As we enter this new era of slow growth and tight budgets it has become more critical for companies to devise creative marketing techniques which beat the traditional methods of influencing, attracting and reaching prospective customers. In Silicon Valley product innovation has always been the cornerstone of business success, but now more than ever, we need both great product innovation as well as genius marketing strategies – one that leads to 10:1 leverage for your sales efforts. Marketing has to be challenged to think in terms of “out-of-the-box” strategies, which lead to unfair competitive advantage for the business. Here are few techniques that I have seen deployed successfully by various startups and businesses with superb creativity and efficiency. Marketing thus becomes a true competitive advantage moving forward.

Stop chasing your customers!

Traditional marketing teaches you to think about pursuing your prospects and customers, so that you can sell them your stuff. This is equally true for B-to-B or B-to-C world. In either case, such techniques are often expensive and do not give you any unfair advantage or leverage. Rather, a revolutionary way of thinking, would be to challenge the traditional approach and look for marketing strategies where the prospects are chasing you instead? Is that too good to be true? Well, a number of companies are coming up with creative game-plans to accomplish just that. At Metricstream, we built an independent portal called ComplianceOnline.com, which now attracts all the top target professionals from around the world using Web 2.0 techniques that allows Metricstream to mine those relationships for sales and marketing leads for its enterprise software business. It also helps that ComplianceOnline generates revenues and profits, allowing the marketing department to become a “revenue” center. In short, ComplianceOnline is allowing Metricstream to generate marketing leads at zero cost, now that the portal is self funding and profitable!

Blend offline and online media

Online media is powerful – facebook apps, twitter campaigns, search engine optimizations, web conversion techniques, email marketing all provide a low cost way to reach your prospective customers in an efficient manner. However, many marketers overlook the synergies that a well-blended online and offline marketing model might deliver to them. Can you effectively tie in your online campaigns to offline marketing programs? By doing so, it gives you real marketing amplification. This helps your prospects to get hooked on to your messages and value proposition through a truly integrated marketing approach. A good example comes to me right here at SiliconIndia, where we have launched a series of powerful industry events like StartupCity conference (for startups, entrepreneurs and VCs), Women 2.0 (for women professionals and execs), Digital Media conference (for advertisers, marketers). These events are generating revenues and contributing to the business model for sure, but more interestingly, they create a brand persona and leverage for greater online adoption of the siliconindia.com web site. SiliconIndia has moved up from being a Top 50,000 web site to a Top 2000 web site (as ranked by Alexa), in less than a year. Thanks to the creative technique of blending offline and online channels in a creative marketing strategy.

Stop PR and become Newsworthy!

Traditionally, a number of startups have spent a lot of money on traditional PR approaches, hiring a PR firm and then chasing the press to write about them. While the publicity is good, in many situations, there is not enough budgets to go around funding such marketing activities any more.

A better way to look at the marketing opportunity here is to ask how you can become more newsworthy. Is there an angle through which the press and media is chasing you for their news and insights, rather than you chasing them to promote your offerings?

For example, Cisco has now embarked on a well known “Pass the Ball” (http://www.passtheball.com) campaign for social good. The idea is to help people to collaborate on doing social good through this campaign. In essence, this campaign is to showcase, WebEx ( a division of Cisco) and the value of collaboration. But, by taking a “social good” angle, WebEx/Cisco is now able to attract media which is looking at how people are collaborating on social good and social causes! The campaign itself is making Cisco more newsworthy. It is also making Cisco shine with its customers, helping it establish a powerful brand. Numbers of marketers have jumped on the “green” bandwagon to achieve the same. However, the key in making yourself newsworthy is to not to have an also ran “green washing” campaign, but to look for distinct angles, where your marketing campaign truly creates an impact and news worthiness for your venture.

Influence the influencers!

In a tight marketing environment, it becomes even more important to stop chasing the masses, but focusing more on influencing the influencers. If done well, these influencers will promote your products and services, and bring the masses to your business. This holds true for both B-to-B and B-to-C environments.

Regalix.com, a leading marketing agency globally, whose Board I sit on, has created a well organized methodology to attract the influencers who can then help them get to the VP of marketing and other senior executives, who are their target customers. Regalix is creating a “specialized” network of these marketing experts, who their target customers, the VP of marketing, look up to. Instead of taking the traditional route of cold calling on the marketing execs through inside sales, Regalix is spending its time with the marketing influencers. It lowers their customer acquisition costs dramatically, and also, the marketing execs more often are beginning to see Regalix as a true thought leader, through the emergence of this powerful panel of experts.

Influencing the influencers is an old and proven concept, though in the current economy it becomes even more important that companies attach higher weightage to this technique. It offers far greater and sustainable market leverage for the company.

My idea here in this article, is not to give a long laundry list of marketing techniques, but to pick a few critical ones. Also I would provoke you to think about how you should revisit your own marketing plans for your current or next promising startup or product launch. Please feel free to send me your thoughts and case studies, where you are indeed seeing creative marketing genius in action – I always love to learn from those examples!