Your company’s marketing campaign is slowing down. It was successful for a while but other companies stole your thunder, and now you’re stuck trying to figure out how to make it even bigger and better. You want to steal back the thunder and the lightening.
- Get a Non-Buyer’s Opinion
There’s a reason they’re not buying into your marketing campaign. Whether they just don’t like the product or marketing has made it less than appealing to them it doesn’t mean they’re not worth your attention. In fact, they are exactly who you should be talking to.
You do want their money, right?
Researching with people not in your market is a way to figure out what they want in order to get them into your market. It’s about pleasing the ones who don’t have your attention, because people who already like your product will keep buying. If a non-buyer doesn’t like a way a product is presented they can point out flaws that the campaign might have that you can then use to better your efforts. Or perhaps a non-buyer can point out missing advertisement venues that you hadn’t thought to cover. People on the outside can perhaps see the best and worst of a campaign because they’re not consuming it, so by catering to non-buyers you can correct wrong-doings and turn them into buyers.
- Look to the Past
Ask yourself ‘What worked in marketing campaigns and what didn’t’? And not just for your own company, but competitors too. See Coca-Cola; their Polar Bears are part of an annual winter campaign. Something about those bears keeps Coca-Cola using them. Can you pin-point what it is?
Take ideas from what works in other campaigns into your own, but make it work with your product instead of just tossing it in. Then on the flip side, take into account what didn’t work. Figure out why it didn’t and then take the idea and turn it into something workable. Good ideas can stem out of bad ideas – it’s just about solving the kinks.
- Take a Break
Inspiration has a way of finding itself when you’re not looking for it. Let inspiration find you as you focus your efforts on something else instead of forcing an idea out. Forcing only creates frustration, and in the end a not very thoughtful marketing campaign. So sit back, relax and don’t think about it.
For companies who don’t have time to waste, a break of an hour can still do wonders. You could use that break to try letting out creative steam in other matters, such as painting, writing or drawing. By placing creative energy into other outlets, it actually stimulates your original creative outlet and will help you boost out that thunder-stealing strategy.
- Go Local
Communities like to feel like they’re a part of something. Bring your product to its closest local community and start embracing the people. It will give them the sense of a hometown product that when they travel they can say ‘That product got its start in my hometown.’ Nothing like a little hometown pride to help spread the word about your product.
Build connections to local businesses to become your allies and supporters of your product. Again, hometown pride can go a long way so long as you treat them right.
- Promotional Freebies
People love free things. Whether it’s free samples of your product or a promotional coffee mug for your product, people can’t resist free things. Its why buy one, get one campaigns draw people in – people like to feel like they’re getting more without spending more (or spending at all). By pleasing the greed factor, you’ll grab their attention – hello, your product is now in their hands.
Maybe you’ve already tried this but it didn’t help. Look at what your freebie is. Not many people have uses for stickers with your product’s name on it or have draws full of promotional pens. Objects like those tend to get tossed aside into junk piles. Ask yourself how you can top the run-of-the-mill freebies.
Dan Ripoll is co-founder and CEO of Guest Blog Genius, an ingenius new guest blogging platform connecting search marketers with hundreds of blog owners looking for specific content for their blogs. Customers use the platform to connect with a crowd of freelance writers to create content on their behalf, and deliver it to bloggers.
