As we enter this new era of slow growth and tight budgets it has become more critical for companies to devise creative marketing techniques that 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 and intelligent marketing strategies that lead to 10:1 leverage for your sales efforts. Marketing has to be challenged with out-of-the-box strategies, which lead to unfair competitive advantage for the business. Here are some techniques that I have seen deployed successfully by various startups and businesses with superb creativity and efficiency. Thus marketing 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 the 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 you will have the prospects 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 and allows MetricStream to mine those relationships for sales and marketing leads for its enterprise software business. It also helps generate revenues and profits, allowing the marketing department to become a 'revenue' center. In short, ComplianceOnline facilitates 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 optimization, Web conversion techniques, and 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. Can you effectively tie in your online campaigns to offline marketing programs? By doing so, you can greatly amplify your marketing efforts. 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), and Digital Media Conference (for advertisers and marketers). These events generate revenues and contribute to the business model for sure; but more interestingly, they create a brand persona and leverage for greater online adoption of the SiliconIndia.com website. SiliconIndia has moved up from being a Top 50,000 website to a Top 2,000 website (as ranked by Alexa) in less than a year. An amazing growth of 2,500 percent, achieved through the creative technique of blending offline and online channels in a creative marketing strategy.