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25 Creative Marketing Ideas To Leave A Lasting Impression

Published April 15, 2022
/ Updated January 9, 2023

Creativity in marketing is nothing new. However, with the rise of digital media and eCommerce, creativity is more important than ever. The importance of marketing, and the value of creativity within it, is likely to continue growing in the future.

Creative marketing can be used by businesses of all sizes, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. It’s a way for you to differentiate yourself from your competitors by providing something unique that adds value for your customers.

Creativity can also be used as an effective tool to help build a brand identity and increase awareness about what makes you different from everyone else in your industry.

We have you covered as we elaborate on 25 creative marketing ideas that will leave an everlasting impression on your customers.

Brand Voice, Look, & Experience

1. Avoid Corporate Speak & Go Conversational

Corporate speak refers to the complicated, tangled vocabulary and jargon that most businesses use to communicate. None of your users would like to hear that, because remember: you’re just a human communicating with another human.

Incomprehensible statements cause organizational uncertainty about goals and misconceptions about success for individuals in their roles.

Substitute the corporate tone with a warm, conversational tone. Write as though you are communicating with a coworker or a friend.

2. Make Your Brand Design Different & Memorable

Standing out is a vital thing when it comes to differentiation through marketing. Make your brand and its design stand out from the crowd, and give the first and best impression on your users.

Free tools like Canva and Infogram can help you design marketing materials like brand design, social media images, brochures, and more. Don’t waste the opportunity to make your business memorable!

Trendiness

3. Forget Blogs & Publish Something Interactive

Blog posts are a great way to talk about your products and reach your customers. But if you want your brand to stand out, try something interactive like Q&A sessions, polls, quizzes or live presentations.

This not only engages your audiences more but also helps improve your brand values and product ideologies amongst your audiences.

4. Take Advantage Of Seasonality

Make the most of your consumer database by sending out frequent marketing campaigns with exclusive offers. By taking advantage of different seasons throughout the year, you can take advantage of seasonal demand spikes and appeal to different customer niches.

There are tons of observances and awareness causes allotted to specific months of the year. There’s National Compliment Day, Financial Literacy Month and more. The list goes on.

As businesses and the market significantly get more and more competitive, you have to keep an eye out for the trending topics and strategies to see which ones work best for your company and use them to elevate your marketing campaign.

Staying on top of the digital marketing trends and strategies takes your company a long way. Learn to make lemonades out of lemons!

6. Celebrate Funny Holidays

Different things attract different people. Content centered around funny or weird holidays gain more traction than others and receive interactions simply because it’s simply current, often hilarious, and usually extremely shareable.

Everyone does promotions for the Christmas holidays. If you want memorable marketing, leverage your own holiday calendar and promote your service on events like International Pancake Day or International Wedding Planning Day — and make your customers smile!

Listed here is a database with unique and funny holidays which you can refer to and make use of.

7. Do Something Unexpected

There’s no greater way to make a statement than by putting yourself in situations where you don’t belong. Try to show up in places where no one expects!

Subvert your audience’s assumptions, and you’ll be astonished at how many people notice that one of these things is different and see your numbers turn up.

One such example is through 404 pages, that inform visitors that the page they were looking for is no longer available. Make your own funny, interesting 404 Page, and it may go viral as people discuss and share it with their friends.

Using hashtags in addition to your location tags on social media is a simple method for attracting more local customers.

Use hashtags on social media sites to get the word out about your deals and promotions.

Follow trends in your sector for the most significant outcomes. What do your customers appear to desire the most this season? Investigate this and tailor your hashtag marketing accordingly.

Engagement

9. Launch Photo Contests

Social Media contests and events are an excellent way to gain a loyal following. You can also incentivize your audience to share your brand by holding contests.

One example of a social media photo contest can be to ask your audience to like and share your brand post or picture for a chance at a prize. You can also encourage your users to post photos that they think are related to your brand and its ideologies and include hashtags to increase significantly reach.

10. Post Funny Pics & Ask For Meme Captions

The current social media algorithm loves humorous and meaningful content that users are inclined to interact with.

Memes as a marketing method work great on Instagram because about 60% of the users on Instagram fall under the age group between 18 and 34. Considerably, their content preference can significantly affect your brand’s reach and popularity on the platform. You can even create meme merch with tailored messaging to promote your brand.

11. Build A Slack Channel For Your Community

Slack communities are digital communities that look a lot like Facebook groups. However, as you may be aware, Facebook groups do not allow immediate contact. You also can’t share files with the community by attaching them from your PC or Google Drive.

Joining a Slack group might be an excellent way to stay up with your business if you’re not a lover of social media. These forums are fantastic for keeping you up to date on current events.

Slack had around 12 million daily active users as of October 2019, and among them, 3 million were paying to use the premium features of the service.

12. Publish User-Generated Content

Create a hashtag for your consumers to use, and then utilize it in your marketing to highlight the most acceptable user-generated content like photographs and videos. You’ll gain more interaction as well as new marketing content.

Create hashtags for shoppers to use when sharing a photo or status that highlights your product to promote user-generated content is one great way to create more buzz about and around your business in social media.

Consider the Instagram feed of Sony’s camera page, Sony Alpha. Their entire feed consists of user-generated photos and quotes.

Collaborations

13. Host An Influencer Takeover

Influencer marketing is a big business. Many micro-influencers with significant followings can be found online without the million-dollar price tag. If you can, get them to submit a review about your organization, product, or service, it will be excellent marketing for your product.

Reach out to influencers that already have a relationship with your target audience and offer to provide them with your products.

Getting someone with much local influence to sample your product implies they’re more likely to recommend it to their followers in the future.

14. Partner On Campaigns & Cross-Promote With Other Brands

Cross-promotion is a strategy in which two companies with comparable consumers, but not rivals, approach and advertise to one another’s audience by promoting a related product or service.

It helps build your partner’s company through their ads while also helping your brand’s promotion.

An example is when UBER partnered with Spotify to let users pick songs to listen to through the car’s speakers while they’re traveling. This effectively promoted both UBER and Spotify’s client base, as the number of users using UBER started paying for Spotify premium, and vice versa.

A photo of three people in a car, promoting the UBER and Spotify partnership.

Source

15. Sponsor Causes & Support Organizations

Users have a strong emotional response to brands when they go out of their way to do something. Organize fundraising for charities or a cause that resonates with your company’s beliefs, then include your consumers in the activity.

Whatever your location, there’s sure to be something you can do to help. This is an excellent way to network, meet potential new customers, and raise your profile locally.

If you’re a small business, and not yet at the level of sponsoring causes or organizations, consider volunteering at a local non-profit or charity event.

16. Publish Content From Guest Contributors

Invite other professionals with intriguing viewpoints and shared interests to contribute to your blog by writing a guest article. They’ll almost certainly share it, and their followers may become new fans of your work and brand as a result.

Offer to contribute and publish articles to those popular blogs or high-traffic online platforms. It will not only assist you with SEO, but it will also help you reach a larger audience while giving your company more personality.

Content

17. Publish Your Content On Other Websites

Co-marketing has the potential to benefit both parties. One of the most common mistakes organizations make with their content is simply publishing it in one location; this results in low exposure and outcomes.

If you’re developing content, the best way to get the most bang for your buck is to amplify it, giving it the most extensive reach and visibility possible.

You’ll discover that your results are significantly more valuable when you add and publish to several channels on a regular and consistent basis than when you publish to a single channel in isolation.

Recommended Reading: What is Cross-Channel Marketing?

18. Test Out Gamification

Gamifying your content by incorporating loyalty programs and competitions can help improve audience engagement.

One method is using a Twitter QR code as a tool. To encourage the gamification of your content, get a QR code for your company and place it on all marketing materials.

This entails using Twitter’s and QR Codes’ strengths to create distinctive brand experiences.

19. Publish, Share, & Curate Infographics

This is more of an opportunity for your brand to be creative than just a concept. As we had discussed earlier, while humorous memes have their place, make sure that some of your content have more substance like infographics.

Infographic videos and images are an excellent method to accomplish this while maintaining a lighthearted, social media tone as they are more engaging and shown to be shared more among users.

Statistics say that about 34% of marketing researchers and users preferred infographic-type content over other types. Tools like Infogram offer you materials to create infographics easily and share across your pieces.

20. Host Webinars

Hosting webinars for your users can help them understand difficult subjects. Explainer videos make information more accessible to newcomers while also increasing the popularity of your brand/website among consumers.

Furthermore, because of Google’s expanding emphasis on video-related content, your brand would also receive a boost.

There are several online platforms available where you can host webinars easily.

21. Leverage Testimonials

Create testimonial videos to showcase your satisfied customers on your website. Nothing promotes your business or establishes credibility like a happy customer, whose opinion is the most important.

Customer input should be filtered and a testimonial video should be used to provide their voice a platform. If you can show first-person footage of the consumers, it’s a great bonus.

If you haven’t already done so, add testimonials to your website or marketing materials. Just make sure you get permission in advance.

22. Add Checklists, Templates, & Decks Into Your Content

It’s critical to maintain your small company brand fresh in the eyes of your target market. This is why it’s crucial to stick to a regular social media posting schedule. If your audience likes your material, they will want more; give it regularly, and you will reap the benefits of their attention soon.

Some tools provide you with facilities where you can organize everything in a single place, so you can refer to that and cater your content accordingly in the future.

Start with this comprehensive 2023 social media calendar template to organize all of your content.

Sales & Conversions

23. Offer Exclusive Discounts To Your Following

Who doesn’t love offers and discounts? People are constantly looking for a good deal. It will encourage new and existing clients to part with their money, maybe leading to long-term commercial ties.

Discounts are usually popular at particular seasons of the year. Offer a discount on your online store’s products and services, such as ‘Summer Savings’ or ‘Winter Deal.’ You can also consider offering a discounted ‘mini’ version of your product or service for a lesser price than usual. Users will taste your product and want to get more of it and hence subscribe further!

24. Launch A Campaign With A Countdown Timer Deadline

With a countdown or a timer deadline, you can create excitement and hype for an announcement or a new product. You raise the likelihood of people noticing by extending the buzz around the product. Plus, a little mystery is never a bad thing.

Launch it big, whether you’re introducing your business or just your newest product. Make it an event that everyone can’t stop talking about.

25. Give Away Something Valuable In Exchange For Completing The Desired Action

People’s adoration for free stuff never changes. But you don’t always have to give away stuff for free. You could get users to subscribe to your newsletters first, for example, before giving away anything.

You could ask your users to follow your brand on social media platforms if they haven’t already, mention your handle or add a humble note asking them to spread the word if they liked your brand. Watch your numbers grow in no time.