50 ways to add some creativity into your marketing

We’ve all been there. Stuck in the same old day to day routine of marketing your business. Once the email campaigns are set and social content scheduled, website SEO’ed and PPC ads set live, sometimes finding the time to even think about something creative is the challenge.

Creative marketing ideas don’t come along often, success favours the brave, so sometimes you have got to take the plunge and find the time to commit to coming up with new ideas.

Creative marketing campaigns stick in the mind. They help build brand awareness, drive new audiences and overall help you stand out by stopping people in their tracks.

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With so many ads and marketing messages around us nowadays, ensuring your brand provides a positive customer experience is crucial.

So we have put together this little guide featuring 50 Creative Ideas for your business marketing online and offline.

1. Commission a public mural – Get permission, and ensure people are going to like it being there. It will attract attention and coverage on social media and bring you lots of brand exposure.

2. Bring offline audiences online – using individual QR codes. Take them to specific landing pages and measure the success of your printed marketing using online metrics.

3. Online Games – A great way to create a positive brand experience. Use it to entertain your current clients or audience, or to attract new ones.

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4. Gamification – taking a particular area of your service or product and ‘gamify’ the user experience. Look how Strava or Nike Run do it, making the act of working out a shared experience.

5. Hashtags – Ok, these don’t sound very creative, but following the right ones will give you tonnes of new ideas.

6. Unusual Sponsorship – Sponsor eco bee-friendly bus stops for example. Support the local community. Put your brand somewhere it would never normally be.

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7. UGC photo competitions – These are great for driving new audiences on social media. Get your audience to generate the content, (User Generated Content) and give away relevant prizes to help fine tune that audience more. You can also use the audience to vote on the outcome of the competition, driving more engagement.

8. Seasonal Brand – Adapt your brand to the season. Halloween, Valentine. Have them planned, it’s the same date every year!

9. Plan creative time – However you do it, just plan it happens.

10. Discover new apps and tools – Do this weekly. If you always use one tool, creativity will be hard to discover.

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11. Make more videos – But make them purely to entertain.

12. Invite ideas – from all areas of the business. Incentive this with prizes and rewards.

13. Get creative with your PPC – Consider more than just advertising with text ads in Google, look at new opportunities, like going to business events, placing ads on terms like ‘Directions/parking to <insert business event>’.  Give them the info early and already you are ahead of the game.

14. Write down 20 questions – your younger self might ask you. Reply to these weekly on your LinkedIn.

15. Get your camera out – Take real photos, don’t rely on stock.

16. Use influencers – Send out your product to key online influencers in return for exposure to their audience.

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17. Write blogs – that list ideas for other people like this.

18. Use real language – Talk like a human, not a robot. That goes for your website copy too

19. Escape your palette – If you only stick to your brand colours, things are going to get very dull, very quickly. Be brave. Create secondary pallets. Give designers the freedom to stand out.

20. Use the local press – when launching new creative ideas, campaigns. Find a newsworthy angle.

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21. Team up – with someone/thing who compliments your brand. We see it alot with the big brands. If you sell vegan bacon, find a vegan mayo company for the ultimate BLT.

22. Use bus, roundabout and phone box advertising. Use it creatively, to entertain, not just promote your logo.

23. Make an app – This could be to use the services you offer better, or for something else. Something that would benefit the life of your customers or get you new ones.

24. Push your boundaries of the content – If you only use photos, push videos. If you make videos, make them better.

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25. Record internal meetings – for content. Even the most boring meeting has a 10 second moment of genius within it.

26. Use search differently – Run campaigns that require the user to search for the answers, and make sure you rank when they come looking. This is great for…

27. Radio Ads – Use an easy CTA to get the listener searching on Google when they get back to their desk. Dont say go to www.myblandMedicalwebsite.co.uk. Have a CTA of ‘Just Search ‘bye bye back problems’.

28. GIFS – and more importantly Giphy. Giphy interacts with most social media and messaging platforms. Build a brand channel and use sector specific terms to make sure you rank. These can help support campaigns and are ideal for location based businesses.

29. Actually use the channels yourself – If you post on TikTok, but don’t look at TikTok yourself, you stand no chance. Platforms change, so unless you are on them yourself, you don’t stand a chance.

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30. Use all content types – Articles, whitepapers, blogs, video, GIFS, Text, carousels, live.

31. Memes – Use trends like tv shows and pop culture to make custom, business related Memes.

32. Print – Get creative. Give more value from an Ad. Newspapers are full of Ads. Give more value to your readers such as a checklist, an actual life-changing fact, entertainment.

33. Guerrilla Marketing – How can you get in front of an audience without paying for the advertising space? Think the Goodyear blimp or the lampposts laden with CEX stickers.

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34. Design for mobile first – realistically, we’re all using mobiles to surf the web, so make sure you optimise your website, app or experience for mobile first, desktop second.

35. Infographics – Use these to tell a story of data. Not words. Visuals can be read in seconds and can actually lead to much longer dwell time. Speaking of which…

36. Maximise dwell time – the length of time the users looks at your content. Do this by writing longer pieces, creating longer videos, giving so much value their eyes fall out and they can’t navigate away from your website…

37. Future predictions – Play the time traveler by predicting future trends in your industry – just make sure you have at least some data to back it up. We recommend Google Trends for this – have a look and see if flared jeans are coming back in style or not.

38. Use comic book – style to illustrate campaigns and promotions.

39. Focus on evergreen content – Content you can use again in the future and isn’t limited to just one week/year/once-in-a-life-time trend.

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40. Use visuals – always. Especially in written blog copy to break up the text!

41. Use Google image search – Make sure your images rank for the terms users might search for by optimising them!

42. Split the audience – for your homepage. Split the audiences across two different pages to see which one drives the most success.

43. Spread Joy – with direct messaging without intent to sell. Just go into it with the intention of putting a smile on someone’s face.

44. Wear wigs. (Don’t ask me, ask Knowlton)

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45. Create tests – and pilots to help other people understand your ideas.

46. Storyboard stuff, even if it seems simple. Allow other people to see what you see, it makes the creative back and forth much easier.

47. Draw daily – It will help give your brain the space it needs to deliver and come up with some awesome new campaigns. And you know what? You don’t even need to be “able to” draw.

48. Read more books – find joy in other people’s marketing and content, this will help you find yours. Follow creative brands and companies.

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49. Fail fast – It’s ok for it to look a bit crappy or for it not to work, take your learnings and get the hell out of there.

50. Coffee – I think this helps.

So in short, you need to create the environments for creativity to thrive. For new ideas to smash into each other and take on new forms.