Three Simple Tips to Improve the ‘ART’ of Marketing

You could make a good case that effective marketing is often more “art” than “science. Why is that? Because, in essence, what you are trying to do with your marketing is touch the hearts, emotions, and motivations of your target audience—and that’s something that can’t always be achieved by numbers, formulas, and equations.

Here’s three simple and practical tips that can greatly improve the effectiveness of your message.

Tip #1 It’s all about perception.

What’s Important to your Target Market may NOT be Logical

If you’ve ever offered a promotion on your website or tried to incentivize your followers, you may have wondered why you didn’t get the response you expected. After all, you were offering a great deal. Right?

That’s because people aren’t always logical when it comes to deals, and we often respond to what we perceive as a good deal, whether or not it’s actually the best deal out there. It’s all about perception. For example, we have worked with multiple Fortune 500’s and studies have shown that when stores offered the choice of either a $10 gift card or a 10% off coupon, 8 of 10 people chose the $10 gift card—even though the 10% coupon is usually the better deal.

It could be the same with a promotional product. You might think that offering a free tote bag to donors will be more motivating than a free t-shirt
because it costs more money—when, really, people get more excited about the t-shirt.

The key to successful incentivizing is figuring out what your audience actually gets excited about—and it may or may not be the most logical.

Tip #2 Be adventurous in your marketing choices.

‘Bold’ can Inspire People to Engage.

We hear all the time from prospective clients that they already “do Marketing”—and what they often actually mean is that they’re just buying ads at random, or sending out info emails, or hiring a young person to post on social media. However, to most effectively “do marketing”, it takes some creativity and out-of-the-box thinking.

Don’t be afraid to be bold and adventurous in your marketing choices. Often, the more unique a marketing campaign is, the more people are inspired to engage with it.

For example, we had a restaurant client who needed to boost their numbers. Our bold, unique approach was to hide a dozen restaurant gift cards and some novelty food items throughout the city—then we announced a treasure hunt via social media. As people began finding the gift cards and items, they posted their success on their social media channels, generating more and more hype as the campaign went on. Ultimately, the campaign was a huge success—with some people even coming from out of state to search for the hidden ‘treasures,’ plus we got an unsolicited ‘shout out’ by a famous TV personality during a national sporting event.

It just goes to show that adventurous marketing choices can be one of the biggest means to reaching the emotions and motivating your target market to action.

Tip #3 Sometimes you need a ‘Hook’ to get People to view Your Content

The Golden Ticket

A great tip we’ve found for getting people to engage with your website or app is the “golden ticket” idea.

Here’s how it works:

Place a golden ticket icon, or any other image of your choice, on one of the pages of your website or app. Send out a tweet, email, or post to your followers announcing a prize for whoever finds the golden ticket first.

The prize could be a gift card, t-shirt, a fair trade item, etc. Everyone loves a good contest, and your followers will click through the pages of your website until they find the ticket.

It’s best to place the ticket on a page with a “call to action”—like your donation page, for example. That way, the people looking for the golden ticket will also be inspired to engage with your work.

To make it even more cost effective, you could ask one of your supporters to supply the prize for the finder of the golden ticket.

Ideas like the “golden ticket” builds intrigue and hooks people in due to their competitive nature—plus IT WORKS! One of our clients received 2 million pageviews in one day alone thanks to the golden ticket campaign.

WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT PROJECT WORLD IMPACT?

marketing.projectworldimpact.com