Advertising on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networking sites can attract visitors to your website, bring in new business and increase brand awareness significantly. Social media is popular right now, but any marketing approach runs the risk of turning stale with time. The trick is to constantly generate new ideas or improve on old ones – but how?
Buzz is hard to create and even harder to maintain. If you’re using social media to market your products or services, you must think up new ideas to assist you in your branding goals. Here are some creative thinking principles to help you do just that.
Ways to Get New Marketing Ideas:
1. Brainstorming 2.0
Every businessperson knows a thing or two about brainstorming. Many have entirely different systems dedicated to the process. You may like to lock yourself in a darkened room with a flask of coffee until you’ve filled a notebook, or you may prefer to draft in a few bright individuals and bounce ideas around.
Brainstorming 2.0 is an extension of your usual process. Use the latest innovations in social media to inspire the next raft of marketing ideas. Find new ideas that fit into the evolutionary path of social media – you’re not only brainstorming for good ideas that work right now, but also thinking ahead to make logical marketing decisions based on the trajectory of Facebook et al.
One recent innovation is Facebook Custom Audience and its Lookalike Audiences extension, through which marketers can target users by email address – the perfect combination of online and offline marketing.
2. Benchmarking and beating the competition
One of the best ways to think up new marketing tactics is to see exactly what your competitors are doing, then benchmark them and try to do better.
Rather than take your competitors head on by playing them at their own game, look for areas in which they’re lacking and where improvements can be made. If they’re creating good white papers, but without a thought of how they might perform on social media, get a step ahead by creating high-value, visual reports that people will enjoy and want to share via Facebook, Twitter and other networks. Place your own white papers behind well-designed landing pages that include social sharing buttons.
Social media marketing still involves niche marketing, so reach out to similar audiences to your own through your competition for a winning move.
3. Seek outside information
Many of the best social media campaigns to date have taken their marketing beyond the virtual realm of the internet and into the real world. Think about big social pushes by Nike, Starbucks and other large companies, whose campaigns frequently combine the very best of online marketing with traditional ‘outbound’ techniques, like print and television advertising.
The London Olympics last year tied in strong elements of social media, providing many ideas that can be scaled down to even the smallest campaign. Professor Andy Miah of the University of West Scotland, writing for the BBC, dubbed it the “social media Olympics to remember”. Although the article talks more about how social media was used to spread news about the games, both good and bad, we’re shown how London 2012 just wouldn’t have been the same without the influence of social media, Twitter in particular.
Professor Miah continues: “There have also been creative projects to help visualise what was happening on Twitter, such as Emoto, which displayed emotional reactions on Twitter to London 2012 content, or EDF's Energy of the Nation, which did something similar, projecting the results onto the London Eye.”
The lesson here is to monitor social media and seek outside inspiration and information when crafting new ideas. Gonzo marketing – a spin on a highly liberal style of journalism in which anyone and everyone can contribute freely and without rules – is exponentially more effective now that we all carry internet-enabled smartphones with cameras and social media apps.
4. Hire some help
If you’re truly having trouble generating ideas, there are many highly skilled, incredibly qualified people willing to get on board with your project. Think about finding an experienced partner agency to help you achieve your marketing goals in new and original ways, and not just via social media.
With some investment in the outcome, finding some real and immediate help through outsourcing may just help you to evolve your campaign quickly.
Generating new, fresh and exciting ideas is the only way your brand is going to effectively develop and spread via social media and associated online marketing approaches. Your products or services may be appealing today, but attention spans on social networks are exceedingly short – work hard to generate new ideas if you want your business to experience continued growth.
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thanx for the post
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