When you create your marketing campaign, the last thing you want is for it to feel like it’s been swallowed up by the competition and isn’t hitting its mark. In fact, studies show that around a quarter of small business owners feel their marketing isn’t doing what they need it to do or delivering the expected results.
And when you’re investing your money into something, you at least want to see a decent ROI, right?
But here’s the thing: for the most part, getting value from your ROI means paying attention to the details before launching your campaign. Because this is what will help you cut through the noise when your marketing hits the masses, sometimes it’s being clever about who you advertise to, or it’s about developing a message that hits home and other times it’s seeking out angles you didn’t think were appropriate that will lead you to success.
Let’s take a look at some surprising marketing angles you didn’t know your campaign needed.
Advertising in Unexpected Locations
Many marketing campaigns go right for the obvious spaces, and while these aren’t necessarily wrong, you might be overlooking spaces that can be more impactful for your campaign.
You don’t want to be advertising where everyone else is; you’ll simply get lost. You want to be where people can see you, especially if they didn’t expect to see you there.
Transport networks are a great example of this. Commuters pass through the same spaces, the same tube stations, the same bus stops on a daily basis and more than once. Think of the potential for visibility here. These environments were created for repeated exposure and are ideal for those wanting to reach more people without having to fight through a crowded digital feed.
The same thing applies to other environments too, such as gyms, cafes, co-working spaces, and waiting areas alongside transport hubs. For example, if you advertise in tube stations with posters on platforms to fully wrapping walkways, then you have an ad at a bus stop a commuter uses, then they see the advert next to the coffee shop they go to before work, how many times will they have seen your ad just on their way to work? Think about it. It makes sense.
Flipping the Message
If you find that your messaging is similar to others, then you need to flip it. Our need to stand out and companies with comparable products and services shilling the same messaging is going to get boring fast and become easy to shut out.
So instead of reinforcing the same old talking point, try something else.
You could focus on misconceptions in your industry, you could find an angle that you didn’t think would work before, i.e., moving from product advantages to customer frustrations, it shifts tone, messaging and impact instantly. You don’t need to rethink the script; you need to throw it out and write a completely new one.
Leaning Into Curiosity
Following on from the above point about flipping the messaging, curiosity didn’t just kill the cat; it commanded attention too.
How this works in marketing is leaving something to the imagination. It’s leaving unanswered questions and sparking interest in consumers. You provide just enough information to get people thinking and wondering about what you’re not showing them. It could be a striking image, an intriguing phrase or a message that hints at something larger, making people want to know a little bit more.
Teaser campaigns work well in this space, too. Sending out an initial message to introduce an idea before following it up in later stages does this extremely well. It’s a staggered approach that keeps the public hanging on,n waiting.
Marketing in Everyday Moments and Times
A lot of marketing campaigns are focused on huge events: Mother’s Day, Christmas, Halloween, New Year’s sales, etc., and while these are great times to be advertising, they’re not the only ones.
Think about the other moments in between, what people do on a day-to-day basis. Jumping on the train to work, dropping kids off at school, doing the shopping or grabbing coffee.
Your marketing needs to be slid into these times so it’s less intrusive and feels more natural. You don’t want to be interrupting people’s days here; you want to be sliding into activities they do almost without thinking.
It’s the ads on social media that they see as they’re mindlessly scrolling, being repeated through the day or week. It’s the posters on the escalators that they see at train stations or in shopping centres. Because when people do the same things each day, following the same paths, this builds repeated exposure without them even realising it.
Audience Participation
Nothing grabs attention more than making people get involved. When the audience becomes a part of the campaign, the marketing moves beyond simple visibility into something else entirely.
Guerilla marketing is a great example of this. This is often done by brands installing pop-up displays or unusual public dispatches or installations in high-traffic or popular areas that capture attention in unexpected ways. And often they encourage people to take photos and share them on social media or interact with the experience directly.
What happens then is the audience becomes an amplifier. They share their experience with family friends or their social media audiences, and before you know it, you’ve reached more people than the original location could ever offer you.
Breaking the Unexpected Format
Advertising can tend to fall into the same patterns. Posters look like posters, digital ads look like, well, digital ads. But when a marketing campaign breaks that message, it stands out immediately.
For your campaign, this could look like choosing unusual visual patterns, unexpected storytelling techniques or creative placements that challenge what people think of advertising or your brand. And they don’t even need to be major changes, just something that looks slightly different from what already sits in the spaces you’re in, and this difference will draw attention because it breaks the visual rhythm that people are used to seeing. And when your market is crowded, it’s this break from the standard that will push you through to someone’s consciousness.
