Today’s consumers are smarter than ever before. They’ve seen every trick in the book and with thousands of messages they’re exposed to every day, they had to become pretty good at ignoring them. Standing out in front of your competition or just grabbing a few seconds of their attention is becoming increasingly difficult.
To combat this, marketers have to resort to new tactics and try out some approaches that have rarely been tried before. Here are a few of those you can use today that are guaranteed to get results and change the way your audience perceives you.
Scholarships for marketing
When you take a look at the history of scholarships, they’re not a new marketing method. In fact, they’re well-known as a method that SEO professionals use to get some extra backlinks to a website. However, scholarships can do much more than that.
When you launch a scholarship, you get in front of two major audiences: students looking for help with paying their tuition and parents looking to help their offspring. Both are pretty wide target audiences that are genuinely interested in what scholarships have to offer.
The ROI of scholarships can be phenomenal if you do your planning right. The amount you give away + the amount you use to promote the scholarships with outreach and ads = lots of impressions, clicks, and eventually leads.
Compared to Facebook ads or PPC a scholarship has two benefits. First of all, it actually helps students in need and allows them to complete their education, stress-free. Second of all, it can be much cheaper. Besides the money you’ll spend on promoting it, you’ll also get a lot of PR attention for free from news outlets, university websites, and others.
One thing that makes ScholarshipApp great is that you can measure the performance of your campaigns like you would with a PPC or Facebook ad campaign. You can see how many views your scholarships have, how many students opened the scholarship and how many of them applied. This will allow you to measure your scholarship conversion rates and understand your CPL. Moreover, you also have access to audience segmentation so you can see exactly who you’re targeting.
And the best part is that you can start your own scholarship in as little as 15 minutes. Sign up today to get started!
Quizzes for attracting new leads
Ever since the Cosmo magazine in the 1970s, quizzes have been the favorite pastime of many of us. They’re short and fun and they reveal us something about who we are. What our spirit animal is, which city in Europe we are, which color best represents us and more.
Up until a few years ago, that’s all that quizzes were for. Nowadays, they’re more of a marketing tool than anything else. When Buzzfeed blew up with their quizzes on Facebook, a number of companies emerged and let marketers use quizzes to get new customers.
The premise is simple: you place a carefully selected quiz in front of your target audience, using your website, a Facebook ad, email or something else. The potential customer has to finish the quiz and give you their details (email, phone number or something else) to get the results. With the results, you send them an offer for your product or service such as cloud hosting or designing a website, for example.
It works really well because you’re not immediately pushing for the sale: you’re making a promise to the potential customer. You’re promising them that they will find out something about themselves and in return, all they need to do is type out their email.
Quizzes get great results: the average completion rate is 43% for a simple trivia quiz. All you have to do is get creative with your questions and outcomes and you’ll find a great channel for promoting your offer. The best part is that doesn’t feel like marketing.
Some great products we’d recommend here include LeadQuizzes, Interact, and YouEngage.
Influencer marketing (on TikTok)
In the world of B2B, influencer marketing gets somewhat of a bad rap. It takes a lot of time to find the right influencers, manage the communication, measure the ROI, and everything in between. Up until recently, influencer marketing has mostly been reserved for B2C brands that hand the bandwidth to deal with influencers.
But not anymore.
As TikTok is spreading like wildfire, the audience that uses it is also changing. In 2020, there were 64% of active TikTok users between the ages of 10 and 29. In 2021, that same group represented 47% of users. In short, the platform is no longer reserved for younger audiences only.
Some B2B brands that have used TikTok to gain an edge over the competition include Shopify, Adobe, Square and others. They used a mix of creating their own content and making their voice heard through influencer profiles.
That’s the great bit – if you don’t know where to get started with TikTok as a B2B brand, there are lots of influencers out there whose audiences you can use instead. We have been using influencers with ScholarshipOwl and we are thrilled with the results. Granted – it’s a B2C audience but the principles of collaboration remain the same. If you’re not on TikTok in 2022 – you’re missing out.
Wrapping up
Marketing is becoming more competitive with each passing year. It will take additional creativity as well as courage to do something new to be able to stand out. Your competition is not your only obstacle – getting your customers’ attention with so much content out there is.
If you want to try one method that is guaranteed to bring results, try out launching your own scholarship! Sign up today and you can get started in as little as 15 minutes.
