Always be on the look out for other marketing ideas to add to your arsenal. Remember there are no sales without marketing.
To Your Marketing Success!
Eric L. Huntley is the CEO/Blogger of Super Zaddy Affilate. Eric helps new affiliate marketers hungry for success fulfill there marketing dreams.