Thinking outside the box is often seen as a buzzword that has little substance. But thinking outside the box, or blue sky thinking can be the key to a startups progress. Being creative in the ways that you market, offer your services and operate can help you to achieve a competitive advantage or to innovate and change the landscape of your industry. Here are 9 Ways to think outside of the box when marketing your startup:

1. Co-Sponsor an event within your niche
Offering to pay for and sponsor an event for larger businesses in your niche or industry is a good way to market your startup. Being seen on the same platform as a larger business will help build your startup’s credibility in the field as well as your business presence.

Making this a regular occurrence can help build a customer base from attendees or partnerships with relevant businesses in your field. Eventually, you could build a reciprocal referral relationship with members of this customer base.

2. Start Locally
Starting your business focusing on your local area is a great way to get your foot in the door and build a reliable and accessible customer base to build on. Focusing all your marketing activities locally, including partnerships, paid search, social media advertising and SEO can help in getting a competitive edge in your area.

After building this base and growing, there is scope to expand this area incrementally in a manner that is manageable for your business in terms of your resources available.

3. Create a remarkable customer experience
Being quirky is one thing, but offering customer benefits that are quirky and favourable, is even better. Offering a relevant benefit to your first group of customers is a great way to delight them, make them repeat customers who are likely to sing your praises with reviews and referrals is a great way for a startup to fuel exponential growth in sales and customers.

A good way of taking good customer service to the next level is to provide a complementary product or service to the one in which you offer. Simply offering discounts on your own is not enough here, you want to be seen to be going the extra mile and breaking the mould.

For this to work well, your basic customer experience needs to be flawless, otherwise, the extra gift could fall on deaf ears.

4. Using Reddit
Reddit is often overlooked and it’s easy to underestimate its power. However, the audiences on Reddit tend to be early adopters. These are the kinds of people willing to take a chance on a startup, they are natural risk takers who will rely on the community to steer in the right way.

Building up a persona on Reddit can help to convince this community that your product is worth taking a risk on. The key here is to engage with the relevant community and not to sell. Explaining the benefits in a relevant manner.

5. Build great resources
One of the simplest ways to grow your business is to become a necessity, somewhere your customers and others in your field can refer to. Building useful resources can be the best way of doing this, especially if you are a tech-based startup.

Consider creating tools that are available on your site and will work to draw people to your web pages and increase their familiarity with your brand as a source. Consider websites like Moz and Quicksprout who offer marketing related tools that appeal to both their potential clients and also other businesses in the industry.

6. Video. Youtube is the second largest search engine, use it!
Create video content and resources that will be searchable to your potential customer base. As a startup, beating the larger guys will be difficult on text search, they’ve had a while to maximise their presence and ranking. However, many businesses, including larger ones are under-performing when it comes to video search.

This is where you can best them, creating great resources and videos which answer all possible customer questions or seeks to engage with them on a related topic.

Treat this like a search engine; relate your video titles and descriptions to the right queries by maximising the keywords you’ve used in them in order to rank higher.

7. Find customer hubs to target
Finding hubs where a large amount of your potential or ideal customers will either physically be or engage with is a good way of gaining large amounts of customers at a go.

Pick a service, event or particular location in which many of your startups’ target group will want to interact with, and then either partner with them or provide some of your services to them for free. This can be a good way to build credibility, brand awareness, and your bottom line sales.

Thinking outside the box is more than just a buzzword. It’s particularly important for startups to think outside the box and innovate in order to compete or gain traction. The benefit of being a startup is the very fact that you can do things differently. Take this opportunity and use it to your advantage.

As always, Happy Small Business Marketing!