Sometimes, each you request are ideas to get your originative juices flowing.

So I privation to springiness you selling ideas to riff off. That’s wherefore I asked 18 marketers for the astir unconventional selling ideas they’ve seen oregon executed.

The intelligence conception of effort justification states that radical thin to property a higher worth to an result if they person enactment effort into it.

If your lawsuit has to leap done hoops to bargain your product, it means they’re motivated—and truthful apt to beryllium a large customer.

Creating friction seems counterintuitive, but it works:

• People are consenting to wage much for furnishings they assemble than comparable pre-assembled items, besides known arsenic the IKEA effect.
• We antecedently offered a seven-day proceedings for $7, and it improved our pb quality.
• Dan Kennedy was erstwhile the world’s highest-paid selling consultant, yet you could lone reach him via fax.
• Longer forms are (sometimes) better. In a study by conversion complaint optimizer Michael Aagaard, reducing the fig of signifier fields decreased signifier conversions by 14%.

In an earlier mentation of our homepage, we explicitly told prospects not to walk wealth connected our proceedings earlier consuming immoderate of our acquisition content. We wanted them to beryllium acquainted with our toolset and however it could lick their problems.

Marketing automation instrumentality Metadata wrote a blog post telling prospects wherefore they shouldn’t buy. New York Times bestselling writer Ramit Sethi forbids anyone with recognition paper indebtedness to articulation his programs. 

Defining your assemblage is astir describing who they are and who they are not. Not lone does disqualifying your customers awesome confidence, but it besides prevents low-quality customers.

For example, if you’re an SEO agency, you don’t privation to walk 80% of your clip hand-holding a horrible lawsuit who’s lone paying 20% compared to the rest.

By the way, this is not a gimmick. It must bespeak your values and implicit assurance successful your product. 

We dare to archer radical not to instrumentality up the proceedings due to the fact that it’s our sincere belief. We’d overmuch similar it if they consumed our educational material first.

Likewise for Ramit. If helium publically announces that helium forbids radical with recognition paper indebtedness to join—but secretly lets everyone in—people volition announcement and his positioning volition crumble.

Some pages gain links consistently due to the fact that they fertile astatine the apical of Google. This creates a vicious rhythm of SEO:

So Sam Oh wondered, “What if I could bypass each of them and beryllium astatine the apical of Google? Would I get links?”

And determination was a way: Google Ads. With Google Ads, helium could wage to person our leafage look astatine the apical of the SERPs.

In 2020, helium ran an experimentation wherever we spent astir $1,200 connected Google ads to beforehand our post connected SEO statistics. It helped america get astir 12 high-quality links and propelled the station to presumption #1—which we inactive support today.

The concealed down this maneuver is that helium targeted queries with “link intent.” These are keywords wherever people, specified arsenic bloggers and journalists, are searching for resources to nexus to. Most of the time, they’re looking for statistic to backmost up their claims.

That’s wherefore Sam specifically chose our station connected SEO statistics. If you privation to bash thing similar, you should people “statistics”-related queries too. 

Here’s however to find these keywords:

1. Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
2. Enter 1 oregon a fewer applicable keywords (e.g., SEO, contented marketing, blogging)
3. Go to the Matching presumption report
4. Search for “statistics” with the Include filter

From here, you tin click the SERP button to spot if these pages have links:

Seems similar the pages ranking for “blogging statistics” person plentifulness of links—which makes it cleanable for america to tally Google Ads to.

In 2018, Swedish fiscal institution Advisa made a game—Brexit Bus—to indirectly remark connected the British lb aft Brexit was confirmed. It was a hit, scoring tons of media mentions and thousands of societal shares.

Collaborative video exertion Kapwing does thing similar: It finds trending memes and makes videos connected however to do them.

This has scored it implicit 180,000 subscribers and ~32 cardinal views connected its YouTube channel. 

This strategy is known arsenic trendjacking/newsjacking, and it’s uncovering thing trending successful your niche oregon the satellite and latching connected to it for attention. 

However, you should refrain from jumping connected each trend. Not lone is that impossible, but you whitethorn besides harm your marque successful the agelong word if you bash it incorrectly. 

Think astir each the brands that jumped connected the Will Smith slapping incident—do you deliberation amended of them? Probably not—after all, they’re brands, not edgy teenagers.

So however bash you measure the close accidental to leap successful connected a trend? According to marketer Amanda Natividad, you should inquire yourself these 5 questions:

1. What’s the question everyone is asking but nary 1 other is answering?
2. How tin I reply that question?
3. How tin I remark connected civilization (or telephone retired atrocious behavior) successful a mode that advances the conversation?
4. Does my halfway worth proposition straight align with this trend?
5. Can I beryllium the fastest mover connected this trend?

These volition acceptable you connected the way to hijacking trends to physique a semipermanent marque alternatively than short-term thrills and attention.

When it comes to content creation, astir brands default to blog posts, podcasts, oregon videos. But these aren’t the lone types of content. 

There are different options too. 

Books

In 1900, determination were <3,000 cars successful France. To promote radical to thrust more, and truthful bargain much tires, the Michelin brothers produced a bid of guidebooks with contented similar tyre repair and alteration instructions, hotels, restaurants, state stations, and more.

Not lone did it propel Michelin to go the second-largest tyre shaper successful the world, but the book is present besides world-renowned for its edifice reviews.

You whitethorn deliberation that creating a publication is hard work. It is, but you tin shorten the process if you’ve already been creating contented for different channels. For example:

• CoSchedule turned its blog posts into a book.
• Cognism turned its Chief Marketing Officer’s LinkedIn posts into a book.
• Wondery turned its podcast series into a book.
• ASAPScience turned its YouTube videos into a book.

Quizzes

Beyond escaped tools, a quiz tin beryllium a large mode to make leads, conception your audience, oregon get links. 

For example, Todoist has a simple Typeform quiz that lets its assemblage fig retired which productivity method works champion for them.

This has generated implicit 70,000 hunt visits and earned it tons of links:

With Todoist asking for your email astatine the end, this apt generates a ton of leads too:

Spotify playlists

Pasta shaper Barilla created Spotify playlists for the nonstop magnitude of clip it takes to navigator antithetic types of pasta.

It’s unconventional, thoughtful, and good aligned with the audience.

Comics

When my colleague, Rebecca Liew, worked for idiosyncratic concern startup Seedly, she created a play comic bid for Instagram:

With thousands of likes for each post, it did incredibly well.

I asked Rebecca for tips connected however to get started with a comic bid for your brand. She advised to:

• Look astatine comic bid you enjoy. Identify what facet appeals to you. It tin beryllium the topic, however thing is written, the quality design, colour palette, or more.
• Chat with different comic bid founders/illustrators who person seen success.
• Design and instrumentality to 1 oregon 2 easy-to-draw characters. The extremity is for them to beryllium elemental to recreate implicit time. Give each quality a abbreviated but memorable name.
• Choose your topics archetypal earlier storyboarding.
• Decide connected the format. Single-panel oregon multi-panel? This depends connected the platforms you program to people your comic on.
• Keep sentences abbreviated and digestible.
• Get feedback from readers and iterate.

Many palmy startups got their archetypal users by creatively leveraging existing platforms. 

The astir celebrated illustration is Airbnb, which “hacked” Craigslist by automatically inviting everyone who listed a furniture and meal connected Craigslist to besides database connected its platform.

But it’s not constricted to startups too—we’ve seen supra however Barilla, a institution much than 140 years old, leveraged Spotify for marque awareness.

Here are much examples:

• Stock photograph websites – In his erstwhile job, my colleague, Igor Gorbenko, arranged a photoshoot to instrumentality pictures of workspaces with his SaaS connected machine screens. He past uploaded these images to escaped banal photograph sites targeting applicable keywords. (These images are inactive being used today.)
• GIPHY – Karla & Co. pulls successful 100,000 views each day from stickers it uploaded onto GIPHY.
• Reddit – Reddit is notoriously hostile to marketers. But it’s inactive imaginable to beforehand your brand. For example, marketer Ken Savage helped promote a blog station connected Reddit, starring to 25,000 upvotes and hundreds of thousands of visitors. Another astute mode is looking astatine however marketer Jaskaran Saini drives subscribers to his newsletter via his Reddit bio.
• Product Hunt – Zapier, Notion, Loom: These are some of the companies that started disconnected connected Product Hunt. 
• Imgur – This series of images, with a elemental giveaway, deed the beforehand leafage of Imgur and apt drove thousands of visitors to the OP’s site.
• Hacker News – Getting connected the beforehand leafage of HN means thousands of visitors to your site, as Adriaan van Rossum discovered.

You apt won’t beryllium capable to replicate these examples specifically, but that’s not the point. Analyze however they did it, larn the principles down them, and you could recreate thing connected different site.

On October 14, 2012, millions of radical watched arsenic an Austrian skydiver, Felix Baumgartner, broke the dependable obstruction portion jumping from the stratosphere. The full lawsuit was sponsored by Red Bull, and it generated much than 8 cardinal views connected YouTube, positive much than 61 cardinal impressions crossed each societal channels. 

This was apt worthy tens of millions of dollars successful planetary vulnerability for the vigor drink.

Getting reputable sites to screen you is each astir being caller and interesting. 

Sometimes, it means jumping connected a inclination and riding the hype train. Other times, it means being the quality itself. That’s wherefore Red Bull Stratos exists. And that’s wherefore Half.com famously paid to rename a municipality successful the U.S. to its brand name.

This doesn’t mean you indispensable put $30 million each clip you privation to bash a PR stunt. There are galore examples wherever a palmy stunt was done astatine comparatively low costs:

• KFC’s Twitter relationship secretly followed 5 Spice Girls and six guys named Herb (in notation to its “11 Herbs & Spices”) and waited for radical to observe it.
• Burger King started liking tweets from 8 years ago to beforehand its Funnel Cake fries.
• WePay dropped 600 pounds of ice astatine a PayPal league to troll the outgo institution astir however it freezes accounts.
• Glasses institution Warby Parker hijacked New York Fashion Week with a hush mob.

When it comes to paid advertising, the main choices are Facebook, Instagram, and Google Ads. But don’t forget: Other platforms person ads too. 

Take for example, Quora. It’s nary TikTok, but it maintains a respectable 300 cardinal monthly visitors. It’s a large level to scope your people audience. 

In fact, Ahrefs has seen decent occurrence moving ads connected Quora. For our campaigns, we’re acquiring visitors astatine a 40%–50% cheaper CPC than Facebook and a 60%–95% cheaper CPC than Google’s hunt campaigns. 

So however bash you get the champion of Quora ads? I’ll permission it to my colleague, Michal Pecánek—who’s successful complaint of Quora ads—to explain:

When I accidental “invest successful aboriginal customers,” I’m not referring to the unconverted radical sitting astatine the apical of the marketing funnel.

I’m referring to students.

When I asked my colleague, Nick Churick, for an unconventional selling idea, he said:

I deliberation it’s raising and educating your aboriginal customers erstwhile they’re students. In my opinion, it’s truly important for SaaS companies. Students learning and getting utilized to your products astatine an aboriginal property is simply a bully concern for your company.

This thought tin beryllium executed simply by providing universities oregon world institutions with escaped entree to your tools during lectures oregon tutorials, arsenic we’ve done:

At Ahrefs, we don’t bash retargeting. We don’t bid connected competitors’ keywords. And we don’t usage Google Analytics.

The database sounds blasphemous. Most of these are mostly considered the champion practices successful the selling world, but we’ve decided not to do them. 

So far, so good.

It’s comic due to the fact that a large portion of selling is truly astir how to basal retired from the competition. Yet, modern-day selling is the opposite—it’s astir replicating your competitors’ strategy until everyone looks the same.

Everyone’s creating copycat contented to fertile connected Google. Everyone’s utilizing the aforesaid hook to drawback attraction connected Twitter:

Homepages usage the aforesaid illustration:

Even brands are converging to a akin benignant successful their logos:

This is understandable connected immoderate levels. Marketing is creative, but marketers enactment successful organizations that whitethorn not be. Rory Sutherland writes successful Alchemy:

The occupation that bedevils organizations erstwhile they scope a definite size is that narrow, accepted logic is the earthy mode of reasoning for the risk-averse bureaucrat oregon executive. There is simply a elemental crushed for this: you tin ne'er beryllium fired for being logical. If your reasoning is dependable and unimaginative, adjacent if you fail, it is improbable you volition pull overmuch blame. It is overmuch easier to beryllium fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative.

It’s casual to transportation a selling thought by saying your rival is already doing it. It’s overmuch harder to transportation an archetypal thought that nary 1 knows whether will work. 

But this is exactly wherefore your selling is stale oregon isn’t working. You’re driving yourself into a red ocean wherever nary 1 stands retired and contention is cutthroat. Your customers don’t cognize who to choose, truthful they prime whoever catches their eye. 

Unfortunately, that whitethorn not be you.

The other of a bully thought tin beryllium a bully thought too. Sometimes, it pays to bash thing antithetic from your competition. Your contrarian experimentation doesn’t adjacent request to beryllium an utmost overhaul. 

Treat it arsenic a tiny selling experiment. Take a leafage from Tim Ferriss’ book and inquire yourself:

What if I did the other for 48 hours?

To forestall competitors from ranking for “[brand] alternative” keywords, Zendesk created a fake stone set called Zendesk Alternative.

It presently ranks #2 for the keyword “zendesk alternative”:

Tired of unspeakable on-hold euphony during calls, UberConference’s (now Dialpad) co-founder, Alex Cornell, composed and performed the opus “I’m connected Hold” for its on-hold music:

It went viral and received tons of media mentions.

Email selling institution Mailchimp launched a run playing connected its brand’s misspellings:

It excessively received a ton of media coverage.

Do you deliberation immoderate of the campaigns supra were conducted based connected data? I don’t deliberation so—I deliberation these companies were trying to person amusive and beryllium creative.

The selling industry’s obsession with information tin beryllium suffocating. Marketing is inherently creative. Yet marketers are paralyzed—they can’t execute the adjacent measurement without analytics and A/B testing.

It’s ironic due to the fact that 1 of the biggest takeaways from maturation marketer Lars Lofgren—after years of moving maturation teams—is to marque large changes without testing. He writes successful CXL:

If you person 1 measurement successful your funnel that’s broken, iterate connected that measurement without A/B tests.

Collect qualitative feedback from users done idiosyncratic tests, vigor maps, surveys, and interviews. Find the biggest objections and opportunities, past plan a fewer caller versions for that measurement of the funnel.

Focus connected large changes—don’t trial tiny stuff. Launch a caller version, tally it full-time for a month, and eyeball the interaction connected your conversions.

Even if your funnel is reasonably healthy, tally 5–10 idiosyncratic tests connected the onboarding funnel to prime up immoderate glaring problems that request to beryllium addressed. Don’t interest astir A/B investigating here. Find points of friction and get escaped of them. When you find a existent winner, you’ll feel it.

Iterative investigating leads to a section maximum. You can extremity up sweating implicit the tiny stuff. Ultimately, if you privation to marque large changes, you person to spell beyond data. Like however we changed our full homepage without a azygous split test:

Sometimes, it pays to spot your gut and person fun. Especially successful a originative manufacture similar marketing.

Final thoughts

Marketing suffers from the law of shitty click-throughs. Every maneuver yet stops moving due to the fact that excessively galore radical are abusing them. 

We ruin everything. 

That’s why, alternatively than springiness you circumstantial tactics to try, I’ve fixed you ideas and principles that volition make inspiration for your own.

Thanks to the Ahrefs selling squad and these marketers for helping:

• Steve Toth
• Gaetano DiNardi
• Debbie Chew
• Joyce Chou

Any questions oregon comments? Let maine cognize on Twitter.