Marketing is the one area that many business owners love to hate. Though continuously promoting your company is absolutely necessary to growing it and bringing in more sales, coming up with marketing strategies that work can be a difficult process to master, particularly because this area is constantly changing.

What worked well yesterday—like placing ads in a newspaper or on the radio—aren’t necessarily as effective in today’s digital world where people tend to spend more time on their smartphones, tablets, and computers than with print publications and live radio broadcasts have largely been replaced by pre-recorded podcasts.

So, what can you do to capitalize on these changes and, ultimately, improve your marketing results? Here are a few strategies to consider.

Harness the Power of Innovation

While it may be tempting to use only tried-and-true marketing methods, being the first to implement a new marketing strategy can often put you steps ahead of your competitors. But this requires being getting your team to be a little innovative.

One relatively easy way to do this is to encourage your staff to share any new ideas that they think would catch your target audience’s attention. You can also organize them with an innovation management platform as this type of platform enables you to record new marketing ideas, decide which ones to implement, and analyze their results. It literally takes you through the entire process.

Focus on Creating Relationships versus Making Sales

No one likes to be sold to all of the time. Even if you are in love with a company and the products and services it offers, if every time they reach out to you they’re asking you to spend your hard-earned money, you’ll likely get annoyed and decide to take your business elsewhere. And that’s the last thing you want to do to your customer base.

Instead, you’ll get further ahead if you set sales aside a bit and focus mainly on creating and strengthening your relationship with your consumer, which you can do by improving customer service. A few ways to create a top-notch customer service department include employing actual paying customers who are strong advocates for your brand, challenging staff to view obstacles as opportunities, and truly listening when customers share dissatisfaction with your business so you can get to (and fix) the problem area.

Develop a Multi-Level Marketing Campaign

The more lines you have in the water, the more fish you’re likely to catch. The same is true with marketing. The more methods you use to reach out to your target market, the more likely is is you’ll hook them in.

In fact, developing a multi-level marketing campaign that utilizes a variety of platforms can cause customers to spend four times more than they normally would. This alone makes this strategy worth considering, promoting your company on social media sites, via email, and by text, for instance, as all of these options cost very little, if anything at all, yet still net great results.

Try one or try them all. Maybe you’ll find you love marketing after all.