Creative Marketing Ideas to Boost Your Sales This Year

Marketing is a relentlessly changing sphere. Its trends, tools, and techniques are adapt and change every year—or even every month—due to numerous factors such as consumer insights and the world economic events. To keep up with the pace of its evolution, achieve KPIs, and stand out from competitors, you have to come up with innovative ways to appeal to new audiences. 

As staying inspired and motivated in tough times is hard, we share a list of creative marketing ideas that will be effective and trendy in 2020 and beyond. 

Organize a thematic podcast

Stats show that in the US alone, 144 million people have ever listened to a podcast and this number continues to grow. More and more people opt for podcasts because they allow people to easily catch up on the latest news, multitask, and save time on a daily basis. 

The widespread use of smart speakers and other voice-based technology also pave the way for a bright future with podcasting. According to Juniper Research, people will use over 8 billion digital voice assistants by 2023 compared to 2.5 billion at the end of 2018. 

What this means is that 2020 might be the right period to organize activity with a podcast relevant to the nature of your business. It allows you to achieve an entire variety of goals depending on the format you choose. If you decide to interview industry professionals, you’ll be able to establish expertise on the market and strengthen your brand image. There are many options with what you can focus on if you decide to invest in this type of activity, but it will always be particular to your business or a more broad field. 

Running a more entertaining format like a talk show will help you better connect with your target audience and convert them into loyal clients as you’ll introduce your brand to them in a different way. Moreover, podcasting can be a great option to collaborate with other brands or people, and expand your audience with cross promo. The more engaged people, the more sales, right?

Collaborate with brands or people you admire

Depending on your resources devoted to digital marketing, you can determine the scale of collaboration that will be beneficial for your business. Primarily, most partnerships will help you get more leads as you’ll be exchanging data bases with your partner. In case your collaboration with another business goes viral and becomes trendy, you’ll be able to get the word out about your brand or product as well. 

Louis Vuitton x Supreme is one of the most popular collaborations of the last decade. Although they had completely different audiences in the beginning, they found a way to unite their efforts in a creative and effective way. Your collaboration does not necessarily have to consist of joint production like Louis Vuitton x Supreme had. With your partner, you can organize common events, run a contest, exchange guest posts on social media or in blogs, and come up with any kind of ideas that would work best considering your brands’ niche. 

In addition to partnering with brands you admire, you can also try to collaborate with an influencer or a celebrity. You can draw inspiration from Apple that in 2018, when they announced a multi-year partnership with Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston, and others. Together, they will produce content for Apple TV+ service and thus, unite audiences of the company’s and celebrities’ fans. 

If you don’t have time and other resources to team up for a joint project, you can simply offer to do a cross promotion and put your efforts into providing outstanding and appealing content to the brand you’re partnering with.  

Useful tip: do not aim to collaborate with your direct competitors. The best businesses to team up with are those that are complementary to your product or services and work in your favor but not against it. 

Explore content marketing opportunities like blogging

Blogging is definitely a win-win strategy when your aim is to boost sales with the help of creative marketing. It serves as a tool of communication between your brand and its clients, allows your business to be easier found on the internet, and drives traffic to your website. According to Hubspot, those marketers who invest in blogging are 13 times more likely to see positive ROI.

The creative side of this marketing idea lies in the fact that you can experiment with formats. You can interview people, write long reads, how-tos, features, and columns, and create infographics as well. With thorough SEO techniques, the quality of the content you produce, and the expertise of people you interview, blogging can help you drive more leads to your website. With the right strategy, the traffic to your blog will be constantly growing.

Moreover, you can agree on cross promotion with other blogs and exchange guest posts to tackle new audiences and spread the information about your brand, product, or services. 

Create explainers because video is still king in 2020

The state of video marketing is promising and inspiring. Over the past three years, the number of businesses using video as a marketing tool has grown by four times. Moreover, Cisco predicts that by 2022 the majority of the internet traffic will be video. 

Another insightful fact is that 96% of people watched explainer videos to learn more about a product or a service. These short and often animated videos attract the audience’s attention as they don’t look like classic ads, the main purpose of which is to sell. However, not every explainer video is entertaining and appealing. To speak directly to your audience, an explainer should be highly-customized and carefully planned at the stage of script writing. With the right preparation and execution, video helps reduce support calls (as said by 41% of marketers). 

These are not the only benefits of video marketing. Today, you also don’t have to invest a lot of resources into creating videos. You can simply use graphic design tools like Crello to create animated explainer graphics and engage your audience even more.

Work up the courage for a guerilla marketing campaign

You can play safe with the creative marketing ideas described above or work up the courage and launch a guerilla marketing campaign. If you’re not familiar with the term yet, guerilla marketing is a practice of implementing unconventional strategies and to appeal to people in a bolder way. 

For instance, chalk art, vending machines, and installations can be examples of guerilla marketing. To increase brand awareness and to gain a pool of loyal clients by offering some freebies, Sprite has placed huge branded machines with water on the beach. Now every person showering there could interact with the brand and become aware of the fact that Sprite cares about people and their clients in particular. 

For guerrilla marketing with less investments, you can turn to billboards, posters, and even installations.

To draw attention to your brand, you can place stylish posters around the city with your brand’s name and a message you’d like to deliver. Don’t forget to include a QR code on a print that will lead to your website or social media and introduce your brand to more people. To advertise your products, services, or seasonal offers, you can opt for billboards or chalk art that will appeal to audiences with their scale and creativity. Choose a format to interact with your audience depending on your general marketing goals.

Offer customization with every purchase

Customization has been one of the trendiest marketing tools in recent years for many reasons. It helps improve customer experience and satisfaction as you give your clients an opportunity to personally tailor your products to their needs and desires. By offering customization you easily stand out from your competitors and win over loyal clients who are ready to come back to buy again and again.

For more inspiration on the topic, you can explore the cases with Jo Malone, a fragrance brand, and Dolce & Gabbana, a luxury wear brand. For seasonal events like Valentine’s Day (as well as on a regular basis for an additional fee) they offer customization of their products. Jo Malone gives an opportunity to engrave any phrase on a fragrance bottle, while at Dolce & Gabbana, you can get a personalized hand-drawing on bags and shoes. 

However, this creative marketing idea can be used not only by luxury brands. Do you remember the Coca Cola campaign during which they printed people’s names on the bottles and you could choose the one for you and your friends? The campaign was different for every market so that names you could see in Brazil and Russia were written in corresponding languages and according to local traditions. This approach to marketing allowed Coca Cola to make their product more relatable because they were personalized tokens. This created a fun perk to purchasing a Coke which inevitably generated more hype and sales.  

Whatever creative marketing idea you choose to implement first, make sure that you translate your brand’s personality with it. You can do this by establishing a particular tone of voice and by using visuals that relate to your audience in the best way. Most importantly, don’t rush and try to carefully plan and prepare your campaign so you wouldn’t have to fix your mistakes on the go. Market research and understanding your target audience should help you craft a campaign that works particularly for your business.