Breaking the Marketing Mold: Christina Reckard On 5 Innovative & Non Traditional Marketing Strategies That Can Engage Audiences Like Never Before
An Interview With Chad Silverstein
Voice Search Optimization — We are all having more conversations with Siri and Alexa these days than with some of our own family members. Optimizing the voice search for your brand is becoming more and more important in how we live our day to day lives.
Traditional marketing methods are no longer sufficient in today’s dynamic and fast-evolving market. To truly engage and captivate audiences, businesses need to think outside the box and adopt innovative and non-traditional marketing strategies. What are these strategies, and how can they transform audience engagement? I had the pleasure of interviewing Christina Reckard.
As the Vice President of Marketing for Southwestern Family of Companies, Christina leads all aspects of marketing for more than 20 member businesses in a variety of industries and multiple countries. She is also President of Pat Summitt Leadership Group providing the time-tested life and leadership principles of the legendary basketball coach to a new generation of leaders. Christina is a progressive marketing professional with more than 15 years of experience in strategic marketing and ecommerce and more than 20 years in the broadcast and music industries.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! To start, could you share when and how you got started in marketing?
My path into marketing was not a straight one. I actually started out as a professional singer and did that for many years before moving to Nashville to be a part of the music industry. I landed a job in sales at a record label and realized that I really needed a creative outlet, not just a job. I was able to use my music expertise and my knowledge of the market trends from my time in sales to transition into marketing, and I’ve never looked back. I found that the same creative forces that are at play in being a musician also power new approaches to marketing strategy.
What has been the biggest shift in the marketing industry and can you give us an example of how it impacted you?
Not to date myself, but when I started out in marketing, we were still using primarily direct mail, radio, tv, and print media to get our message out to the world. Very quickly thereafter, I had to shift focus to email marketing, websites and SEO, and social media. Now our world is so segmented in how we receive information, you can be much more targeted, but you also have to be much more diverse in your approach. Everyone listens to different podcasts, and very niche websites, so you really need to dig in and know your audience. And now with the advent of AI, we are only beginning to understand how that is going to change the way we market.
Can you explain why it’s essential for businesses to break away from traditional marketing and embrace new strategies?
You must continue to grow in the world that is marketing, or you will become irrelevant. We no longer watch the same three networks and read the local newspaper. Many times, the social media platform that you used to build your business is all but nonexistent in just a few years or its appeal and its audience has shifted. Even if you use the same channels to reach your audience, the algorithm can change overnight and completely diminish your reach. We always need to be finding new ways to break through the noise in order to get our message across to our desired market.
Could you share and briefly explain the first major change you made to break the trend of traditional marketing that was not so common?
One of the first that comes to mind was a user-generated content campaign I did before that was commonplace. I was working for a company that helped people change the way they handled their money and to become debt free. We had them submit their stories along with photos or video and the submissions auto populated on our website with a watermark of our brand on their images. We encouraged them to share their story once it was submitted and this created a word-of-mouth style campaign for our brand. We also implemented a ticker that represented the number of lives changed by our products at the top of the site to demonstrate the vast reach of the brand.
What specific results did you see after implementing this change?
The campaign really helped to spread the word about a program that had plateaued a bit in popularity and helped to bring it to an entirely new audience. The stories also provided social proof to potential customers who visited the site and helped them to feel a part of something bigger than themselves. If you can help someone to identify with your brand on that level, it goes beyond a purchase and moves to advocacy.
How do you ensure that these new marketing strategies resonate with your target audience?
Like any new marketing strategy, no matter the confidence or the research, you really need to test the new approach with your target audience. Even if the tactic is a good one, the actual implementation may be off and need to be tweaked or optimized.
Can you share an example of something you tried that didn’t deliver expected results or ended up becoming a financial burden, and what you learned from that experience?
In one of my former roles, we tried to create an “organic movement” of sorts. We had launched a big event to stir up excitement, and the follow up communications and social campaigns were designed to create a virtual “joining” affect. It was more about selling an idea or ideology than a product. We implemented an interactive map so you could see everyone that was joining the cause. While it did garner some participation, the results were not what we anticipated. What I learned from the experience is that while we often try, forcing something to be “viral” is not always a winning strategy. Being authentic in your marketing efforts and really listening to what your audience wants from you is truly the key to success.
Great. Now, let’s dive into the heart of our interview. Could you list “5 Innovative & Non-Traditional Marketing Strategies That Can Engage Audiences Like Never Before”?
1. Interactive Content or Tools — Building tools or quizzes is one of the best ways to get an audience to engage and to freely give you permission to market to them. Also, based on the content, you will learn a great deal about where they are in the buying process. If you create an interactive car buying guide or a car financing calculator for example, you have narrowed in on a very specific target audience at just the right time.
2. Experiential Marketing — Creating some sort of immersive experience or unique environment attached to your brand that goes beyond the expected is a great way to attach more emotion to how people interact with your company. This can also be through the use of augmented reality. For example, websites that sell furniture now allow you to visualize the piece in your home before you’ve even purchased it.
3. Unusual Partnerships — Forming an unusual partnership can help break through the cacophony of ads. For example, Tinder partnered with Ford. You could swipe right to win an all-expenses paid date and to be featured in a car commercial. Arby’s partnered with Old Spice to create a limited edition “meat sweat” deodorant. These tactics cannot be your whole marketing strategy, but unexpected partnerships can help to shake things up.
4. Voice Search Optimization — We are all having more conversations with Siri and Alexa these days than with some of our own family members. Optimizing the voice search for your brand is becoming more and more important in how we live our day to day lives.
5. Micro-Moments and Ephemeral Marketing — Creating bite-sized, mini pieces of content delivered right when someone is making a decision or in the middle of the buying cycle is highly effective. This also includes the creation of content that disappears relatively quickly like Snapchat, TikTok or Instagram Stories. This type of content increases brand engagement and can create a scarcity mentality and a fear of missing out.
What challenges might companies face when transitioning away from traditional marketing strategies, and how can they overcome them?
The biggest obstacle is usually buy-in. Convincing stakeholders to invest in a totally new idea can be challenging. Also, new efforts are often more difficult to track if they are truly out of the box, so proving ROI can be more of an undertaking. The best way I have found to overcome these types of obstacles by testing. Find a way to prototype the idea in advance to get an idea of how it will work to scale.
How do you measure the success and ROI of these new marketing strategies?
As I mentioned previously, measuring the ROI of new initiatives can be a challenge. The more innovative the idea, the more difficult to measure. However, we always find a way. If you are doing something that is more of a one-time event, even if you do not have direct tracking, you can monitor any increases over your benchmark data. With the resurgence of QR codes during Covid, many digital activities can be tracked with QR code, tracking links or other means to measure success. We also need to get comfortable as marketers with indirect measurements. In the early days of advertising, we did not have the luxury of tracking behaviors through the entire buying cycle. We can gather enough information from our environment to make inferences around impact even if we don’t have that direct link.
Looking forward, how do you see the role of innovative marketing evolving in the next 5–10 years?
I think it is hard to really predict the future of marketing these days. AI and automation are going to play an increasingly crucial role in marketing, both in strategy and implementation. The ability to create more customized experiences and more detailed and nuanced data analysis is going to be a game-changer. I believe the trend towards value-based marketing will continue as well. As the technology is able to create more and more niche experiences tailored to our individual needs, the marketing messaging will get more and more targeted to someone’s personal identity and the product or service fits their personal view of the world. I also believe emerging technologies such as augmented and virtual reality will begin to find their way into the day-to-day marketing funnel. If the brands you associate with are part of your personal identity, you will be more willing to allow them into your home in a more pervasive way like what we’ve seen with smart home devices.
What advice would you give to business leaders who are hesitant to move away from traditional marketing methods?
The biggest risk in business is inaction. Waiting for your business model to break is too late. Technological advances are “moving our cheese” and we need to be able to adapt to those changes in real time. Audiences no longer want to be marketed to; they want to interact with personas and brands that they can personally relate to. With those shifts, we cannot continue to market in the same way we have and expect to keep pace.
Can you share any upcoming initiatives or plans you have for further innovating your marketing strategies?
The most fun part of my role is getting to interact with many different businesses in diverse industries from around the world — so there is always something new in the works. Because of that high level of change, we are always working on the next product launch or finding that new way to interact with our audiences. So more to come.
How can our readers follow your work and learn more about your approaches to modern marketing?
You can follow me on LinkedIn @christinareckard and you can always follow our new initiatives at Southwestern.com.
This was great. Thank you so much for the time you spent sharing with us.
About the Interviewer: Chad Silverstein, a seasoned entrepreneur with over two decades of experience as the Founder and CEO of multiple companies. He launched Choice Recovery, Inc., a healthcare collection agency, while going to The Ohio State University, His team earned national recognition, twice being ranked as the #1 business to work for in Central Ohio. In 2018, Chad launched [re]start, a career development platform connecting thousands of individuals in collections with meaningful employment opportunities, He sold Choice Recovery on his 25th anniversary and in 2023, sold the majority interest in [re]start so he can focus his transition to Built to Lead as an Executive Leadership Coach. Learn more at www.chadsilverstein.com
Breaking the Marketing Mold: Christina Reckard On 5 Innovative & Non Traditional Marketing… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.