If your marketing needs a breath of fresh air, then look no further. We’ve compiled a collection of our favourite strategies below, taking into account changes in the digital landscape and the new doors that social media has opened.

Make Videos

We’ve written about the importance of videos in another post, but it’s certainly worth writing about it again.

We’re officially in the age of videos: According to Cisco, consumer internet video traffic will be 80 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2019.

The value of videos is clear and shouldn’t be dismissed, especially with tools like Youtube, Vine, and Snapchat at our disposal.

Marketers are encouraged to see the opportunity in this new era, and seize it by making their own videos and promote their business. Videos can be both long and short: while we may be seeing a trend of short, brief videos taking over, long videos are still useful as they have their own unique appeal.

Keep Communication Alive

Two-way communication between you and your customers can only bring benefits. Social media has given people a voice. It has also bridged the gap between customers and brands, placing people a lot closer to their favourite brands. Businesses gain bonus points with the public when they take the time to reply to people.

It’s normal for people to have questions for brands, whether that’s due to technical problems they may be facing with your product/service, or it might be due to pure curiosity.

An auto-reply to confirm you’ve received their message and will be contacting them soon is a good start. The next step is to strengthen your customer service, to make sure your team is answering questions by email, social media, chat and phone in the best way possible.

Every business should deliver high-quality customer service, regardless of their sector, location, etc. Helpful, friendly and timely customer service is a desirable trait in all businesses, and it will make you memorable for all the right reasons.

Encourage Interaction

Brands have been innovating in the interaction department for some time now. There are plenty of examples you can use as benchmarks, but a couple that stands out are AMC’s online tools based on its series: one lets you create a walker/zombie version of yourself, while the other lets you ‘Mad Man Yourself’.

Work with Humour

Several brands make excellent use of humour in their campaigns: Snickers, Old Spice and Cadbury stand as brands that like to make their audiences laugh and become all the more memorable and attractive for it.

Humour can be an excellent addition to a brand, but only if it’s genuine and natural. If you try to force it, it will backfire. So it’s important to find out whether you or your marketers have a natural flair for comedy and if it’s suitable for the nature of your brand.

Provide Solutions

If you feel the above tip is not suitable for your brand, then this one might be. If your brand is more on the serious side of the spectrum, then you can strive to help your audience with informative content that helps solve their problems.

You can achieve this by hosting webinars, writing how-to blogs, creating apps, etc. You’ll strengthen your credibility with your target market, which is a great competitive advantage.

Work with User-Generated Content – (UGC)

User-generated content is an excellent idea in both theory and practice: it is free marketing and it will give your brand awareness a significant boost. In a survey of 839 millennials, “Millennials reported that UGC is 20 percent more influential on their purchase decisions than other media.”

Businesses partner up with people in their target market, making them brand ambassadors as they promote the brand’s products/services on a range of social platforms — placing the brand in a positive light for all of their followers to see.

Brands ask people to tweet about their experience with their service, how it helped them. Then the brand in question can give it an extra push by sharing the best tweets on their own timeline. The other scenario consists of people posting photos of themselves with the brand’s product. Both scenarios use the brands’ chosen hashtag in their posts/tweets.

Forge Marketing Partnerships

Strategic partnerships offer a fair share of advantages: they are inexpensive, yield great results quickly, and expand your reach to new audiences.

Another selling point is that brands are likely to work harder and go the extra mile in partnerships, which leads to better, stronger content.

Be Thankful For Existing Customers

Businesses often make the mistake of focusing too much on potential customers and end up forgetting to pay attention to the existing ones.

It’s pivotal to set aside some time and effort to make your existing customers feel like they’ve made the right decision by choosing you. Think of loyalty cards and freebies. These tiny details make all the difference, and people will always love free stuff.

The key is making people feel special, looked after. If you go the extra mile for them, they will do the same for your business.