Author: Alyssa

Whether you’re a small business owner or a corporation, boosting your marketing through creativity plays a major role in the success of your business. It’s fair to say that you really need to know your product, target audience and will definitely have to know your market. In fact, you will have to know your market well enough to be a step ahead of your market in order to deliver the best possible product and monetize when the next big wave of orders roll in. This is easier said than done, but if you are a marketing director, part of the marketing team or a one-man band, you will have to find creative solutions to market your product or service in the best way possible.

Lack of creativity and imagination normally deludes us to believe that whatever we are doing is deemed correct, and so, it will be the best we can do to move forward in marketing. You need to move away from this delusion and put yourself beyond what is present. In other words, think ‘outside the box.’

In order to do that, put yourself in your customer’s shoe’s and look at your business through their eyes. What are your competitors doing, are they successfully stepping out of their comfort zone and being prosperous. What are the market strengths and weaknesses within your industry and can you play on that to drive fantastic results? Boost your marketing through creativity and you’ll be surprised at what you achieve and the way you achieve it.

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To boost your marketing through creativity, here are 5 focus areas:

What disturbs you about your target market

Go on… make a list of all the things that bother you about your target market. It could be the daily grind and operations within the market to annoying customer expectations and lousy service providers. Keep writing to them until you have totally exhausted your list of criticism. How does it feel?

If you have managed to write down even one annoyance, that usually means there is a possible market entry into solving that problem. For example, if you are an Independent Financial Advisor (IFA), it’s likely you will be operating many different investments and accounts. Your annoyance could be that you need to login to every account separately to review their individual performance. Now imagine if you came up with a system whereby you could log in to all accounts simultaneously and at the same time, clients could log in to review their financial reports.

It’s a big project and a big idea, but imagine if you creatively applied yourself, you could potentially fill a huge gap, satisfy yourself and your clients and lease the system out to other IFA’s and earn more money. It is a creative, entrepreneurial idea and can boost your marketing.

If your target market dictates a certain practice, break the convention

This could be a life-changing business experience for you. Break the mold, and creatively generate ideas on how you could do things differently to your competitors. Are you able to serve your customers in a manner that is unique and somewhat surprising? Are you able to offer extras that make them ‘wow’ your offer and get them talking about your business to others?

Don’t accept doing things the same way as all your competitors. Be different, be creative and you will definitely stand out.

Get out of your comfort zone and become uncomfortable

Creative thinking can drive great marketing appeal. In order for you to get out of your comfort zone, you will have to think differently and in some cases act differently. For example, if you’re at a networking event of forty people and you normally stick to networking with five of the regulars, this time aims to meet at least half the room. That’s a lot of meeting and greeting and it will definitely get you out of your comfort zone as you will be spending no more than 2 to 3 minutes on each person. Impersonal… not really, just uncomfortably clever.

As nervy as it may sound, your goal will be to approach someone new, listen, learn and speak to them and move on to the next person. It is challenging, it is uncomfortable, but it will get your creative juices flowing. Don’t be afraid, the least that will happen is you will become a better networker and probably walk out of the room with a handful of business cards and a few prospective clients.

Advertising via any platform like billboards, television, banners, and print media or through the internet sparks a trend of making it more social. Although numerous examples of campaigns based on social marketing are quite sophisticated, there are technology-based tools that are highly innovative for example, Facebook Connect, that enable you to advertise according to your budget.

Creating a witty campaign, it is even possible to be able to integrate a lot of activities with your social media and hence, you are able to get a lot out of what little investment you can master creating communities you can visit any time. The ways to develop an effective campaign for social marketing are as follows:

Using appropriate platform-Advertising through social media usually means Facebook as the best thing that comes into the minds of many people. Facebook is okay but it is not the best tool to just focus your marketing effort in it alone.

Many other platforms can be used for advertising using social media. LinkedIn has opened its doors to advertisers through a self-services platform that is able to segment the audience on their different characteristics according to their profile. It is the perfect alternative especially when you are a B2B company. On the other side of the story, there are emerging tools and social networks like Foursquare which are very useful for advertisers with low marketing budgets but at the same time, very high visibility to its users.

I think what people find really attractive about some of these emerging platforms is the fact that you don’t need a very technical design or display to make it effective. You simply need to be able to understand marketing in Social Media and what platforms other users are experiencing.

Media Combination-To creates a very effective campaign in social marketing, you can try using online video and you will see a major difference. Consumption for Online video steadily growing and people watch online videos more than they watch TV. Hence, this is a very amazing opportunity you can take advantage of to bring your campaign on that map. Consumers want something ever-changing and something entertaining and content that is presented in an interesting way.

For Brands, it is both a challenge and an opportunity to try out the online video. The most amazing thing to watch out for is the ability of your ads to be a means to entertain. You will enjoy as you catch your viewers’ attention and watch your view rates rise due to the sharing tools you may have set up.

Your campaigns must represent a social reason. There are many ad campaigns out there that do not include a T or an F that usually is being used by advertisers as a tool to measure the social aspect of their ad campaigns. However, these logos have minimal impact because it does not involve their viewers a call to do some action or even a URL.

These types of ads should include social elements. Oftentimes, their only purpose is just social presence while others promote a social platform which includes some sort of reward.

However, social media is not free. It is a fact that social media maximizes small budgets and get huge effects because you get a lot of users with minimum competition. But one thing in common with social media marketing and traditional marketing is that you need to spend money.

However, to really produce results, time and money must be spent on social networking. To get a campaign for social marketing to be fully developed, necessary visibility is a must to achieve your desired results.

There are many tools for Social Media Marketing. The famous application on Facebook, the Facebook Check-in is another amazing source of awareness for brands that is very useful to businesses to show their significance in trending online. Dunkin’ Donuts, for example, has taken the big leap with their application for checking in and encourage their costumers to pay attention to them by using this application for some sort of an incentive for costumers. This application is on their page in a social network and the more a customer “checks in” any of their stores or at least stands near their stores, they can win a 50″ Flat Screen Television!

The entire purpose of this strategy is there is no need for a person to purchase anything from Dunkin’ Donuts; they just have to be in the store or be near one. So the effect of this is that costumers will just want to be near the store and others will want to just be near the crowd and they get potential customers. This idea has given Dunkin’ Donuts a lot of traffic and loyalty from costumers. Of course, when one checks in to Dunkin’ Donuts and they bought something from the store, they can even comment about the food and services or just than having a good time and it is already free advertising. This type of marketing via word-of-mouth is proven to be very effective and very inexpensive.

There is a concept called Social Media Cards which allows people who own business to consolidate all their business information in one convenient place like a Social Media network. Social Media Sites like Twitter, YouTube or Facebook are becoming the channel for people to connect with each other via the internet. If your small-time business is not yet endowed with presence in social media then you are just throwing away an amazing opportunity to make money from a lot of potential customers. A lot of people today don’t just own a single account but several on different social media networks.

Using Business Cards in Social Media

A business card in Social media is still a business card. It should focus on your business and you. Therefore, you have to emphasize your name, company name, business address, contact information and of course your tagline for describing what your business is.

Unlike the traditional card type business card, a business card in Social Media will let you provide more information about yourself professionally and your business. This is what you call a tool for personal branding; hence, you should consider a strategy to make your presence in the web media known. Carefully selecting first social media sites to use is a must, they should be websites that your potential costumers usually visit and you will not miss out on any business contract with them.

Inclusion of Sites that are proven to be the best in Social Media

Plenty of Social networking websites are online today. If you put all of them, then it might overwhelm any recipient you want to give it to. Having just about 4-5 Social Media accounts are enough as long as you focus your efforts on them.

Here are some good Social Media Websites for an online business card.

LinkedIn-This is a website available primarily to professions. It will allow you to put up your educational history, work history, references and recommendations and affiliations professional.

Facebook-The The largest Social media out there and the most powerful which offers a lot of opportunities for your business. It connects your business to millions of potential costumers worldwide and even networks your company to other businesses and companies.

Twitter- A fantastic way to update costumers about any change in the company you are running or any cool deals or special you might be offering.

Flickr-It is best to post your costumer’s intimate and special moments in your restaurant, for example, to allow people to view it and share it. Flickr is also one of the best ways to share portfolios of immerging photographers and get potential visibility and costumers.

YouTube-It is ranked high in all search engines. Creating videos has not yet been fully exploited but imagine the potential profit for your business if you use it as a great medium for advertising by telling people about yourself and your business.