If you’re preparing to launch a home-based business or already have one, you need to think about how you can stand out from the competition with your marketing.
Hopefully, you have hired a designer to develop a nice website and a content expert to get good, original, and relevant content on your website.
Now you need to figure out how to stand out from the millions of accounts on these sites and reach your targeted customers.
STRATEGY #1: An Element of Surprise Can Help You Get Noticed
Distinguish yourself by doing something unexpected to rouse people to take a second look. There are a lot of businesses fighting for recognition and it takes a bold step to get noticed. Guerrilla marketers thrive on the reaction, whether good and bad.
Guerrilla marketing tends to lean toward shock value, but there are examples where sheer creativity wins the day and no one is offended. A bus stop bench painted very realistically to look like a life-size Kit-Kat bar featured by Creative Guerrilla Marketing is one example.
Think of images that reflect your business, but in an unusual way.
They can be seen anywhere — down the street, in your living room, from your car. Get in the habit of taking your camera with you everywhere you go, advises Sarah Evans, who owns a successful PR and new media consulting firm, in a recent Vocus webinar.
If photography isn’t your thing, use deposit photos from professional photographers and artists, often at surprisingly low prices.
Content on Google Images is not necessarily free for others to use and artists are starting to take legal action against those who use their work without permission.
Evans also suggests going old-school and running an occasional postcard campaign targeting new and potential clients. Fresh, engaging images and content can work in an older medium like this. Think about how people still put pictures up on their refrigerators and cubicle walls.
STRATEGY #2: Video is the Way to Go
Speaking of video, online video ads have the highest click-through rate of all online advertising, according to Business Insider.
They are more effective than buying banners, hiring bloggers, and paying for link-building.
Post a video on a site like Vimeo, Vine, or YouTube that ends with a call to action, such as a quick form and a link to your site.
If you’re stumped for ideas, practice taking videos of your (or your friends’) pets.
Animals remain wildly popular in viral advertising, notes The Viral Video Blog. Animals won’t complain or get bored. Put a chess set or other recognizable game on the floor where pets may be intrigued for a few moments, sniff it out, and maybe push around the pieces.
Start filming and you might capture a few cute seconds to put out in the social media world, courtesy your business.
Jon Rognerud and Chaosmap work with Fortune 500 companies, small business and entrepreneurs to create digital traffic strategies that scale up customers, leads and sales with profitable returns. Mr. Rognerud wrote a best-selling book (Buy On Amazon), “The Ultimate Guide To Optimizing Your Website” (Entrepreneur). Connect directly here.
