6 Unusual Online Marketing Strategies That Aren’t Played Out Yet

Reading about online marketing strategies can sometimes feel like a complete waste of time because the ideas that you read about are either utterly obvious or simply don’t work anymore. That’s the natural cycle with marketing techniques. Someone comes up with an unusual new idea that works, and word starts to get around. Before long, everyone is doing it. Consumers become blind to that marketing tactic, and it stops working.

If you’re trying to break through the static and take your online business to the next level, you need an unusual marketing strategy that actually works. In this article, we’re going to give you six. Some of these techniques work because they’re new enough not to be completely played out, and others work because they’re evergreen and always produce results if they’re executed correctly. Let’s dive in.

Let the Prices Do the Marketing for You

Having an unusual sales model or price structure is essentially like finding a niche within a niche. That makes it an evergreen promotion technique that can always work as long as nobody else in the niche is doing it already. When you adopt this strategy, your pricing can actually do the marketing for you. Here are a few examples.

• Adopt a bulk pricing model that allows customers to save money by buying more products in a single order. The website shefawholesale.com uses this technique successfully.
• If you sell a digital product or service, offer lifetime pricing for early customers or even try a pay-what-you-want sales model.
• Offer an extremely generous product guarantee that makes your competitors look like they have something to hide or aren’t standing behind their products.

Try Physical Mail

If you’ve been dabbling in online marketing for a while, there’s a good chance that you’ve at least experimented with email promotions. It’s likely that the results weren’t good because people are so blind to email marketing these days that they often don’t even open messages from their favorite companies.

Direct marketing still works in some niches, though, but it requires a different approach. Instead of sending blasts to an email list, send physical mail directly to your potential customers. You’d be surprised how responsive people can be to a glossy product brochure. Direct mail can also really help a business stand out in crowded niches where all of the search results look much the same as one another.

Find an Unusual Link Building Technique

Link building is the ultimate promotional strategy for any online business because links between websites – and the implied trust conferred by those links – remain core parts of Google’s ranking algorithm. If a website has many links from sites that have many links themselves, that site’s content has a better chance to rank well on Google for competitive search terms.

The problem with links is that website owners don’t give them away easily. That’s why online marketing professionals spend much of their time trying to come up with new link building techniques that actually work. By the time you read about a “new” technique, though, chances are that it’s already played out. If you really want to be successful, you’ll need to come up with a technique of your own. The longer you keep that technique to yourself, the longer it’ll work.

Maximize Your Customer Loyalty Program

Does your business have a customer loyalty program that’s powered by an app or plugin? If so, there’s a good chance that you’re doing it wrong. Many, many businesses fail to maximize their results here because they just install an app that allows customers to obtain small discounts after every few purchases. If that’s what you’re doing, your customers aren’t engaging with the loyalty program and probably don’t even know how many reward points they have.

If you really want to get people talking about your reward program, think of a way to turn it into a game. For example, you could begin including a free toss-in item with every order and improve the quality of the item as people reach new loyalty tiers. You could also begin giving away prizes to the first customers to reach certain point plateaus. If your customers typically know how many loyalty points they’ve saved up, you’re definitely doing something right.

Influence the Influencers

The word “influencer” tends to create a connotation of Instagram models strutting their stuff while hawking beauty products, but that’s not the type of influencer we’re talking about here. We’re talking about authority figures that people trust. When those types of influencers recommend products, people listen. Instead of marketing your products directly to the people who might buy them, try coming up with a new angle that could get your company recommended by the people your potential customers trust.

Some possible examples include:

• If you sell a product intended for children, find a way to market to teachers.
• If you sell an over-the-counter health product, find a way to market to doctors or dentists.
• If you sell a B2B product, find a way to market to the consultants who work with your intended customer base.

Try Some Micro-Sponsorships

Sponsorships come in many different forms. Big businesses like car manufacturers and soft-drink companies often look for advertising opportunities that get their names in front of as many eyes as possible. That’s great for relevance within the mass market, but it’s also extremely expensive and isn’t really realistic for most small businesses.

Having a huge budget, though, isn’t the only way to get your brand some attention. Sponsorship opportunities are everywhere, and a micro-sponsorship can be a great way to increase brand awareness among the people who are most likely to be interested in what you’re offering.

The ideal micro-sponsorship opportunity is anything that has an engaged audience, relates to your niche and needs financial assistance. Look for blogs, YouTube channels, local events, newsletters and podcasts that are relevant to your niche. A sponsorship should result in a link to your website, and it’ll help to create awareness and goodwill among the exact people you’re trying to attract as customers.