How to Use Your Content as a Creative Marketing Strategy

In online marketing, content is king. If you can create high quality content that is informative, educating and entertaining, you attract readers with ease. These readers become the bulk of the traffic to your website. They transform to leads and eventual customers. If you want to succeed as an online marketer therefore, it is extremely important and a good marketing strategy to always create content that people want to engage with. Note carefully that a good content is far more than just blog posts and press releases. It must be well crafted and creative enough to fit into your overall marketing strategy.

These here are great ways to use your content as a creative marketing strategy.

Emulate Industry Leaders: In any business you are in, look out for the industry leaders and endeavor to follow them keenly in whatever they’re doing in their business. Pay particular attention to what the leaders in your industry are doing by way of marketing themselves and their business. Doing so gives you the opportunity to discover certain things you can take away from what they do and how you can adapt such things to your own strategy. Think more of emulation and not outright copying to get results for your own business.




Use Industry Related eBooks: If you blog for business, well, nearly everyone does these days, you must already have a huge trove of content on your website. You can re-purpose this content to create a guide or industry related eBook. With that, you can then use the eBook to attract visitors through an invite form on the landing-page of your website. That helps to capture leads from among visitors who are interested in downloading your eBook.

Online Polls: Conducting online polls is one great way to get visitors interested in your website. By working through poll-maker sites online, you can specifically ask a target group of people some probing questions. Since these questions are industry-related, you will get some attention from people who are in the same industry if you report the findings on your blog or in a case study. Sharing such findings widely on social media helps to get traffic back to your website.

Use Fun Memes: Having fun is one great way to relieve tension. Good Memes do help your website visitors with some humor and to have fun. They help to give them a break from mundane business activities while showcasing the lighter mood of your business. That’s why many people love Memes and they are always attracted to good ones. Your website traffic gets boosted as a result.

Industry Trends Infographics: This is one great way to process data graphically for easy comprehension and digestion by your readers. Infographics help you to merge the statistics you get from your research efforts into an easy-to-understand visual presentation. If they are well-designed and well-presented, they attract the attention of online visitors.

Use SlideShares: SlideShares represent some form of online presentation strategy. They involve re-purposing your PowerPoint presentation in a more engaging way to attract visitors seeking preferred visual info. B2B persons mostly on LinkedIn social media platform tend to prefer the use of SlideShares as online marketing tools.

Use Comparison Guides: If you are marketing a product similar to that of your competition, you can create a comparison guide for it. Such guide helps in a strategic way to show your audience how you are different and what you do differently that warrants giving your product a try. Stating the naked facts about your product in a fair and objective way is an ethical way to go about it. Customers easily take note of that from among the several choices they have, and they reward you with patronage.

Offer Product Test Trials: It is one great and effective marketing strategy to offer money-back guarantees for returned goods and offering free trials as well. Allowing buyers to test your product risk-free is a great way to get them in. It demonstrates to buyers that you have implicit trust on the product you have in the market. For most buyers, if your product meets their needs during the trial period, they get converted as customers.

Teach with Webinars: Teaching with webinars is one impactful way to teach and to give more insight on any industry topic of choice. You can also use webinars to give a more detailed inside look at any product you are marketing. Webinar lessons can be delivered with synchronized timing at the same time around the world. They are very effective online marketing efforts which help to generate good sales and leads.

New Industry Intro Guides: Yeah, there are always new entrants into any industry on daily basis. People who are in a relatively new industry or branching into a relatively unknown part of any industry do need guidance and pathways. For this reason, beginners guides are a great piece of content that typically have very high engagement rates because such content has a way of making readers feel like industry insiders.

Use Pop-Up Opt-In CTA: Strategically using pop-up opt-ins as call-to-action just when visitors are trying to exit your website works very well to convert. That way, the bounce rate on your website gets lowered. For marketers, pop-up opt-ins on a website do serve as last ditch efforts to give visitors one last chance to engage with your website.

Use Interactive Quizzes: Online quizzes are very easy to create using free online tools. Many people love doing online quizzes mostly for entertainment and for solving imaginary business problems or answering imaginary questions. When such quizzes are good and challenging, they tend to attract visitors to the website.



Write an Online Magazine: Producing your own virtual magazine is a great form of content marketing. If your content is of high quality, you can quickly build up followers and subscriptions. That helps to get leads, customers and sales.

Produce Your Own Podcasts: To produce your own podcasts, be sure you really understand what your audience actually wants to hear and learn about. That’s the only way to produce podcasts that will benefit your audience. Make sure your podcasts are unique and outstanding not just run-off the mill podcasts everyone else is producing. If well produced, they can serve as strategic traffic earners for your website.

Make Online Comics: You can create good online comics using free web tools. They serve well as visual content marketing materials. Online comics are very popular with web visitors thereby helping to get traffic for a website. As marketing tools, online comics that relate to the surreal aspects of any business niche tend to be better liked.

Market with Videos: Videos are very effective visual content marketing tools. They tend to arrest viewer’s attention much faster than text content. Web visitors who view product videos are more likely to convert to customers because videos always present a more convincing visual message to potential customers. You do not have to be a professional to be able to shoot marketing videos. With the amazing cameras now available via smart phones, creating videos has become much easier than ever. Once created and shared on YouTube, they get the required exposure from one of the most searched Social sites in the world, which YouTube presently is. That exposure is good for traffic.

Cover Industry Events: Every business person likes to get quality information about the industry they operate in. The reason many like to attend industry events. For the benefit of people who are unable to regularly attend such events for one reason or another, they benefit by getting information from reliable sources that cover such events. So, by creating a guide, overview of an industry event, or even doing real-time industry updates on Facebook or Twitter, you can quickly build an audience of eager followers hungry for information.

 

How to Boost Your Website for Creative Marketing

As an online marketer, you must be aware that your website is your functional business window in the internet world. It is probably your most important online marketing asset. If your website is well-designed and internet-friendly, with some creative strategies, it can help your business to do well on the internet. Creatively using your website to its full potential is like having a 24/7 sales and marketing team that never takes a break nor sleeps.

Here are some proven ways to boost your website for creative marketing.

Simple Website Design: A simple/practical website design helps to give your website a good loading speed to satisfy web surfers who habitually are always in a hurry. It must be easy to navigate and with a landing page that tells the whole story about your business at a quick glance. Its aesthetics, content fonts and display colors must be such that help to arrest the attention of web visitors.



Use Simple Language: Avoid industry jargon which may not be universal in usage. Remember always that your website represents your business around the world, cutting across cultures and linguistics lines. For that reason, it is good to write your content simply just as you speak. Apart from the simple easy-to-understand language needed in your content, it should read in some kind of conversational way which your reading public and target audience will love.

Optimize Your Content: Optimizing your website content for SEO purposes is to make it search engine friendly. On-page SEO best practices help to make sure each page on your website is optimized for searches and that your content is focused on specific keywords with which it was optimized. Doing so somehow helps to induce search engines to rate your material high on their SERPs. A consequence of which the organic traffic to your website is greatly enhanced!

Carefully Choose Your Website Colors: Carefully choosing your website colors helps its aesthetics and attractiveness to a reading public. Somehow, everything tends to communicate some message in a unique way. By carefully choosing and using colors that really attract and engage your audience, their user experience is helped a great deal. You can effectively use colors for branding and marketing if you take quality time to ponder what colors mean and how they make people feel, before choosing to use them.

Use on-page CTA strategically: It is advisable to use Call-To-Action, CTA buttons above the fold of your webpages preferably on the top right corner, making sure you don’t install too many per page. In that strategic location, it is difficult for visitors to miss a CTA button no matter how brief their visit to the website is. An effective CTA can be as simple as hyper-linked text asking your website visitors to take some sort of action.



Optimize Your Images: Since search engines found ways to index web images, it became necessary to optimize them for easy search and ranking on SERPs. You can optimize images by Adding Titles and ALT text tags making them universal for searches even for people with sight impairments. Optimizing web images also enables a text to be displayed in place of an image if an image file cannot be loaded. In addition, there are also SEO benefits when you add keywords to your image alt text. These tags tell web crawler bots what your image actually is and help the image to appear in image search results of search engines.

Regularly Audit Your Own Content: Changes in business addresses, telephone numbers, poor spellings, obsolete info/data etc. necessitate the periodic auditing of a website. By running an audit of the current content on your site, you can easily see what needs to be changed, what is working and what isn’t. After that, you can then write, reformat or remove any stuff that just doesn’t jell with your audience.

Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices: According to Google reports, over 60% of web searches these days are attributable to mobile devices. Meaning? More people now search on mobiles than on any other devices. Now, that’s one huge chunk of search information.  For this reason, having a mobile-responsive website has become very essential.

Use Forms to Capture Leads: Your creativity and ingenuity come very handy here. You can design and use your own on-page forms to capture leads. Avoid asking for too much information from your visitors. Ask for just the barest essential info you need. Designing and adding your own forms on your website is a cheap and very easy way to add conversion elements to the site. You must however endeavor to keep things very simple while making sure to always have a mandatory email field. Capturing emails allows you to nurture and market to your new leads with ease.
 

How to Use Social Media as a Creative Marketing Strategy

Social media marketing is gradually increasing in popularity in tandem with the increasing popularity of social media platforms. Social media now provides a veritable avenue for online marketers to market to billions of people around the world 24/7. Now, that is one very huge market no doubt. To take full advantage of this huge market, you’ve got to be sufficiently creative in your marketing efforts. First, you must build a formidable following on social media platforms and with some creativity, you can harness it for the benefit of your business.

You can try these here creative strategies for effects and expect amazing results.

Share Industry Related Content: Online, marketers and consumers are always looking for information to help solve problems for them. This is why it is imperative to always choose content that adds value to your audience. Such content must be related to the industry niche your business in known for. You can share links to relevant content published in authoritative and credible sources like trade journals, business publications, research journals and newsletters in the fields of interest to your audience. This is one creative way to build audience and traffic.



Reward Customers Who Share Your Content: Content sharing is very easy on social media even though not everyone does it. A vigorously shared content tends to go viral fairly quickly and that is good for business visibility and traffic. Since not everyone likes to share content, you can design ways to appreciate and reward customers who take a bit of time and effort to share your content. Simply thanking them for what they are doing for your business may be OK with some. Some others may be rewarded with token gift items like free coupons, discounts and suchlike incentives to make what they are doing for you really worth their while. That’s a creative way to encourage them to continue sharing your content.

Create a New LinkedIn Group: LinkedIn is a very popular social media platform that helps to bring together business persons with similar interests. So, if you can’t find any group in your industry that has similar needs as yours, you can simply create one. That’s very easy to do after which you can take deliberate actions to promote it to people you are connected with. You can attract them with compelling content and discussion questions then invite them to join up.

Join LinkedIn Groups: These are places business persons with similar interests have unlimited opportunities for interaction. So, if you are a business owner, you need to join LinkedIn groups if you’re yet to do so. Joining groups on LinkedIn is one easy way to building connections and getting involved in business conversations with like-minded people. The more active and useful you are in these groups, the greater the returns your business gets.

Connect with Local Businesses on Social Media: One great way to build community and cross-market your business is to connect with other local businesses on social media. You can actively interact with these businesses, positively engage with their content and build good relationships as a result. Doing so can help open doors for your business to get referrals and even mutually beneficial partnerships.

Push Your Social Media Handles: Do you often see “Follow me on Twitter?” That’s one creative way to push your Twitter handle. You can do similar things in many social media platforms. If for example you are writing an article for publication or you are speaking at an industry event, conference or seminar, you can easily drop your social media handles for your audience to link up with you at a later time of their convenience. When people love what they hear you say or read what you write, many will be keen to keep up interacting with you. Dropping your social media handles helps to facilitate that process.

Use Hashtags: The internet loves hashtags usually denoted with the symbol “#” before the hashtag word or phrase. Many internet users usually search for information using hashtags. When you use hashtags, it allows people searching for content, using such tags, to find your content fairly easily.

Join in on Popular Hashtags: You can search Google for hashtags related to your business niche. If found, you can join and use the popular hashtags in your industry by getting involved in the larger conversation. Search results will be turning up your business as well if it is involved with popular hashtags.

TikTok Social Service: TickTok is useful for creating quick, short-form videos. It takes just a bit of work and efforts to create the videos. If such videos are some fun creative content, you can quickly grow a network and following on TikTok. Get started now if you’ve not already done so before everyone else in your industry beats you to it. If your content is good, the traffic it gets is good too.

Images on Pinterest: Pinterest is more an image and inforgraphic social media platform now becoming very popular with marketers. If you create some great images for your blog or make an infographic, you can Pin them on Pinterest. You can leverage Pinterest for your business by sharing other related content along with your Pins. That way, your business gets seen as someone who Pins great content even if you didn’t produce the content. This helps to build trust with your audience and positions you as informed and helpful in your niche.

Follow Your Competition: Some marketers like to call this spying on your competition. It is good for business if you can keep a keen eye on what your competition is doing. Use creative and effective ways to keep watch on and to keenly follow your competition. In some social media platforms like Facebook for example, you can use its “Page to Watch” feature to follow other accounts easily. Following your competition and keeping tabs on what they are doing enables you to see what works for them and if you can learn anything from the strategy they are using.

Be Your Biggest Promoter: Having a good content on your website is not enough. You must reach out and promote it. If you sit back and hope it will work just like that, it won’t. You cannot be wrong by promoting your own thing. If you’re unwilling or unable to share your own content, who will? If you have a good content, experts advise that you should reach out, engage, interact and be bold enough to ask for, follow, like or connection. That is one great way to get noticed.




Use Instagram Photo Contest: Instagram is one social media platform that is image driven. The reason it is a celebrity platform of choice. Posting good photos regularly helps to build a very formidable following in good time. On Instagram, you can use a photo contest to build brand awareness. If some good prizes are involved in such photo contents, you easily attract followers who in turn help to share your business with their followers. That helps to grow brand awareness real quick.

Use a Social Media Management Tool: Social media management tools come handy to help manage many social media accounts and saving time. Many of the tools come with great features which you can use to run the connected accounts from one location. You can even get to use some of their analytics features to better understand what is working for your campaigns and what is not. A proper use of social media management tools helps to save time and energy and with good results to boot.

Connect with Leaders in Your Niche: Finding and connecting with influential leaders in your niche has two major advantages. Firstly, if you connect with them via social media, you have unlimited access to their awesome content which you can learn from and share with your own audience. Secondly, you can get them to also help share your own content to their huge followers who look up to them as industry leaders. Both ways help your brand awareness and visibility immensely.

Use Zoom Web Conferencing: Zoom is one new technology now becoming popular with marketers. It is a great, free way to do video conferencing. With Zoom, you can market directly to customers and engage them as if you are doing word–of-mouth advertising. By video conferencing, you see them and they see you. Talking to each other is seamless while facial expressions and gestures can also help to send powerful messages. Many business owners now use Zoom to connect more intimately with their following or to record their screen and produce screencast videos to share on social media.

5 Easy and Creative Marketing Campaign Strategies

Taking a creative approach to your marketing campaigns is one great way to increase your online presence and improve traffic to your website. Even if it involves spending a little money on creative approaches to your digital marketing campaigns, getting good traffic from such efforts somehow enhances your business revenue. Once in a while, a good marketer needs to spruce up the marketing content of his business. If this need arises, the first thing to do is to work on your marketing campaign strategies in a creative way.



You may choose to try these here 5 creative marketing campaign strategies if you want to give your business some boost.

1. Routinely Create Fresh and Engaging Content

In online marketing, content is always king. The more and better the content you produce to enhance your marketing efforts, the better for your business. Online audiences respond better to engaging and current content which provides them real value. This is exactly where blog posts come in very handy. Your blog may be the first place customers hit when they have questions about products or solutions like the ones you provide. If your blog posts are engaging, relevant to your product, and remain up-to-date, they tend to encourage more visitors who are initially attracted through a search query to explore your website further. Engaging readers longer on your website content can lead to conversion and eventual customer. A creative content marketing strategy results in more engagement from your content readers. This leads to more and better conversions, leads and sales.

2. Use Video Marketing

What video marketing entails is to creatively use videos to promote and market your products. Videos tend to have a unique way of helping to increase engagement on your website particularly when they are used to demonstrate the use of products or to suggest uses. They practically tell a convincing story which can help your brand to resonate effectively with its target audience. Thus, videos can become very powerful outreach tools when they are produced in a conversational, measurable and actionable way especially personalized to the consumer.

3. Generously Use Enticing Giveaways

Generally, most people love the prospect of getting something for nothing no matter how token the object is. Giving something related to your brand away as a token gift is one creative way to market a brand or to attract customers. This is why many businesses use branded products like ballpoint pens, calendars, branded mugs, tea sets, stress balls, customized dress socks and neck ties, face towels, handkerchiefs, key holders, notepads etc etc, during such events as product launches, trade shows and product promos.

4. Design and Use Graphics for Branding

Images and graphics if well designed and deployed always have a very unique ability to arrest customer attention. They help to provide a seamless website experience for your website visitors. That somehow enhances the overall customer satisfaction for those website visitors. Images/graphics convey to your target audience at a quick glance what your business is all about and represent a brand that has something of value to offer them. When creatively used, images/graphics eloquently tell the story of your brand to visitors. The reason they’re very effective marketing tools. With good images/graphics on display, a visitor’s experience on your website actually starts even before they click to access the homepage. Therefore, for your online digital marketing strategies to actually work to effectively inspire visitors to click through to your website, the graphic design used in your ads must prioritize creative marketing strategies that match the target customers in terms of culture, lifestyle, and messaging. That enhances their real effectiveness.

5. Promote on Social Media

These days, nearly everyone is on social media for one reason or another. When used creatively, the popularity of social media can be deployed to provide a huge advantage for your promotional efforts.  Social media is an excellent platform to showcase authenticity in a very graphic way. With the ease to share updates of content and photographs regularly, social media manages to keep the attention and engagement of your reading audience for prolonged periods. It easily promotes customer interaction by allowing customer comments on your posts and photographs. This tends to amplify messaging to reach new markets which are likely to share important characteristics with your initial contacts. By responding to these comments, the brand not only further fuels sharing but also makes contacts feel valued. That is good for trust building, leads and conversions. If social media is used creatively, it allows for improved market performance without having the audience feeling as if they’re being sold an item or service.