Now there is a disclaimer that goes with a title like the one above. It goes something along the lines of, “Marketing Ideas WILL work if they meet certain criteria. Those criteria are;”

1. Must have vision.  Campaigns that don’t see past your nose simply won’t go that far.  Look ahead and have a grand plan of WHAT YOU WANT if everything goes according to plan.
2. Must have patience.  These things take time to develop, time to plan and time to execute.  Then you have time to wait to measure the results.  I see most campaigns fail because they run out of patience.
3. Must have reasonable expectations for what is put in.  Most of the times if you spend no money on a campaign don’t expect to hit it rich.  You must temper your expectations, or reward, with the amount of risk you are willing to put in.

So there you have a short qualification list before you get to the meat of this post.

I will also preface that if you aren’t the creative out of the box type of thinker necessary to come up with campaigns to really get your audiences attention then find one (and they aren’t cheap but they will give you solutions that you wouldn’t have thought of) like well, me the orange county graphic designer for instance, but there is also Google so go ahead and dig.

Now the real meat and most of this has been said before in some form or another but here will be my take.

1. A proper SEO campaign.  Get keywords important to you generating traffic for you.  Also use PPC strategies as well (and there are multiple strategies that have different desired outcomes and ways of approaching them so don’t just do PPC to do it).  And be aggressive in attacking the keywords that are KEY to your business.
2. SOCIAL MEDIA.  Why in all caps?  Because still most people just don’t get it or don’t want to.  Times change, technology changes, climates change, pretty much everything changes except how some people want to do business.  If the failure of GMC doesn’t strike a chord with you then what will.  Besides having several fundamental issues as how a company was run they just didn’t see the writing on the wall and failed to compete with the imports.  Adjusting to incorporate new technology in your marketing is not only smart its evolution and in a matter of time with be the norm.
3. Video.  If you offer a service, or a product lets make some videos and get them out there demonstrating what it is you have.  Websites that offer actual product/service demonstrations are at least twice as likely to convert as those that do not.  People love video, but don’t want to use it for themselves.  How many times have you seen a video and thought, “Man that was awesome?  I’m going to get me one of those.”  I know I have on several occasions.
4. Direct mail.  It’s not dead, if you don’t do what’s not always done.  Go 3D, be original, be impactful, BE the one that gets opened and not thrown away.
5. Utilize local TV advertising where applicable.  Rates are great and you can really target your demographics and get a lot of impressions.
6. Articles/blogs.  I put these together because they kind of go hand in hand for me.  Write articles and blog posts about what’s new and what’s going on with your product/services.  Think of it as PR.  The whole while bolstering your keywords and your website.
7. If possible involve your customers.  Make your Website a 2.0 application where the user has an input on content rather then force feeding them everything YOU think is important.
8. Create a concise, tight yet completely out of the box campaign that will be memorable.  I would always rather be polarizing than not.  Either way people remember you because they A) didn’t like you or B) they loved you.  Being in the middle will ensure one thing, you are forgotten.
9. Provide great customer service.  I know this isn’t really a marketing idea but I can tell you that there are large companies out there that have these blind processes that do one thing, piss me off and alienate me as a customer to the point I will never use them as long as there is an alternative (and I don’t care about the price difference).   Companies like Yahoo Finance, AT&T, Times Warner Cable, Quizno’s, and many more have guaranteed I will never use their service and I tell everyone I know not to as well.  Bad customer service = BAD MARKETING.
10. Throw parties and events around your product or service.  People will show up and you get 1 on 1 marketing and feedback and get you to observe customer reaction and feedback.  Plus if you make a great statement not only will you be guaranteed that people will talk about it but they will blog about it and write about it and put up pictures and video, and invite their friends to join your cool group on your social networks and then you can offer them more advertising (at almost 0 the cost).  Wow, no way.  But that takes vision, and some guts to pull off.

In the end every company wants to be the cool kid on the block.  Most fail.  Sometimes because they just didn’t try and sometimes because what they tried didn’t work.  Now more than ever with the amount of information we are being bombarded with is it not important you stand out?  I know I try, and I am just one person.  It all comes down to your marketing and advertising consultant and how much that person can push the envelope.