5 Unconventional Marketing Methods

There are numerous ways you can market your services and products. As a business owner or operator, you can rely on some of the proven standbys. Those might include radio spots, TV commercials, and more recent additions to the list, like social media marketing.

However, maybe you want to use less conventional means to reach your potential customer base. There are certainly some ways to do that which might not have occurred to you before. Let’s look at some of those right now.

The In-Person Giveaway

With Covid-19 concerns, there are not as many in-person events taking place these days. However, the FDA has approved a couple of vaccines, and things should gradually start getting back to normal over the next year.

As they do so, people will begin to gather together again. For instance, they might congregate at:

• A street fair
• A farmer’s market
• A holiday festival

Anywhere community members draw together, that’s a great place to show off your products and services, especially if you have a smaller company with a brick-and-mortar location.

You can set up a 10×10 canopy to keep the weather off. You will probably need to get yourself a permit as well.

Then, you can have your employees sit under and canopy and promote your business. You might have a wheel that people can spin to give them a chance to win a small prize. You can also have them enter a drawing to win some of your products.

You can pass out business cards that have your company’s name on them. If you appear at more of these events, people will start to recognize you as part of the community.

The Street Giveaway

You can also have individuals hand out business cards and free samples. You don’t need an event to do this. You can hire someone to stand outside your brick-and-mortar location, assuming you don’t have a strictly eCommerce business model.

Doing this can help because:

• You’re actively engaging with the public
• You’re letting people know you value their business

This is an excellent thing to do if you opened recently. If you can print your company’s name on coupons, that’s a great idea, but if you can print the name on something useful, that’s even better.

Someone might throw away a business card as soon as they get to the next block. They might hold onto a refrigerator magnet, a chip clip, a flash drive, a deck of playing cards, or anything else along those lines.

Flyer Posting

You can also print flyers and stick them up in convenient places. Maybe you’re having a sale, and you want people to know about it.

You can get some of your regular employees to find places to hang them up, or you can hire some day workers to do it. You can probably pay them minimum wage since it’s unskilled labor.

Aside from flyers, you might come up with mailers that talk about your services and products. You can have employees target certain neighborhoods that are not far from your store’s location. The mailers should be colorful and eye-catching, with exciting visuals and fonts.

Hire a Plane with a Banner

Once the weather is nice, you can hire a plane with a banner that can fly over an area where you know people will congregate, like a marathon or public park. You can have the banner convey a simple message about a sale or promotion you’re having.

It will probably get people’s attention more than some of the other ideas we mentioned. The only issue is that this is a more expensive option, so you’ll need to have a little more in your marketing budget if you want to attempt it.

Spray Paint Your Logo

You can have one of your employees go out with a stencil and some spray paint and spray your logo and company name on sidewalks or dilapidated buildings. This is another common guerilla marketing strategy.

It can definitely get your name out there more. The one issue is that you should check about the legality. Various towns and cities have different rules about this sort of thing, and you don’t want to have to bail your employee out of jail for vandalism.

You must tell as many people about your services and products as you can, however you can. No passive business entity ever succeeds. You can also use more conventional marketing strategies, but the best engagement plan captures public interest in a highly visual way.