Rather than talking about all the best marketing tricks that you could use to bring more awareness to your brand and bring more leads to your sales pipeline, let’s talk about bad advice that marketers often receive.
After years of experience in digital marketing, it’s time to call out hacks that create more problems than solutions.
Ask for as much information as possible
A lot of marketers suggest you create long contact forms for your audience to give you a vast amount of information. You can then use that information to segment your audience and target them better, in theory.
The only thing is, this doesn’t work. Once people see long forms asking for too much private information, they tend to give up and look for a different brand to sign up with. Don’t ask your users for a phone number in order to subscribe to a newsletter list and expect them to give it willingly.
We understand that you want to gather insights on your audience, and contact them on multiple platforms in order to raise your chances of converting them, but being too pushy will only drive them away.
The same goes for free trials that ask for payment information. Research shows that the act of paying disrupts the pleasure of an experience and that the more obvious or transparent the payment is, the less we enjoy making purchases and the more likely we might be to back out.
Therefore, if you want people to sign up for your free trial and fall in love with your service, don’t ask them for credit card information in order to trick them into a subscription.
While we’re on the subject of forms and analyzing their performance, one thing that always ends up in the mix is Google Tag Manager. Its biggest selling power is that it’s a tool made specifically for marketers and lets them have all the control without having to know how to code.
The truth is, GTM is not the easiest tool to use if you don’t have any technical expertise and furthermore, the cons outway the pros, since using the tool will hinder user experience by slowing down the site noticeably.
What to do instead
Ask your audience for their name and email address and use the information from your Google, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn analytics for further details on the habits, wants and needs of your potential clients.
Instead of installing Google Tag Manager, work with a developer that can help you implement Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel and create different funnels for segmenting your audience that can be helpful in your future marketing campaigns. Especially if you rely on affiliate marketing to bring in new leads, you should bring outside help.
Use social media only to promote a big launch
This one really grinds our gears. If you’re going to spend months on planning, developing and crafting your products and services, only to make a single Instagram post about it once it’s out then what’s the point?
Your social media post should be a part of the whole marketing strategy, not just an afterthought. If you only use social media to promote your products and services, you’re not really giving your audience a reason to follow you.
What to do instead
Make behind-the-scenes content that teases new releases and answer fan questions about your future products. Overall, you should create a relationship with your audience that isn’t exclusively rooted in you trying to get them to buy something from you.
Furthermore, if you’re having trouble finding your audience, give up on trying to attract them to follow you on every social media platform and focus on the one they already spend time on and forge communities on.
Social media behavioral segmentation will allow you to further see exactly how each stage of any campaign is providing a positive response and consequently, improved ROI.
If Reddit and Twitter are where your people are, go to them and focus on creative native content for those platforms instead of reposting the same type of content on every social media you can get your hands on. For this you can use social media management tools which curate your social media content every time a post is republished.
Jump on every trend
Just because your competitors struck gold with a viral video, doesn’t mean you need to scrape a similar one in a day. Not every trend is going to work for you and that’s ok.
This is especially true for social media trends that are exclusively for people and not brands. If your feed is full of people talking about a social injustice issue, don’t use the hashtag to promote yourself.
Source: Lightspan digital
What to do instead
Remember what your mother said – If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. You don’t have to voice your opinion on every subject. It’s always great to show your support for the disenfranchised, but don’t go overboard.
Conclusion
As long as you remember to always put user experience in front of marketing benefits, you’re on the right path. You don’t need a huge amount of information about your audience, you need to focus on using the ones you have to create a clear picture of your buyer persona.
