Marketing is possibly the hardest part of running a daily deal website. There are two parts to marketing a daily deal website: 1) sourcing for merchants/deals and 2) getting subscribers and social media followers in order to build traffic. A great deal of the daily deal sites that we host are operated by owners who are aware that differentiating themselves from Groupon and LivingSocial is a business priority – and they are right. Marketing may be a good place to start differentiating.

The key idea that I am putting forth in this article is to market through channels that are less utilized by your established competition. The most obvious tactic is to use offline marketing more where online marketing has been used to death, and vice-versa. In other words, start thinking of ways to use offline marketing to reach your end consumers and online marketing to reach your merchant suppliers.

Using offline marketing tactics with your end consumers make sense, because, at any given time, a bigger proportion of them are likely to be at eateries, supermarkets, shopping malls, the streets, bars, etc. than behind a computer burning hours online. The product that you are selling is to be consumed offline anyway (by the way, the “product” is the voucher, not the underlying goods or services). So going directly to them may be an opportunity to see what they are like in real life, so that you can source for deals based on their consumption patterns. Heck, you can even talk to them to understand what they are like. That is something valuable that online marketing cannot offer.

Here are some offline marketing tactics that you can use with end consumers: http://www.bootstrappingblog.com/50-guerrilla-marketing-tactics-you-should-be-using/.

As for online marketing with merchant suppliers, one possible way to do it is to put up a page on your daily deal website that shows off your past successes in bringing in customers through the door by the dozens as well as the burgeoning size of your subscriber list. Selling to merchants is a B2B affair, thus ROI marketing needs to be your core strategy. You can then promote your page in forums in which your merchants participate, which would be easy to identify if you begin with a niche. If you do not begin with a niche, you are possibly committing a fatal mistake already.

What if you are new and you do not have past success stories on which to leverage (yet)? There is no silver bullet here, but working from within your current network may be a good idea. Offering a limited-time substantial discount may be another, sprinkled with the sweet promise that your subscriber base is “healthily growing.” Call me radical, but being a decent human being and asking nicely for a pilot deal may also be a viable strategy to employ.

As the saying goes, “marketing is a tax you pay for being unexceptional.” The fact is that marketing becomes a whole lot easier when you start with a compelling idea that it sells itself, i.e. niche targeting. When you claim to focus only on a certain geographical area, interest group, age group, or gender group, people within that niche feel special and are more likely to be captivated by your basic premise. The belief that niches are limiting is false and silly – nothing stops you from leveraging upon the success within your initial niche to enter another niche market.

Ultimately, marketing tactics may allow people to know about your business; getting people to care about it, however, starts earlier – much earlier. It begins at the conception phase of your business.

Direct marketing remains a popular channel for many businesses to reach potential customers. Traditionally, direct marketing on its own is used to increase awareness, arouse interest, and drive action. For those who are familiar with the AIDA framework, direct marketing is used to achieve all of the four stages of AIDA: Action, Interest, Desire, and Action. Despite claims that direct marketing is still as effective as before (e.g. here), what we are seeing is that, particularly for high-ticket purchases, direct marketing is increasingly losing its ability to drive action or arouse an interest to buy. These days, the value of direct marketing largely lies in its ability to build awareness.

The reality today is that the emergence of social media and search engines has allowed consumers easy and free access to a wealth of information about brands and products in the market. Consumers almost always want to make an informed purchase decision, and information from unbiased third parties now form an indispensable component in consumer research. In fact, information from other consumers who have had experiences with the product, brand, or company in question is considered more trustworthy and useful than information from the company itself. The only valuable information that can be obtained from the company itself is objective information, which the company is in a position to provide. Marketing is about facts and not opinions after all.

Direct marketing is nonetheless still useful in increasing awareness, because awareness is neutral. People either have or have not heard of your products, services, brand, or company. Consumers are unlikely to shut out new or unfamiliar offerings from their windows of consideration, since consumers love having a choice as well. However, generating awareness is only a small part of effective marketing. Awareness about a brand is ultimately knowledge of the existence of a certain offering. The merits of said offering have to be evaluated and verified with reference to the reviews, opinions, and experiences of others who have personally tried the offering.

A potentially effective strategy to reach new customers is to use direct marketing in concert with word-of-mouth marketing. Direct marketing captures attention; word-of-mouth marketing converts that attention into desire and action to buy. Ultimately, real sales are driven by what others say about you, not what you say about yourself.