3 Creative Marketing Best Practices For a Flood of Customers
Maria Gudelis, CEO & serial entrepreneur, shares her secret sauce to stand out from cutthroat competition and shift into strong profitable growth.
We all want more customers right? I believe it’s critical to get creative to win the battle for attention.
It’s disturbing for brands today because advertising costs are increasing and just in this year alone, roughly 25.8% of internet users were blocking advertising on their connected devices. I have over 18 years of experience in digital marketing and sales and would like to share with you three effective best practices based on my experiences and lessons learned from six and seven figure marketing campaign launches.
Here’s the thing, the future of your business is now controlled through fleeting micro-moments of attention shared across multiple social media channels.
So how does a brand grab those micro-moments of attention from their ideal prospects? Here’s three creative marketing strategies that work:
1. Host an online challenge. It’s interactive and people share it. An online challenge is an event or experience that allows your brand to establish a powerful bond with your ideal customers as you provide ‘micro-lessons’ each day. These daily lessons elicit micro-commitments from your challenge participants. Micro commitments are a very powerful persuasion technique based on Robert Cialidini’s commitment and consistency principle. Basically, humans have a hard-wired desire to be consistent so when you offer something for sale at the end of the challenge, you will convert your challengers to customers. It’s a super powerful way to get more leads, engage prospects and get more sales.
I’ve personally hosted challenges for my company and my clients that have resulted in bringing in tens of thousands of new leads. One company was then able to raise venture capital funding to create software because they now had a “ready to buy” list of customers after the challenge.
2. Host a contest. Who doesn’t get excited about contests!? When I started my first ecommerce store on Shopify I knew I needed to build a list fast. I did a giveaway contest that produced over 7,000 ideal prospects that kick-started my sales. People love to share contests so the ability to get free organic traffic from contests are high. There’s a great selection of software companies that provide compliant contest hosting platforms. Some of them that I’ve used or researched and recommend are: vyper.io, upviral, gleam.io, and rafflecopter.
3. Meet them at the micro-message. 1.3 billion people use messenger every day. Today’s chat marketing and SMS technology like Manychat allow you to set up some great ‘micro-messaging’ experiences within Facebook messenger. You can set up simple automated messenger marketing campaigns such as delivering a coupon code or delivering an interactive quiz to more complicated AI messenger bots such as qualifying your prospects. I’ve helped consumer brands and Amazon sellers create coupon messenger campaigns that builds their list and increases sales effectively.
In summary, implementing these strategies, even just one of them, will help you stand out from cutthroat competition and shift into strong profitable growth. If you’re a startup, hire a creative marketing consultant to help you strategize and execute a campaign that will make people want to buy from you, pay for your products, and fall in love with your brand and products before you ever even pitched them.
Maria Gudelis has worked for Fortune 500s such as Price Waterhouse, Computer Sciences Corp., Deloitte and Touche before jumping into being CEO of her own startups. She has created multiple million dollar online companies and has taught over 30,000 people worldwide over the last decade. Her creative marketing skills act as a sales catalyst to her clients businesses resulting in increased profits and asset value. She founded and grew a successful social commerce company and has published several books. Currently, Maria is consulting on interactive creative marketing strategies for startups to $1 million dollar companies. She holds an MBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business and is a Springboard Enterprises alumna. For more information about Maria please visit www.mariagudelis.com.
