Guerilla marketing
As we mentioned earlier, most promotional techniques we discuss in this article constitute different forms of digital marketing. Guerilla marketing, however, is a rare type of modern marketing that involves taking your tactics offline.
Guerilla marketing
As we mentioned earlier, most promotional techniques we discuss in this article constitute different forms of digital marketing. Guerilla marketing, however, is a rare type of modern marketing that involves taking your tactics offline.
Guerilla marketing uses novel, unconventional methods to boost sales, build hype around your go to market strategy, and generate awareness around your brand. While sometimes aided by technology such as social media or mobile devices, it generally involves a small group of people using bold methods to promote a brand in a high-traffic physical location. This means anything from branding a public space with street art to creating immersive pop-up experiences in physical locations.
Guerilla marketing can be achieved on a low-budget, but it does require high energy and prompt, tightly-organized execution. If you’re up for the challenge, this fun and original method can generate buzz around your brand. Take a look at these guerilla marketing examples for ideas.
15. Word of mouth marketing
Ever heard the phrase that happy customers are your biggest advocates? This is the main idea behind word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM), which gets satisfied customers to spread the word about your product or service.
This is important for two reasons: First, successful WOMM strategy means your brand has obtained loyal, committed customers. And since these people will recommend your product to their friends, it also means more potential buyers. After all, people place more weight on the recommendations of a trusted friend than those of a biased seller.
There’s no tried-and-true approach to guaranteeing an effective WOMM strategy, but the most essential ingredient is consumer happiness. Offer top-notch customer service and do your best to genuinely address your customers’ needs, from the way you design your products to the values you practice as a brand. Enchant your customers and the recommendations will follow.
16. Referral marketing
A referral marketing strategy takes advantage of word of mouth. This practice involves building a referral program, which incentivizes customers to recommend your products to others. Typically, these programs offer both the customer and their friend discounts when the customer convinces that friend to buy.
For instance, the Airbnb Referral Program allows members to earn promotional coupon credits (“travel credits”) toward future homes/experiences bookings by referring friends to become new Airbnb users.
17. Acquisition marketing
Acquisition marketing, as its name implies, is marketing with the sole purpose of acquiring new clients. This contrasts from retention marketing and brand marketing, which you’ll read more about below.
Examples of acquisition marketing include SEO, top-of-the-funnel blog content, landing pages, and social media or Google ads. Anything that aims directly to obtain new customers or capture leads is considered acquisition marketing.
The goal of acquisition marketers is to create assets that compel their target audience to click. Offering freemium products and free trials, optimizing your website’s conversion rate, and including strategic CTAs in your content are all powerful techniques for acquiring new customers.
18. Retention marketing
A strong marketing strategy requires implementing both retention and acquisition tactics within the sales funnel. However, retention marketing practices have distinct goals and KPIs.
While acquisition marketing focuses on acquiring new customers, retention marketing aims to bring back previous customers and hold on to existing ones. Studies have shown that this is a powerful practice with a high ROI. Acquiring new customers is between 5 and 25 times more expensive than retaining existing ones, and on top of that, increasing retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by up to 95%.
An effective retention marketing strategy requires you to over deliver on your promises to customers. Find ways to make your business exceed their expectations from the start, such as by thanking them with a handwritten note. Go above and beyond when engaging with them, whether by sending out customer feedback surveys or taking extra steps to address their pain points.
19. Brand marketing
Unlike acquisition and retention marketing, brand marketing isn’t focused on making sales. Instead, its primary goal is to shape how the public perceives your brand.
In other words, brand marketing promotes your identity, not your products. This involves creating a logo and coming up with a cohesive brand language, colors and website design. It also requires putting together a compelling brand story, as well as a mission statement that highlights your values as a business.
For these efforts to be effective, your brand needs to deeply resonate with your target audiences’ interests, values and needs. Start by researching your audience, and then shape a brand that speaks to them directly.
20. Behavioral marketing
Behavioral marketing uses consumer behavior to decide how to target an audience with relevant material. This involves finely segmenting audiences based on their behavior online.
To get behavioral data, you can analyze the user flow on your site. This offers important insights about a particular user’s interests and readiness to purchase. Based on this information, marketers can create specific promotional campaigns tailored for different audiences.
As you might expect, marketing automation plays a vital role here, with certain behaviors triggering specific campaigns. A particular action on your website, for instance, might show that user a relevant Facebook ad or send them an automated email recommending related products.
21. Nostalgia marketing
Nostalgia marketing evokes the power of nostalgia to create warm, happy feelings around your brand. This involves infusing your promotional materials with familiar concepts that evoke fond memories, and it’s a great way to build trust in a new company.
Think about the retro appeal of an 8-bit era video game or a glass Coca-Cola bottle with its timeless red logo. These appeal to our love for nostalgia and our yearning for a pure and simple past.
To tap into this strategy, try launching a nostalgia-driven social media campaign that incorporates old school references and invokes childhood memories among your target audience. Just make sure your messaging stays consistent with your brand’s story, values and product.
22. Neuromarketing
Another important type of marketing is neuromarketing. This field of marketing applies neuropsychology to market research. Neuromarketers analyze brain imaging and scanning to measure physiological and neural responses to marketing stimuli. They can tell, for instance, if a customer is genuinely happy with a particular product, even if they don’t verbally express it.
Not only is this a fascinating way to learn more about human behavior; it also helps guide organizations in creating marketing materials that truly work. All types of marketing consider psychology, but neuromarketing is founded in real, hard science. Guided by neural research, marketing professionals can develop a more informed approach to crafting marketing assets, designing products and developing a brand.
23. Emotional marketing
Emotional marketing encompasses any marketing effort that primarily uses emotion to get people to purchase or otherwise engage with a brand.
To be effective, emotional marketing needs to concentrate on a single feeling, whether it’s happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, disgust or something in between. Consider Dove’s Real Beauty campaign, which evokes optimism, acceptance and self-love to promote its products.
Studies show that feeling plays a bigger role than thinking in consumer behavior. Why? Because most people prefer to follow their heart when making a decision. So, in your marketing campaigns, don’t just focus on the advantages of your product; focus instead on how you want people to feel when using it.
24. Public relations
Also known as PR, public relations is a subset of marketing that involves managing the way the media represents your business. The process involves using press releases—official statements about a newsworthy item or event—to encourage the media to publish content about your business.
For instance, you may urge the press to publish stories on your business’s launch, the latest funding round, a recent award, a groundbreaking new product, or a large charitable contribution. The goal is to shape the public’s perception of your brand and highlight your company as an industry leader. This, in turn, helps stimulate demand for your product or service.
While it can be combined with other marketing efforts, PR is a full-time job. Many businesses have a dedicated PR team to help the company get good press.
25. Mobile marketing
A core part of any digital strategy, mobile marketing has rapidly gained traction since the advent of the smartphone. This technique refers to any marketing or advertising activity that uses mobile devices as its main promotional platform.
If you own a smartphone, there’s a good chance you’re already familiar with this strategy. Push notifications, ASO marketing, SMS messages (SMS marketing), in-app marketing and QR codes are all commonly-used methods for promoting a product or brand.
Mobile marketing takes advantage of the fact that people carry their mobile devices everywhere. It also makes use of people’s tendency to casually browse the web through their mobile phones and uses this data to target potential customers with well-timed messages. For example, a phone’s location services enable businesses to target users based on their physical location.
26. Relationship marketing
Relationship marketing is a type of marketing that seeks to build long-term customer relationships rather than focus on short-term sales or transactions. The goal of relationship marketing is to foster a loyal, dependable customer base who advocates for your brand.
This marketing practice prioritizes customer retention over acquisition. It involves providing high-quality customer service and responding to the questions and needs of your customers, whether that’s by engaging with them on social media or using live chat on your website.
Importantly, building strong relationships with customers doesn’t just mean providing them good service until they make a purchase. You must continue to delight customers long after they make their first purchase, such as by offering a loyalty program with special perks, complementary product recommendations or product care tips and guides. Thoughtful acts like these can cultivate a community around your brand and build a lifelong relationship with your fans.
27. Voice marketing
Voice marketing is a relatively new type of marketing that applies SEO practices to voice search. This allows businesses to capture searches from people who are speaking, rather than typing. While voice search has been around for several years, it’s become increasingly common with the popularity of smart speakers like Amazon Alexa or Google Home, as well as smartphone assistants like Siri.
There are numerous ways voice search differs from typed phrases; for instance, people searching with voice may use longer phrases or even full sentences. If someone browses on their computer and has a hankering for a burger, they may simply type “burger restaurant” into Google. On the other hand, if they’re busy driving, they might ask Siri, “Where can I get a burger?”
Google accommodates for this semantic variation by continuously improving the natural language processing (NLP) capabilities of its search engine. To stay on top of this ever-evolving world of SEO, familiarize yourself with voice marketing and adapt your site to voice search. One way to do so is to write blog post titles in the form of a question.
28. Partnership marketing
Partnership marketing is when two or more businesses combine their promotional efforts for mutual benefit. By collaborating, you’ll expand your reach to another business’s audience, while they expand their reach to yours. This can generate brand awareness, get new customers, and help grow relationships with companies that share your values. To exemplify, Wix’s partner's program is built for agencies to support their clients and get rewarded for each site they build on Wix.
To try this approach, start researching businesses with similar target audiences. Ideally, they should offer products that compliment your own to encourage customers to purchase both. And of course, you’ll want to make sure they don’t directly or indirectly compete with your business.
Partnership marketing options include hosting a joint webinar, conducting a research study together, or collaborating on a special product release. For instance, if you run a small business selling charcuterie boards, consider partnering with a local winery and marketing your products together.
29. User-generated marketing
While partnership marketing harnesses the power of other businesses, user-generated marketing taps into your audience. Any strategy that allows consumers to participate in a marketing campaign is considered user-generated marketing.
The most common user-generated marketing strategy is getting users to use your product and share the experience via social media. On Instagram, this typically involves using a branded hashtag to organize all posts in one place or tagging the brand in a TikTok, Story or Reel.
The primary advantage of sharing user-generated content is to drive engagement and spread brand awareness. On top of that, content that shows real users enjoying your products helps persuade other consumers to try them out, too.
30. Seasonal marketing
Seasonal marketing, also known as holiday marketing, is the promotion of products and services at certain times throughout the year. This might involve having one marketing campaign for Valentine’s Day, a different one for Christmas, and yet another for Pride month.
While every business can benefit from this type of marketing, it’s especially crucial for seasonal businesses. A florist or jewelry business, for instance, will want to invest heavily in marketing for Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.
Guerilla marketing uses novel, unconventional methods to boost sales, build hype around your go to market strategy, and generate awareness around your brand. While sometimes aided by technology such as social media or mobile devices, it generally involves a small group of people using bold methods to promote a brand in a high-traffic physical location. This means anything from branding a public space with street art to creating immersive pop-up experiences in physical locations.
Guerilla marketing can be achieved on a low-budget, but it does require high energy and prompt, tightly-organized execution. If you’re up for the challenge, this fun and original method can generate buzz around your brand. Take a look at these guerilla marketing examples for ideas.
15. Word of mouth marketing
Ever heard the phrase that happy customers are your biggest advocates? This is the main idea behind word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM), which gets satisfied customers to spread the word about your product or service.
This is important for two reasons: First, successful WOMM strategy means your brand has obtained loyal, committed customers. And since these people will recommend your product to their friends, it also means more potential buyers. After all, people place more weight on the recommendations of a trusted friend than those of a biased seller.
There’s no tried-and-true approach to guaranteeing an effective WOMM strategy, but the most essential ingredient is consumer happiness. Offer top-notch customer service and do your best to genuinely address your customers’ needs, from the way you design your products to the values you practice as a brand. Enchant your customers and the recommendations will follow.
16. Referral marketing
A referral marketing strategy takes advantage of word of mouth. This practice involves building a referral program, which incentivizes customers to recommend your products to others. Typically, these programs offer both the customer and their friend discounts when the customer convinces that friend to buy.
For instance, the Airbnb Referral Program allows members to earn promotional coupon credits (“travel credits”) toward future homes/experiences bookings by referring friends to become new Airbnb users.
17. Acquisition marketing
Acquisition marketing, as its name implies, is marketing with the sole purpose of acquiring new clients. This contrasts from retention marketing and brand marketing, which you’ll read more about below.
Examples of acquisition marketing include SEO, top-of-the-funnel blog content, landing pages, and social media or Google ads. Anything that aims directly to obtain new customers or capture leads is considered acquisition marketing.
The goal of acquisition marketers is to create assets that compel their target audience to click. Offering freemium products and free trials, optimizing your website’s conversion rate, and including strategic CTAs in your content are all powerful techniques for acquiring new customers.
18. Retention marketing
A strong marketing strategy requires implementing both retention and acquisition tactics within the sales funnel. However, retention marketing practices have distinct goals and KPIs.
While acquisition marketing focuses on acquiring new customers, retention marketing aims to bring back previous customers and hold on to existing ones. Studies have shown that this is a powerful practice with a high ROI. Acquiring new customers is between 5 and 25 times more expensive than retaining existing ones, and on top of that, increasing retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by up to 95%.
An effective retention marketing strategy requires you to over deliver on your promises to customers. Find ways to make your business exceed their expectations from the start, such as by thanking them with a handwritten note. Go above and beyond when engaging with them, whether by sending out customer feedback surveys or taking extra steps to address their pain points.
19. Brand marketing
Unlike acquisition and retention marketing, brand marketing isn’t focused on making sales. Instead, its primary goal is to shape how the public perceives your brand.
In other words, brand marketing promotes your identity, not your products. This involves creating a logo and coming up with a cohesive brand language, colors and website design. It also requires putting together a compelling brand story, as well as a mission statement that highlights your values as a business.
For these efforts to be effective, your brand needs to deeply resonate with your target audiences’ interests, values and needs. Start by researching your audience, and then shape a brand that speaks to them directly.
20. Behavioral marketing
Behavioral marketing uses consumer behavior to decide how to target an audience with relevant material. This involves finely segmenting audiences based on their behavior online.
To get behavioral data, you can analyze the user flow on your site. This offers important insights about a particular user’s interests and readiness to purchase. Based on this information, marketers can create specific promotional campaigns tailored for different audiences.
As you might expect, marketing automation plays a vital role here, with certain behaviors triggering specific campaigns. A particular action on your website, for instance, might show that user a relevant Facebook ad or send them an automated email recommending related products.
21. Nostalgia marketing
Nostalgia marketing evokes the power of nostalgia to create warm, happy feelings around your brand. This involves infusing your promotional materials with familiar concepts that evoke fond memories, and it’s a great way to build trust in a new company.
Think about the retro appeal of an 8-bit era video game or a glass Coca-Cola bottle with its timeless red logo. These appeal to our love for nostalgia and our yearning for a pure and simple past.
To tap into this strategy, try launching a nostalgia-driven social media campaign that incorporates old school references and invokes childhood memories among your target audience. Just make sure your messaging stays consistent with your brand’s story, values and product.
22. Neuromarketing
Another important type of marketing is neuromarketing. This field of marketing applies neuropsychology to market research. Neuromarketers analyze brain imaging and scanning to measure physiological and neural responses to marketing stimuli. They can tell, for instance, if a customer is genuinely happy with a particular product, even if they don’t verbally express it.
Not only is this a fascinating way to learn more about human behavior; it also helps guide organizations in creating marketing materials that truly work. All types of marketing consider psychology, but neuromarketing is founded in real, hard science. Guided by neural research, marketing professionals can develop a more informed approach to crafting marketing assets, designing products and developing a brand.
23. Emotional marketing
Emotional marketing encompasses any marketing effort that primarily uses emotion to get people to purchase or otherwise engage with a brand.
To be effective, emotional marketing needs to concentrate on a single feeling, whether it’s happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, disgust or something in between. Consider Dove’s Real Beauty campaign, which evokes optimism, acceptance and self-love to promote its products.
Studies show that feeling plays a bigger role than thinking in consumer behavior. Why? Because most people prefer to follow their heart when making a decision. So, in your marketing campaigns, don’t just focus on the advantages of your product; focus instead on how you want people to feel when using it.
24. Public relations
Also known as PR, public relations is a subset of marketing that involves managing the way the media represents your business. The process involves using press releases—official statements about a newsworthy item or event—to encourage the media to publish content about your business.
For instance, you may urge the press to publish stories on your business’s launch, the latest funding round, a recent award, a groundbreaking new product, or a large charitable contribution. The goal is to shape the public’s perception of your brand and highlight your company as an industry leader. This, in turn, helps stimulate demand for your product or service.
While it can be combined with other marketing efforts, PR is a full-time job. Many businesses have a dedicated PR team to help the company get good press.
25. Mobile marketing
A core part of any digital strategy, mobile marketing has rapidly gained traction since the advent of the smartphone. This technique refers to any marketing or advertising activity that uses mobile devices as its main promotional platform.
If you own a smartphone, there’s a good chance you’re already familiar with this strategy. Push notifications, ASO marketing, SMS messages (SMS marketing), in-app marketing and QR codes are all commonly-used methods for promoting a product or brand.
Mobile marketing takes advantage of the fact that people carry their mobile devices everywhere. It also makes use of people’s tendency to casually browse the web through their mobile phones and uses this data to target potential customers with well-timed messages. For example, a phone’s location services enable businesses to target users based on their physical location.
26. Relationship marketing
Relationship marketing is a type of marketing that seeks to build long-term customer relationships rather than focus on short-term sales or transactions. The goal of relationship marketing is to foster a loyal, dependable customer base who advocates for your brand.
This marketing practice prioritizes customer retention over acquisition. It involves providing high-quality customer service and responding to the questions and needs of your customers, whether that’s by engaging with them on social media or using live chat on your website.
Importantly, building strong relationships with customers doesn’t just mean providing them good service until they make a purchase. You must continue to delight customers long after they make their first purchase, such as by offering a loyalty program with special perks, complementary product recommendations or product care tips and guides. Thoughtful acts like these can cultivate a community around your brand and build a lifelong relationship with your fans.
27. Voice marketing
Voice marketing is a relatively new type of marketing that applies SEO practices to voice search. This allows businesses to capture searches from people who are speaking, rather than typing. While voice search has been around for several years, it’s become increasingly common with the popularity of smart speakers like Amazon Alexa or Google Home, as well as smartphone assistants like Siri.
There are numerous ways voice search differs from typed phrases; for instance, people searching with voice may use longer phrases or even full sentences. If someone browses on their computer and has a hankering for a burger, they may simply type “burger restaurant” into Google. On the other hand, if they’re busy driving, they might ask Siri, “Where can I get a burger?”
Google accommodates for this semantic variation by continuously improving the natural language processing (NLP) capabilities of its search engine. To stay on top of this ever-evolving world of SEO, familiarize yourself with voice marketing and adapt your site to voice search. One way to do so is to write blog post titles in the form of a question.
28. Partnership marketing
Partnership marketing is when two or more businesses combine their promotional efforts for mutual benefit. By collaborating, you’ll expand your reach to another business’s audience, while they expand their reach to yours. This can generate brand awareness, get new customers, and help grow relationships with companies that share your values. To exemplify, Wix’s partner's program is built for agencies to support their clients and get rewarded for each site they build on Wix.
To try this approach, start researching businesses with similar target audiences. Ideally, they should offer products that compliment your own to encourage customers to purchase both. And of course, you’ll want to make sure they don’t directly or indirectly compete with your business.
Partnership marketing options include hosting a joint webinar, conducting a research study together, or collaborating on a special product release. For instance, if you run a small business selling charcuterie boards, consider partnering with a local winery and marketing your products together.
29. User-generated marketing
While partnership marketing harnesses the power of other businesses, user-generated marketing taps into your audience. Any strategy that allows consumers to participate in a marketing campaign is considered user-generated marketing.
The most common user-generated marketing strategy is getting users to use your product and share the experience via social media. On Instagram, this typically involves using a branded hashtag to organize all posts in one place or tagging the brand in a TikTok, Story or Reel.
The primary advantage of sharing user-generated content is to drive engagement and spread brand awareness. On top of that, content that shows real users enjoying your products helps persuade other consumers to try them out, too.
30. Seasonal marketing
Seasonal marketing, also known as holiday marketing, is the promotion of products and services at certain times throughout the year. This might involve having one marketing campaign for Valentine’s Day, a different one for Christmas, and yet another for Pride month.
While every business can benefit from this type of marketing, it’s especially crucial for seasonal businesses. A florist or jewelry business, for instance, will want to invest heavily in marketing for Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.
