Small Businesses Need to Be Creative in a Different Way — And How To Do It In 2022

As a small business, you have to be more creative in your marketing efforts than ever before. With so much competition online, it's no longer enough to just have a website and run some ads.

But, SMBs take this too literally — who has the most "creative" or "viral" ads? Who can create the most converting ads?

Instead, you need to find ways to stand out from the crowd and give potential customers a unique experience that they won't find anywhere else.

In this blog post, we will discuss some of the best ways to do just that. We'll also take a look at Facebook's Instant Experience feature, which can help you create an immersive ad experience that will really grab attention.

Create a well mapped out detour prior to your website or landing page

Okay so this will be a bit more technical then usual, and even if you're new to digital marketing, I hope this social media strategy makes sense.

Traditional marketing strategy thinks of a funnel too literally — generate mass website traffic, retarget, and improve conversion rates.

But that is so 2010!

In 2022, your marketing budget and ad campaign cannot use that strategy as the marketing channels' algorithms are designed to control both frequency (which means the number of times your ad impressions gets shown to prospective customers — or, aka, retargeting) and show relevant content to the ideal customers.

In layman's terms, social media marketing now means give the platforms the conversion that means the most to your business (like online purchase) and have your marketing campaign target broadly with no additional targeting layers.

What's the solution? Marketing for startups, or even brands thinking about optimizing its social channels, instead now need to think about adding a step between the website and the ad.

That "detour" is almost used as a way to weed out people who would not have been interested. Yes it's counter intuitive to prevent someone from getting to your website and decrease traffic — but the algorithms now will reward marketing strategies that create a content strategy that converts higher quality than send mass traffic.

Social media marketing strategy now needs to involve things like Facebook Instant Experiences

Re-enter Canvas ads — which is now rebranded as Facebook Instant Experiences (will be referring this as IE moving forward).

These are the targeted ads that ask you to swipe up and it shows a mini website prior to someone going to a brand's landing pages.

Originally thought to be an unit to raise brand awareness, many tests have shown that people that click through the IE actually converts at a higher percentage — and these social media marketing campaigns often have a lower cost because the quality of the traffic is so much higher.

Let us repeat that — your target audience who goes through this detour gets more invested into your value proposition that they convert higher and more efficiently on all your core metrics.

A startup marketing strategy is often hard because its marketing team cannot create hundreds, let alone tens, of content.

But, create a well-designed IE and a few landing pages can replace 50 pieces of content marketing directly to your website.

IE isn't the only example. Do you remember those BuzzFeed personality quizzes?

Here's another example — when's the last time you heard a brand asking asking you to take an online quiz of some kind?

Usually used for things like supplements or skincare to see what type of specific products the company needs to match you with. Sometimes it's used for fashion as well to make the fit better.

Those are all what we're calling detours here. Marketing for startup requires social media content to have legs of its own. Think about this:

Which content would you share — a fun quiz to take on social media or an ad that asks you to go on your website and buy something?

We're not even getting to the mountain of self-declared data this marketing strategy can generate. Or even key performance indicators (aka KPIs) that can be generated by your exact target market.

But early stage startups should look to build a detour like these so that it can cut through the competition.

Okay, but do these marketing strategies actually convert?

This is where we wish we can share some numbers. Because there are countless of startup business campaigns that was successful doing this digital marketing strategy.

IE and quizzes in general are a fun social media experience. It's also something uniquely social media platforms can do that other channels like search engine optimization or Google ads can't do.

Customer acquisition in 2022 is more art than science.

Startup founders need honest feedback from its marketing and need to find ways to save money.

This strategy will not only work for new and existing customers, but also for every social media channel (yes including LinkedIn ads).

Your definition of customer lifetime value and your startup marketing strategy will undoubtably need to figure out a scalable content marketing strategy.

Our recommendation is to put the marketing efforts into designing a well crafted detour — and invest your social media to create experiences prior to the landing pages.

Whether its Twitter ads, email marketing or a referral program, your paying customers will always appreciate a marketing strategy that focuses on making tens of thousands of customers have a better experience.

Realistically, though, can a startup marketing strategy afford to provide detours?

All search engines probably states that a marketing team needs to maximize its web traffic — and a startup marketing success will come from its target market and target customer converting on your landing pages.

A detour, by definition, is a roundabout way to get to a destination (and in this case, that's becoming a paying customer).

It's not intuitive to big companies, let alone startup marketers with fancy a job title, but a proper social media strategy to effectively market to paying customers will now need to find ways to create more qualified traffic than mass traffic.

Marketing for startup in 2022 requires your target audience to be convinced of your value proposition

Rather than convince you of the counterintuitive-less-traffic marketing strategies, how about a marketing plan that is giving more content to your potential customers?

A social media ad is needing to generate a click, get someone to view 3 seconds or more, get across a brand's mission, etc... The landing page is, simply, designed to get someone to convert quicker.

The 2010 thinking is that someone who need to find more information or do research will go to another tab on the landing page — blogs, sign up for email marketing, etc...

But, in 2022, if additional information isn't literally in front of the paying customer, they will exit and go back to their feed/next ad.

This is why the detour actually makes sense. You're going to get people who want to find more info to click out of the detour to get to your main website.

It's actually better than the most optimized search engines or leveraging marketing strategies that's designed to mindlessly click through.

Your marketing campaigns shouldn't just maximize conversions and instead think about how your digital marketing ads creates satisfied customers by adding in a guided detour.

Again, only social channels can truly leverage this for growth hacking

Digital marketing is no longer linear. In fact, the idea of just increasing clicks or traffic and improving conversion rates at parts of the funnel is counterintuitive to how algorithms on social media channels actually work.

Spend a part of your marketing budget to try this strategy. We promise it'll be something new for the startup business, and your potential customers will greatly appreciate in 2022.