How To Market Your Business Outside The Box

While you may have developed a sophisticated digital marketing strategy, there is no need to stop there. There are also many ways to market your business that will differentiate you from the competition and help you attract more customers.

Rather than just relying on digital marketing, try integrated marketing, adding some old-school marketing techniques that still work. These techniques can be broken up into two distinct categories: events and traditional media. Let’s take a look at 3 examples from each one.

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Market Your Business At Events

An event could be a trade show, a conference, or a speaking engagement.

1. Trade Show

A trade show is often seen as an excellent way to introduce people to your products and educate the public on the benefits they offer. One way to get people to visit your booth is to promote it via social media. Also, use custom canopy tents so people who read your posts can quickly recognize you.

However, one thing few people consider is that this is also a wonderful opportunity to conduct some informal market research. You can ask your customers directly how they first heard about your company, what they like about your products, and what you can do to improve them.

Instead of dealing with abstract customer avatars, which, in the final analysis, are what you imagine your customer’s to be like based on data sampling, you will get to meet real people and get to know their wants, needs, and desires through one-on-one conversations. In fact, after attending a few trade shows, you will probably want to update your customer avatar profiles.

2. Seminars

If trade shows are a way to directly get to know your customers better, then think of seminars as a direct way to know market leaders, influencers, competitors.

Besides learning a great deal from the talks and workshops, as well through observation, conferences are also a great place to meet future joint venture partners, people in businesses that complement your own.

3.  Public Speaking

By sharing your knowledge at service clubs like Lions or Rotary, you will effortlessly build your brand and acquire name recognition. When you stand in front of a group of people to share information that will help them, you build rapport in a way that advertising and public relation campaigns simply can’t do. This is why TED coaching skills are extremely highly rated nowadays.

This is also a good opportunity to take photographs of yourself speaking and standing beside well-known people you meet at a speaking event. You can then use these images as part of your branding strategy.

Traditional Media Advertising

Traditional media could be television, radio, and print.

1. Television

When you run a television commercial, you are exposing your brand to a huge audience within less than a minute. It’s a vast amount of exposure within a small time frame. For this reason, it’s essential that you learn the nuances of how to create an effective television commercial.

2. Radio

Although not as effective as television, radio advertising is far more affordable. Since you can’t show people your products so that they can intuitively grasp their benefits, your choice of words will have to evoke the right images. It’s advisable to work with a copywriter to be able to have just the right things said about your products in the limited time available to broadcast your message.

3. Print

When it comes to print, you can advertise and write articles. These articles will not be promotional but simply sharing important information with readers about topics within your range of expertise that might interest them. Your takeaway will be your author’s resource box, where you can then mention your business and share your contact information.

In closing, it’s important that you keep the following 3 things in mind when you try out these techniques:

• First, try out these techniques one at a time. This will give you accurate figures on how well each one works. If you do several at the same time, it will be difficult to understand what is responsible for an increase in business.
• Second, document everything you do. This will help you figure out how to improve. You will be able to compare how your marketing differed in time, say, from one trade show to another or from one speech to another. You will also be able to make some qualitative comparisons between different types of strategies. Did you, for example, have more of an impact and reach a wider audience when you gave a public talk or when you wrote an article for your local newspaper?
• Third, develop as many metrics as you can so that you can make statistical interpretations. A qualitative impression of how something went will not be enough; you also need some quantitative results to get the whole story.

If you are interested in even more marketing-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels then we have a lot to choose from.

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