You've used all of the standard, popular marketing strategies with only moderate success. You wonder - are there things I am missing? Could there be other avenues I don't know about?
The short answer is "maybe." Here are a few you may not have tried - some are easy and doable quickly; some are a bit more complex. But all are worth having a look.
1. Get Your Guerilla Marketing On
While this is usually an offline strategy, there I one related online tactic - product reviews. Simply send your products to bloggers for review.
Go to Tomoson or another site offering blog reviews from influencers. Click the "send products to influencers" link. Up pops a list of bloggers with their stats and categories.
Look at their past promotions and head over to blogs to get a feel for style and tone. Contact a few selected bloggers (or many) and make your offer. In most cases, you send your product over or provide your service for free.
Once their reviews publish, promote them on all of your platforms. You get the benefit of all of their readers as well as some useful content of your own to market. Here is an example of a review of "In a Pickle" - a company that sells handbags and other products shaped like pickles.
This review is guaranteed to bring traffic/sales. It has an amazing headline, and then provides not just a review but a discount offer and a contest - so many enticements!
And here is the CTA that the reviewer posted:
2. Improve Your Link Building Strategies
Having high quality and relevant links is huge for SEO, and it takes time and usually money to do so. Using the Ground Zero Technique you can take a step-by-step strategy of link building that will gradually move you into the ranks of a broad range of inbound links from a variety of sources.
Of course, your site must be poised and ready with great content and features and "humanized" with photos of you and your team. From there you go through the remaining 8 steps, beginning with giving links to other sources in all of your content and finishing up by convincing influencers to link to you and contribute to your content outreach.
3. Try StumbleUpon Paid Search Discovery
Most paid advertising cost a bundle. StumbleUpon is cheaper and targeted. If you have an accurate customer persona, you can target for gender, device, age-range, income bracket, etc. You start out at 10 cents per click and add 2 cents for each target specification.
But your potential customers are delivered right to you - no mining for them. The best ads for this platform are visuals (of course) and humor. Make sure you use the targets - that's the key.
4. Hold Contests
Very effective, but don't even think about running a contest unless you have a great prize to offer and you set it up right. The potential to get new leads from contests is big, so consider it seriously.
If you are unsure about putting a contest together, use Rafflecopter - they do it all for you. Get it up and running on all of your social channels and imbed the registration in your website, gated with an email registration.
5. Seek or Create Online Business Awards
A lot of industry niches have business awards you can apply for. If you can get one or two, display the seals on your site for greater credibility.
Or host a business awards program. Think of the attention you'll get from related businesses - connections for future collaborations and partnerships.
6. Find and Use Apps and Tools that Will Increase your Business Exposure
There are so many ways now for lead generation and increasing your exposure within the right groups for your business niche. One example is the IBOToolbox. Here is how it and most of the others can work for you.
Easy to do:
- Create an account on IBOToolbox - it's free
- Fill out the profile page and add a picture of yourself - maybe a little about yourself too
- Watch the tutorial
- Send out friend requests to all recent joiners
- Send out an introductory message, describe yourself and simply say you look forward to collaborating for mutual benefit
- Narrow you list of "friends" down to those who respond - keep conversations going
- Propose mutual marketing strategies
7. Use Google Alerts
Sign up and get notified when
- Discussions occur about topics based upon the keywords you have entered.
- Your name or brand has been mentioned anywhere on the web, and where that occurred.
Here's how:
- Go to google Alerts and enter a content topic in the box
- Click "show options" and personalize the settings for what you want
- Click "Create Alert."
You'll get all sorts of information, can jump into conversations, respond to mentions of you, and basically improve your rep as a reliable individual and brand.
8. The Magic Bucket Technique
Become an authority immediately. Simply pull RSS feeds from the top blogs within your niche, organize them into categories, and then schedule their distribution on all of your social media platforms. Here is how it works using a tool like Feedly.
Once you have these top blogs, you schedule their publication on your blog, promote them on your social media accounts, and let the original writers know that you have featured them on your blog. This begins to develop relationships that you can use in the future, especially if these authors are influencers in your niche.
9. Use Great Content from Others to Promote Your Business
If you have not yet used Snip.ly, try it now. This will let you take any piece of content that is hugely popular, overlay your own message that relates to the content, and add a CTA button that takes a reader back to your site. Create your message and backlink, and click "create."
10. Use Your Team as Guest Posters
Who has more expertise and knowledge of your product or service than your own team members? They are great sources of content, tips and more. You'll get far more content out there with this simple tactic.
Suppose, for example, that your business involves all things related to gardening. You have an employee who is an avid gardener and has a special expertise in flowering perennials. Who better to create posts related to this than that employee? You can always edit if grammar, etc. isn't perfect. Find the areas of expertise/deep interest on the part of your employees, and tap into them.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of untapped marketing possibilities. But it's a start. And remember - online marketers are clever people. There will always be new tactics out there. Stay alert.