As marketers, we aim to sprinkle a dash of creativity into everything we do.
But the problem with creativity is that you're bound to run out of ideas — it’s like when a songwriter hits writer’s block — it happens to the best of us.
And it happens more frequently than you might think, especially if you’re a busy in-house marketer stretched thin across several marketing campaigns — like digital advertising and events — where too many things require your attention.
That's why we've drawn up a list of 25 creative marketing ideas to keep things fresh. So the next time you hit the metaphorical wall, revisit this one and save yourself the hassle.
Content marketing is a no-brainer if you're in a competitive market where paid advertising costs are too high.
The best part is that you can let customers lead your strategy by digging for question-based content to attract inbound leads on autopilot.
Previously, I was the VP of Growth at Aura — where we grew organic traffic from 0 to over 200K visitors in less than one year.
To develop our first batch of content marketing ideas, we started listening to sales calls to identify real customer problems and then aligned them to long-tail keywords.
Since Aura focused on keyword patterns, we were able to crush long-tail search terms like:
Here's why YouTube SEO works: your potential customers want to see more than just written text — they want a mix of videos and interactive media.
On top of that, embedded YouTube videos enrich your blog content, and if done right, your channel may bring consistent traffic to the website.
If you need inspiration on YouTube SEO, the team at Splash has a pretty sweet YouTube channel you can refer to if you want to steal some ideas.
Here's how you can do YouTube SEO:
Webinars and live events can be a game changers for any business — no other marketing channel enables you to directly connect with your potential customers and future buyers like online events.
B2B brands are figuring out that with all this AI craziness, we need to get back to fundamentals and bring the human connection back to marketing — and virtual events are one of the best ways to do that.
Why invest in live events?
Whether you’re a small business or enterprise powerhouse — there’s nothing like the magic of in-person connection.
For brand awareness, pipeline creation, or pipeline acceleration — real-life events are one of the most memorable ways to deliver exceptional experiences and build a more meaningful connection with your prospects and existing customer base.
If you want to WOW your attendees, check out this on-site best practices guide for inspiration.
If you're short on ideas, why not shift the task to an influencer? 69% of social media users trust recommendations made by the people they follow rather than brands.
Whether it's a B2C influencer or B2B thought leader, you can bring in a fresh set of eyes to find new marketing angles.
By collaborating with influencers, you're breaking through brand skepticism and creating a new brand identity that's authentic and trustworthy.
While looking for influencers, focus on both macro and micro-influencers to target different follower segments.
For example, this virtual sales coaching masterclass is a powerhouse collaboration between sales influencers like Chris Orlob, Mor Assouline, and Josh Braun — where salespeople can collectively browse a sweet list of options to level up their sales game.
When you guest post on someone else's website, you also market to their audience and improve brand awareness.
Hunter published a case study on the Ahrefs blog about listicle outreach which resonated with the blog's core audience, bringing it 42 backlinks, including from Indie Hackers and SEO Round Table.
Similarly, Aura leveraged the audience of Wishpond to share its expertise in email marketing security and improved its backlink profile.
Social media is all about creating demand and staying top of mind.
With social media platforms, you can nurture and grow your audience, offer better support, distribute content, and run ads based on first-party data. The benefits are endless—all you need to do is pick your social media channel and be consistent.
If you need inspiration, just look at the canned water company clocking $100 million in revenue with quirky social media campaigns.
To improve close rates, look into loyalty and referral programs. After all, old customers spend 31% more than new customers.
With loyalty programs, you identify brand champions that can influence others and collect social proof.
Once they are deep into the marketing funnel, you can activate referral programs to bring in new customers and reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC).
Loyalty programs are often an overlooked marketing strategy that obtains surprisingly good results. The reason? People trust people. If customers love your brand, word-of-mouth will do its job.
If you're getting visitors but struggling to convert them, you might want to update your landing pages.
First, make sure your offer/claim redirects to the correct type of landing page (lead gen, click-through, sales, splash page, etc.), then tweak the headline and CTA.
Then, include UGC and social proof to legitimize your offer and add high-quality visuals that flow with the content. Use a tool like Hotjar to find your landing page heatmap.
Conversion issues crop up over time, so measuring performance on a regular cadence is best. Keep UX in mind and use device-sensitive designs for better conversions.
If you aren't using quizzes and templates in your marketing strategy, it's time to course correct. Quizzes gamify an otherwise boring funnel for consumers by removing doubts.
Ask questions that help you understand the prospect better, add engaging options and titles, use interactive visuals, and compile results that matter to your target audience.
Klientboost is an example of a company that leverages quizzes as a marketing tactic to generate leads — they even link to their quizzes from the main website navigation.
Giveaways and contests can jumpstart audience interactions and generate massive buzz online.
How giveaways and contests can work:
Important to note that contests and giveaways can often spiral out of bounds and attract a lot of irrelevant and low-quality leads that drain your resources. So make sure you have your target audience fleshed out — and, of course, leverage a platform like Splash to host your sweepstakes pages.
Starting an email marketing program costs almost nothing — just effort and dedication.
Email campaigns are a no-brainer if you already have a decent email list.
Like guest posts — podcasts can help you tell a story and grow your brand organically.
You can appear as a guest on various podcasts to increase brand visibility, get backlinks, and leverage them for influencer marketing.
Of course, you can host podcasts to grow followership on external platforms.
Despite using the usual distribution channels such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, Refine Labs' CEO, Chris Walker, regularly "repurposes” his content on LinkedIn about new Revenue Vitals episodes because that's where his target audience interacts the most.
If you need inspiration for running a podcast, check out how Splash does it.
Once your business makes sales for a while, you're bound to garner a few reviews. If the growth plateaus midway, you can use reviews from real people to influence new prospects.
User-generated content (UGC) and testimonials work as social proof and, in many cases, can persuade people better than your website copy. Gather the best testimonials, integrate them into landing pages, pricing pages, and social media ads, and let user feedback do its job.
Chili Piper’s “Wall of Love” is a fantastic example.
Shaking things up with discounts and free offers is a timeless art.
You can use time-sensitive flash sales to revive orders and create seasonal offers that tie in with brand awareness and bulk discounts to increase average cart value.
Landing pages, social media ads, and newsletters will help you spread the word but remember that discounts alter the perceived value of your products, so you have to lean heavily on the exclusivity factor — so use this marketing effort sparingly.
Like giveaways, freebies can quickly spiral out of your budget, so ensure you closely track ROIs.
Like guest appearances, you can use forums like Quora, Reddit, and Indie Hackers to share your knowledge and redirect traffic to your business.
Since forums are much more informal and organic, readers are more likely to convert if you offer helpful information.
People often turn to Quora for personal security questions, and Aura identified a brand-building opportunity here. As long as it offers helpful answers, Aura can persuade people to take the next steps by signing up for its services. Plus, the Quora backlinks send all the right signals to Google.
There are plenty of free marketing ideas out there that you can try — it just requires some sweat equity.
But some results come at a cost. If you're ready to spend a few Benjamins, here are some marketing campaign ideas worth a shot.
You can take your sponsorship game to a whole new level by associating your brand with popular industry trade shows, conferences, pop-ups, or webinars.
This strategy typically consists of planning and executing an entire event activation with the goal of brand recognition and promoting your products.
It's definitely resource intensive, but the ROI can be extremely high.
With event sponsorships, you control the audience flow, value proposition, and reporting and personally interact with guests, potential customers, and thought leaders.
Whether we like it or not — pay-to-play is part of the marketing game.
It gives faster results than content marketing, and you only pay when someone clicks your ad, but costs can pile up quickly.
Basecamp’s CEO went viral after calling Google ads a “shakedown," but the reality is that if you master the channel, it can become a revenue producer, not a cost center.
By the way, you don't always have to spend tons of money to target your competitors; you can also do this with search engine optimization.
Here are some cool examples:
PR is a classic move — but it's costly. Packages typically start at around $5,000 monthly and can be as expensive as $50,000 monthly.
That said, it can help drive brand recognition, breaking into new markets, and reputation management — all of which dictate revenue in the long run.
Successful public relations strategies work on identifying a target audience, leveraging social media posts and "tier 1" publications to connect with fans and followers, and using impactful or timely stories to stay in the news cycle.
We mentioned YouTube SEO earlier, but that's just one part of the broader video marketing toolkit.
Video content creation does require some budget, but it doesn’t have to break the bank.
There’s a lot brands can do to leverage video marketing outside of YouTube SEO:
Most people don’t subscribe to corporate newsletters — they subscribe to their favorite niche content creators.
So instead of creating corporate email marketing campaigns from scratch, you can sponsor a niche newsletter that overlaps with your target audience.
Sponsoring a newsletter is particularly useful if your email deliverability is low or if you have a small email list.
Marketing Examples is an excellent niche newsletter with an engaged audience of growth marketers that are subscribed — often, they tastefully promote products and services in their content — but it's not annoying or overly promotional.
Similar to newsletters — people subscribe to their favorite niche content creators over most corporate podcasts; that's just the way it goes.
Sponsoring different content formats is all about being omnipresent to maximize reach across many platforms and channels.
Celebrity endorsements can be a costly experiment but one that can bring massive ROI if done right.
Celebrities can draw attention to your brand and make people take notice. It's memorable, sometimes shocking, and definitely stands out.
VoIP provider Nextiva engaged Dennis Rodman to tweet about the company and appear at the Nextiva booth at Channel Partners Conference & Expo to shoot some hoops with attendees.
That was absolutely genius!
A book is the kind of tangible asset that makes people take your brand seriously.
A physical book is not something most businesses will publish — but that’s why it stands out.
Cognism’s CMO Alice de Courcy compiled and refined years of experience into a hardcover titled The Diary of a First-time CMO.
Since it's value-packed, it'll attract a niche audience (CMOs, CEOs, entrepreneurs), but the brand loyalty and trust gained from qualified leads is unparalleled.
If you have something exclusive to offer, consider going against the grain and publishing a full-fledged business book.
Speaking of going against the grain, how about you write a brand theme song? Or a rap even!
Alex Cornell, the co-founder of UberConference (now owned by Dialpad), gave a fresh spin to the phone-on-hold experience by whipping up a song about it.
The “I'm On Hold” song turned out to be one of the most popular features of UberConference as it caught people off-guard and in a good way.
Call it a “gimmick” or clever marketing, the brand visibility gained from this experiment was a major success for Alex and UberConference.
Infographics are hit or miss — on the one hand, infographics are content assets that fetch you backlinks and improve your brand visibility. Since visual content attracts people more than plain text, infographics can perform well.
On the other hand, this marketing tactic has been so overdone that some people can roll their eyes when they see one.
As an example, the team at Splash built a pretty cool infographic about the return to in-person events.
As a part of digital marketing, memes are growing in popularity, but their success depends on how the target audience views them.
The reality is that memes can potentially go viral, but you'll usually attract a lot of irrelevant eyeballs to your brand.
Hashtags in social media are best utilized for event marketing.
Otherwise, it can be good to use them, but don't rely on hashtags to grow your brand visibility.
If your business is investing heavily in LinkedIn — there are plenty of tools to track ROI, so forget about hashtags since they won't help you much.
Business cards? Who uses business cards these days? I don't use them, but I know some formal industries, like banking and management consulting, still use them.
User-generated content (UGC) such as reviews, feedback, and photos cut through the marketing noise and help prospects learn from real users. UGC works because it shows how invested customers are in your brand, which creates an identity new prospects can trust
First, you must understand how and what they interact with to attract new audiences. Find the type of content, messaging, and visuals your target audience relates to and reverse engineer the journey to create and distribute content. We already discussed plenty of ways to do that in this guide — such as SEO, paid advertising, and events.
Email newsletters are one of the best ways to boost recurring orders and average cart value. Impulses trigger most e-commerce sales, so the better you understand consumer psychology, the more personalized your email copy will be. Segment email subscribers, A/B test multiple offers, and design a seamless checkout process to get results.
BigCommerce published a phenomenal guide on growing eCommerce sales that I recommend checking out.
Drumming up interest in a new product requires you to drop teasers and the critical features without revealing too much. The exclusivity creates anticipation. You can also run an early bird offer or a contest to keep people invested in your product launch.
When you create the "mother content" or the long-form piece, highlight the key areas to share on different platforms. You can easily find content chunks that fit into other formats by weaving a repurposing strategy right at the start.
For example, if your article has a how-to section, turn that into a LinkedIn post or Twitter thread. You can do similar things with product walkthrough videos and TikTok. The team at Splash created this cool post-event marketing playbook with some great ideas for repurposing content.
