If you own or manage a business, there are likely a few things you’re already doing to market it to your target audience. You’re probably on social media. You might already post content to a blog or other medium for content marketing. And you hopefully have a nice, clean website set up (what decade are we in again?)

Congrats: you’ve got the basics down. But what else can you be doing to promote your business? Here are 4 ideas you may not have thought of!

Facebook Live

If you’re not familiar with Facebook Live, it’s basically a tool that lets you broadcast live to your followers using your phone’s video. When you’re done, you can simply stop broadcasting and the video will automatically be uploaded to your timeline on Facebook.

Are the gears turning yet? You’ve probably already got a few ideas on how you could use this feature, but in case you’re reading this early on a Monday morning before your coffee, here are a few thought-starters. Imagine running an educational seminar, announcing a brand new product or service, or hosting a fireside chat using Facebook Live. The tool simply opens up new engagement opportunities that might not have been possible before.

User-Generated Content

Why do all the work of creating content yourself when you can engage your audience to help do it for you? User-generated content can be a great way to extend the reach of your marketing to your customers’ networks. It comes with an added benefit, too: you’ll often learn about the interests and dreams of your customers by inviting them to create content for you.

You’ll need to offer some sort of incentive to get them to take action, of course. The bigger the demand on your audience’s time and energy, the bigger the incentive will have to be to entice them. If it’s as easy as uploading a photo and using your hashtag, for example, an entry into a contest might do the trick. If, on the other hand, you’re asking for a blog post, video, or something more involved, you may want to offer a freebie and the promise of visibility for the winning submissions.

Customer E-newsletters

We know: email marketing is about as new as the T-Rex skeleton at your local museum. But there are some good reasons why it’s still alive and well as a channel. For one, email marketing gives you complete control over what you say, who you say it to, and when you say it.

Second, people who have given you permission to email them are among some of the most engaged and loyal customers you’ll have, and we all know it costs less to keep an engaged customer than to acquire a new one.

Lastly, a sophisticated email strategy allows you to custom-tailor the content of your emails based on actions your subscribers have or have not taken – something other channels often don’t give you the insight to do effectively.

The key with email is to give value more often than you push sales, and it starts with the signup. Offering an incentive for signing up (such as a free whitepaper or e-book, or a small product discount) can be a great way to grow your mailing list. From there, be sure that each email you send includes content that adds value to your subscribers in some way.

Affiliate Marketing

Remember what we said about enlisting others to help grow your business? Offering an affiliate marketing program can be a great way to do just that. Affiliate marketing works by compensating others in exchange for sending traffic to your website that results in a sale.

Websites like Amazon have some of the most well-known and structured affiliate marketing programs out there, and for good reason: this is a scalable way of increasing your visibility and driving major revenue growth.

Conclusion

Many business owners start promoting themselves with all of the common channels – Facebook, Google, and the like. Oftentimes though, business starts to plateau in those channels, and from there it’s time to get creative. The channels we’ve mentioned here aren’t as commonly used for two reasons: they’re not as well understood, and they take a little more planning to get right. The rewards of investing that time and energy are well worth it in the long run, though!

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