Advertising (paying somebody who has access to your target market) is only one way to get new customers. Over the last few years, I've been working to discover other ways of achieving the same result, and it's led me to a number of marketing sub-disciplines that can work just as well. 1. Fusion Marketing - Partnering with local businesses around town in a mutually beneficial way. 2. Networking - Showing up at events my target market goes to and interacting with your target market. 3. Public Relations - Public speaking, public demonstrations, and exhibiting at local events. 4. Media Relations - Building relationships with people that work at local media outlets. 5. Referrals - Create a plan to increase the number of friends, family, and coworkers people tell about your product/service. 6. Upselling - Find ways to increase the size of the average purchase, or to sell additional products/services to your existing customers. 7. Customer Retention - How can you stop people from leaving? Why do they leave in the first place? 8. Viral Marketing - Creating unique promotions, content, and e-mails that people are likely to talk, tweet, text, email, or post on Facebook. 9. Internet Marketing - Same as networking, but online. Where does your target market gather online? How can you post content or ads in those places? 10. Storefront Marketing - Create a unique display or post a poster or banner in your store (or office) front designed to draw people in who pass by. 11. Branding - Creating a strong brand enhances all of the methods above. If you would like more marketing ideas, I've created an online library of marketing ideas that currently has over 450 unique marketing ideas for both online and offline marketing - (http://www.marketing-training-center.com). We accept user submissions, so please feel free to share your marketing ideas! Cheers
Very good points... it would be great if you could ellaborate on the points. For example, how to build relationships with media.
Hi praetserge, the link I included in the post elaborates on every one of those categories. Right now I've merged media relations and public relations together under "public relations". I plan to separate it shorty. My goal with this website is to really catalog marketing into all of its various subdisciplines, and build the most comprehensive list of marketing methods for each category. This is an exercise in mapping out the field of marketing. Within the next two weeks I'll be adding 150 more ideas, including 30+ viral marketing tactics, 50+ freelance marketing tactics, 10-20 guerrilla marketing ideas, and just beefing up the other categories in general. I aim to get to 1,000 ideas within the next 2-3 months. I would appreciate any help people can offer in submitting an idea or two on the site (there are idea submission forms all over the place) Thanks for your comment, and I'll consider doing a follow-up post for each category if people are finding this information useful. If anybody else has any requests, I'll definitely take them into consideration. Cheers