As marketing and technologies change at a rapid rate, a company’s marketing strategy must be regularly updated to meet current trends. When reviewing your practices, in terms of how well they serve your company’s strategy, vision and goals, take a good look at your marketing mix itself.
Do your tactics suit your target market? Are they still relevant for the upcoming period? There are a number of practices that are slipping into marketing oblivion and for good reason.
Don’t turn content into a novel!
In order to ensure your target audience is reading your content, you must provide them with added value. No one wants to read long, self-promotion articles, or browse content-rich web pages.
According to statistics, people have an 8 seconds attention span. Analyze your bounce rate metrics and the time spent on your pages against the length of the content. Are users spending enough time on the page to read what is written? If not, your content is driving them away.
Make sure to create a content strategy that promotes brand awareness while engaging your target audience, without overwhelming them with novel-worthy word counts.
Don’t overuse keywords and buzzwords!
One of the primary goals of content creation is search engine optimization. Keywords can certainly increase exposure, but over-saturating your content with them is counterproductive. It turns away your valuable readers.
The same is true for whatever buzzword is currently trending in your industry. Use keywords and buzzwords sparingly, always keeping the goal of your content creation efforts in mind.
Plan your ads carefully!
The average click-through rates on banner ads are only 0.05%. Ad blocking program usage grew 30% in 2016, with 29% of users citing interruptions as their key motivation for using these programs.
Choose your display advertising carefully, and respect your audience’s right to an interruption-free browsing experience. Perform an audit to find out where your followers and target audience are, and focus your display advertising efforts on social media ads. Invest in Adwords and SEO to promote click-through rates, and keep intrusive advertising to a minimum.
Don’t always be ‘On’!
Social media is one of the leading marketing channels for reaching your targeted audience. Revenues from social media advertising are projected to increase by 194% in 2018. Yet, despite the importance of investing time and resources in social media efforts, overextending yourself on social won’t work out in your favor.
Posts should be entertaining or of specific interest to the reader. Your aim? To generate comments and shares. Avoid continually self-promoting and advertising your products, and commit to creating relationships and working towards brand awareness.
Personalization IS important!
Automated email campaigns, when done correctly, are effective, with comparably high click-through rates. When these emails are overly standardized and impersonal, however, recipients are likely to delete them without even opening the mail.
It’s important to adapt the content to fit the target. Personalize messages with the contact’s names and tailor the content of the message itself.
Don’t ignore your mobile audience!
The majority of emails are opened on a mobile device. If you haven’t yet optimized your websites and emails for mobile, there is clearly no time like the present to do so, thereby expanding your reach and improving the overall effectiveness of your marketing efforts.