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At a time when almost every brand has a strong online presence, it can be extremely difficult to stand out from the crowd.

We all have corporate blogs, maintain social media accounts, send weekly email newsletters, and may even offer downloadable resources. Since our social media feeds are updated every few seconds and new articles are published constantly, it is a complete success for most companies to gain at least some traction.

Of course, traditional marketing techniques are critical to developing a long-term marketing strategy. To increase your visibility, you need to diversify your marketing efforts. Rise above the noise. Do something your competitors haven't done yet. And you will see how your audience notices you.

Sometimes the best way to improve your digital marketing strategy is to use overlooked marketing techniques like the one in this article.

Therefore, you should think outside the box

Social media accounts of many popular brands are full of posts that barely get 10 likes, let alone small businesses and startups.

By restricting ourselves to the most popular marketing methods, we only mix in the oversaturated market. While we all act identically, how are we going to outperform our competitors?

It always takes creativity to be noticed. Before you create an outstanding marketing campaign, you can use the following marketing techniques. They don't guarantee that your traffic will skyrocket, but they will certainly help you to increase brand awareness and reach more people (some of these methods work particularly well for certain niches).

7 Marketing Techniques Your competitors haven't tried yet

It is important to know what your competition is doing and how it is achieving its marketing goals. However, this does not mean that you should do the exact same things.

Why should you try to escape your rivals when you can just go the other way? With various marketing approaches, you can be the first to identify the most effective methods and be successful there. Here's what you might want to try.

1. Start a native advertising campaign

Native advertising has grown rapidly in recent years.

By the end of 2020, U.S. advertisers will spend almost two-thirds of their display budget on native ads. However, according to recent research by CMI and Outbrain, only 26% of marketers use native advertising to reach their target groups. This means the remaining 74% are still missing the opportunity to improve their content performance.

If you haven't heard much about native advertising, we'll define it for you.

Native advertising is a paid marketing method that uses ads that blend seamlessly into the design of the platform on which they appear. In contrast to typical banner advertising, native ads are not intrusive and do not impair the user experience.

You can find native ads in your social feeds (yes, these Booking.com ads that you see every time you come back from your vacation are native ads) under Articles (remember the content you might as well like?) Or under product cards on e-commerce websites.

This is an example of how native ads match the shape of publisher content.

It takes time to create an effective native advertising campaign. But the effort is worth it:

• Native ads were 18% more likely to buy than traditional banner ads.
• Consumers saw native ads 53% more often than display ads.
• 70% of users stated that they preferred to discover products or services through content rather than through conventional advertising.

How can native advertising work for you? It's about time, testing and continuous optimization. However, you can do the following simple steps first:

1. Set clear goals and be realistic.
2. Choose the right native advertising platform. You can either use a small native ad network with strong local publisher connections to promote your local business, or advertise on a large platform that works with the most popular publishers worldwide.
3. Align your campaign goals with the campaign content. Would you like to attract more newsletter subscribers? Why should your visitors do that? Give them an incentive. Show them the value.
4. Research your target group.
5. Think of the buyer's journey. If you want to increase brand awareness, target people who have (obviously) never heard of your brand. So don't attack your visitors with overly promotional content about your brand.
6. Before you create an ad, learn about creative insights into Taboola trends.

2. Publish survey results

Anyone with a customer base or website traffic can do survey research. Your own research will become a source of unlimited traffic to your website, a great link building opportunity, and a quick way to build credibility.

What does it take to do research?

1. Idea.
2. Ask.
3. Audience.
4. Survey.
5. Evaluation.
6. Infographics.

Another major advantage of survey research is that it can be reused in a number of ways. You may want to format the original research as an e-book to capture your audience’s email. You can also publish the research results in a blog post, include them in your newsletter, etc.

Our preferred survey results include:

3. Get traffic from Quora

I've been marketing on Quora for some time. This question and answer website offers many companies enormous marketing potential.

With 300 million users per month, Quora can help you significantly increase the visibility of your brand.

What is Quora Marketing like?

From a platform where you can find answers to your personal questions, Quora has developed into a global knowledge base. Now you can find people asking about product reviews, solutions, business tips, etc. So entrepreneurs who are ready to recommend their company appeared on Quora.

Based on my own experience, I should say that Quora is extremely effective in making mid-priced products known to an audience in the United States.

If your company matches this description, you should definitely try using Quora for marketing.

Here are some tips for building a successful Quora marketing strategy:

• Create a reliable profile. Show that there is a real person behind your answers. Add as much information as you can. Create a biography, describe your area of ​​expertise, add your photo and educational details and link them to your social media accounts.
• Follow other people and topics. In this way you can track new relevant answers and make connections.
• Answer new questions. Look for keywords that are relevant to your topics and look for questions that are still being discussed.
• Look for questions on the first page of Google search results. Your answers to these questions will be much more popular. To find these questions, you need to use a keyword research tool. You can find more information on the topic on the Ahrefs blog.
• Offer real value. First, Quora has strict guidelines and prohibits replies that are marked as spam. In addition, your audience is not blind and sees when they are being cheated on.

PER TIP: If your answer has been blocked but you do not agree, you can appeal. In most cases, my answers have been restored (if they are really relevant).

The fact that Quora is particularly well suited for companies that offer services to US target groups does not mean that other companies should use these services. If you have a blog, Quora can be a great place to share your posts with more people. Find and answer the questions relevant to your topics by adding a link to the original blog post.

4. Stay active in online communities

There are many online communities where you can share your content. The most popular include GrowthHackers, Quuu and Medium.

About GrowthHackers:

GrowthHackers is a community where you can submit your blog posts so that they can be seen by a relatively broad audience. The more engagement your posts get, the higher it will appear in the feed.

The best thing about this community is that readers are redirected to read the full post on the original blog post. This allows content marketers to see how many people were interested in their content and didn't accidentally click on the title.

About Quuu:

Quuu is a website where you can submit your content for sharing from other users' social media profiles. This platform is suitable both for people who want to share relevant content consistently but do not have time for it, as well as for companies who want to promote their content.

About medium:

Medium is a website with high domain authority, on which curated content is displayed that relates to the interest indicated by each reader. The quality of the content is crucial for Medium. Whether your content is recommended to others depends on the reactions of the people who have already seen it.

5. Sign up for the HARO newsletter

If you are looking for effective link building strategies, this technique is for you.

HARO or Help A Reporter Out is an online service that helps journalists and content marketers get offers from the public. After registering, you will receive source requests every day. If there is a topic related to your area of ​​expertise, write an answer, send it, and wait for the journalist to contact you.

In contrast to blogging for guests, answering HARO questions takes much less time and provides more meaningful results. Some journalists write for premium websites that hardly accept guest posts.

6. Use gamification

Gamification is the key to improving customer loyalty.

Gaming techniques such as competitions, rating systems, and incentives help brands build brand loyalty, attract more prospects, and increase conversions (you may never want to buy this wine cabinet, but they give you half the price if you win!).

You can play almost any phase of customer interaction. There are two things your entire campaign will build on – your goal and the interests of your audience. From there you can develop an idea, its translation, incentives, etc.

One of the most important points is that you shouldn't make things too complicated. It often happens that I see great campaigns that I would only have liked to take part in if they hadn't provided so many rules and conditions.

Here are some campaigns that could inspire you:

McDonald & # 39; s offered an interactive Advent calendar, in which new special offers or gifts are released every day during the Christmas season.

Starbucks offers customers the ability to collect stars for specific tasks and choose rewards that they can receive with their stars.

7. Build meaningful relationships

Marketing is not just about publishing content or running creative campaigns. It's about relationships – not only with your prospects and your customer avatar, but also with other brands.

Host interviews

Wondering how to drive more traffic to your blog? Host interviews. Think about a topic and ask niche experts for their opinion. You can either use their quotes to add certain points to your posts or publish full interviews. No matter which option you choose, don't forget to mention an expert in the title.

Search for popular companies on LinkedIn and contact their employees. The names of big brands give your articles credibility. Don't forget to send a link to the interviewees as soon as they are online so they can share them from their personal social media accounts or corporate accounts.

Work with brands

Collaborative marketing is a technique that many brands overlook. Everyone is excited when another co-branding campaign by popular brands sees the light of day, but hardly anyone believes that they could do the same with a company next door.

Summary

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for growing your brand. And sometimes it seems that the first thing that comes to mind as business owners when they hear the word "marketing" is social media marketing.

However, if you want your marketing strategy to deliver great results, you need to stand out, test different approaches, and run campaigns that your competitors haven't even thought of.