We are all aware of the nuts and bolts of marketing; we have to be if we want to promote our services effectively, acquire new clients and grow our businesses. In it’s most basic form, there’s not a lot to it — marketing is simply getting the word out to increase awareness of your brand. As business owners, we hope that this awareness will translate into new clients and increased income.

Most of us have developed our own set of marketing activities that we tend to return to over time, activities that may or may not be as successful as we’d like, but activities we are likely very comfortable doing. If you spend most of your marketing focus doing the same old thing, though, you may not only be boring your audience, but you could be wasting serious time and money.

When it comes down to it, marketing is like every other activity you focus on in your business. While you want to have systems and processes in place to make it cost-effective and time-efficient, you need to analyze your actions from time to time to make sure you’re hitting the mark. And it’s easy to get stuck in a marketing rut.

So this week, I’m focusing on four types of marketing strategies that you can use to kick-start your 2021 marketing plans, target your audience in a new way and add some spice to otherwise stagnant campaigns. Each of my next four posts will focus on a different type of marketing strategy, covering the background of the technique, providing an overview of how it’s used and giving you some ideas on how you can use it to market your business.

Here is a quick rundown of the four types of marketing strategies I plan to cover to give you a look at what’s to come.

Cause Marketing

Cause marketing, also known as cause-related marketing, links a company and its products and services to a social cause or issue.

Relationship Marketing

Relationship marketing focuses on customer retention and satisfaction in order to enhance your relationships with existing customers to increase loyalty.

Scarcity Marketing

Scarcity marketing creates a perception of a shortage which aims to entice customers to purchase out of fear that they may not be able to get it in the future.

Undercover Marketing

Undercover marketing, also known as stealth marketing, involves marketing to consumers in a way that they do not realize they are being marketed to.

The first two – cause and relationship marketing — are what I consider “positive” marketing techniques that focus on the benefits to others. The second two – scarcity and undercover marketing – are more unconventional and potentially controversial techniques.