5 Marketing Tactics You Should Stop Doing
Marketing is an evolving industry. It evolves because people’s tastes and preferences and their buying behavior evolve. It evolves because the media on which it’s done evolves as well. It evolves because the whole commercial sphere within which it operates is also evolving.
As changes occur, certain things that were once ubiquitous have become outdated. One can see drastic changes on digital media. With these changes came the death of certain practices that were once common, if not necessary.
- Too much link building. That link building is dead is an exaggeration. But marketers, even SEOs, have either minimized link building or abandoned it completely. One of the reasons marketers are doing away with generating backlinks is the lowering efficiency. It takes a lot of time and energy to build quality links, but the time you devoted in it can well be used for other activities with a much more lasting effect — for instance, writing a great article that people will share around.
- Keyword stuffing. Only silly SEOs would do this now. Eight years ago, no one thought about the pitfalls of overzealous keyword use. That was when search engines still computed the relevance of a page for a particular keyword based on how many times it appears on that page. It was effective until everyone became concerned with the quality of stuff that appears in the search results.
- Too much SEO. Investing most, if not all, of your marketing budget on SEO is a deleterious move. Again, there was a time when the only thing that seemed to matter was getting your site ranked by search engines on the first page. Companies would hire specialists, who would do anything to put their sites on page one of the SERPs. Optimizing your website for search engines is not in itself bad. Who doesn’t want their pages to be visible to the search engines and users? What’s awful is when you disregard user experience when implementing SEO. Get your website ranked by search engines. But write to your readers! Search engines don’t put money into your bank. Humans do.
- Keeping an eye on the follower count. It’s easy to be caught up in the numbers. Numbers are attractive. It’s easy to think that having three hundred thousand followers is better than having thirty thousand. However, follower counts don’t tell the entire story. Having a million followers isn’t everything. There are other factors that determine the strength of social media pages. Having a thousand engaged audience is much better than having a hundred thousand who doesn’t care about your brand.
- Ignoring the data. Business is kind of a math game. You have to get back to the sheets, tables, and graphs and see where you’re headed. Measuring the effectiveness of your strategies allows you to determine what’s working and what tactics you have to abandon or change. As we always say, business is fickle. It’s at the mercy of so many factors interacting in unpredictable ways. Trends can only show so much. It’s you who has to decide whether marketing formulas are working for you or not.
