The internet is full of the worst marketing advice. You can’t help it when 18-year-olds come in and become consultants. The bigger problem is when you follow these pieces of worst marketing advice and follow along.
You can’t help it when people write/say/do whatever they want to further their agenda.
It’s impossible to stay away from this terrible advice for marketing. And businesses are suffering for it.
Everyday.
Knowingly or unknowingly, chances are that you’re following this terrible advice to this day. Heck, I can even bet that you actually think that these so-called nuggets are the right thing to do.
Here are some of the worst marketing advice I’ve heard over the years:
Write well [Like Stephen King?]
It was a thought that just flowed from writing books, publishing magazines, and newspapers right onto the web.
Because writing well for all of those previously mentioned media requires excellent research & writing skills it so happens that everybody has this frame of mind for writing blogs as well.
The focus on English grammar, spectacularly clever writing, or inspiring writing is good; but that shouldn’t be your only focus.
Don’t diss me yet. Those are all important, but you are missing the point.
Even if your name is CNN, Huffington post, or Kiplinger, you miss the point.
You are writing for the web. The average reading level of a web user is around 7 to 8 grade.
What good would it get you to write in spectacular English with fancy words that nobody can understand?
Why are you focusing on grammar when your intent is to actually get traffic leads and sales?
Why do you hire writers who are on the level of writing journalistic pieces or those who authored books to write for your blog when all that was needed was someone who can research well and write good blog posts that get you traffic, leads, and sales?
Where did this nonsense come from? When will you stop pretending like you are on the line for a Pulitzer?
Write well, yes.
But don’t just hire “writers”; hire marketers who can write and know how to convert readers into leads and customers.
Be everywhere on social media
Chances are that you were told by some social marketing agency or a social media manager that you should be on absolutely every social media network out there.
And that’s terrible marketing advice for your business.
You only need to focus on social networks that bring results for your business.
This is where the need for your Ideal Customer Persona (ICP) comes kicking in.
Unless you know who your products, services, and brand is positioned for, you have no idea which social media network to be on.
I sell digital marketing courses, marketing services, and some more. Do you think I have a way to make my presence felt on TikTok?
Even after you did consider what social media networks are perfect for your business and might have potential for your sales and leads, You would still need to have data visualisation, analytics, attribution to ensure that you know exactly which social media network is actually care giving you the results you seek.
Share About Products & Services on Social Media [Always. At Any Cost]
Earlier, I have written about how you need to use social media for your business. I also wrote that you can use social media for social proof, generating traffic, generating leads and making sales happen.
All of that is true.
Just that it won’t work the way you expected to.It might sound a little counter intuitive for businesses that are used to working with traditional ways of marketing, but social media demands That you focus on people first and your business next.
You need to connect, you need to give, you need to help, you need to show generosity and kindness, and you need to show that you are there even before you think of putting out your products and services for people to take notice.
This Is How SEO is Done [ Still Stuck In the 90s?]
Search marketing happens to be powerful.
Several businesses do great to show up on search pages for key phrases they have something to do with. Some of the best examples of SEO and content marketing success did not achieve SEO success with fancy tricks and techniques.
The best SEO success stories invest a lot of time, effort, and resources in creating content that’s inspiring, problem-solving, and complete. They followed a publishing velocity for years.
Publishing velocity — which means publishing content with a determined pace (and never stopping) is the number one SEO Strategy.
By the way, SEO is not about just backlinks, SEO audits, Keyword research, link management, begging people for links, and all the other fancy tricks that people do.
Good as you can never be possible without good content period.
Use whatever powerful SEO tools you want for SEO but you are never getting there without content.
Use Marketing Automation. It’s Makes Marketing Easier
Using marketing automation is a fantastic way to ease your business processes, make things more efficient, and it helps you achieve goals faster and in a much more synchronised manner. But none of that means that marketing is easier by any standard.
Yes, there are more marketing automation tools than you care to count. Yet, Marketing is never easy.
Your business is not going to the moon just because you started using marketing automation.
That marketing automation makes is that it helps to simplify and automate certain parts of your business or marketing to be specific. It helps you offload some of the work that you would normally do for spending time ( it’s a precious resource).
Further, some of the marketing tech now use artificial intelligence to try and make things easier for you and to help you launch campaigns faster.
You could automate lead generation, landing pages, ads, creatives, bulk upload of creatives, social media management, analytics, email marketing, and a lot more.
None of this means that you would take your hands off the wheel.
You still have leads to nurture, you still have to be on social media, you still have to build a personal brand, and you still have to do a lot more for your business.
As business owners, you’d have to plan, execute, stay on top of your marketing campaigns, keep an eye out for analytics, and ensure that everything you are doing is working the way you expect it to.
Launch Paid advertising. It’s easier & faster
Launch ads. Make money — one of the worst pieces of advice that I see is that every small business is now being managed to do paid advertising. Don’t get me wrong: I actually do paid advertising courses and I teach business owners and how to do per advertising is better.
What I mean to say is that paid advertising is not easy, nor is it fast, nor is it cheap.
You really underestimate the work that it goes into paid advertising.
Working backwards from your ideal customer persona, choosing the right platforms to advertise on, creating ads, creating ad copy, creating graphics for ads, creating matching landing pages, making sure that those landing pages also have variants so that you can do A/B testing simultaneously.
These are some of those tasks and most agencies freelancers and even in-house team is don’t do.
On top of A/B testing, you still have to do bidding optimization, bidding control, negative keyword list management, audience management, and more.
The running you need to still ensure that you have proper analytics, data visualization, and attribution set up.
This while your money is being spent.
Can you handle it?
Read more:
Best analytics tools For Business
Retargeting is for busy websites
I actually overheard a PPC Agency owner tell a small business owner that re-targeting is not appropriate for them because their audience is way too small for the targeting.
That’s terrible retargeting advice.
The fact that over 80% of the visitors don’t do anything that is worthwhile for your business while they are on your side applies to every single business out there.
Retargeting has nothing to do with the size of the audiences; rather it has to do a lot with how you manage your audiences.
It’s true that you have to actually have audiences to even begin retargeting, and you would need to have an audience even if you don’t intend to do the targeting right away.
Video is Expensive
You already know that video is big. I won’t bore you with video stats.
Chances are that you aren’t doing video (because I understand. I didn’t do it for a lon time, and I still struggle with it.
I am camera shy, I struggle with imposter syndrome, and I have logistics issues as well.
If you go and talk to a video production agency who have a reputation for creating stunning looking videos, they will tell you that video is expensive and that you would need to invest $XXXXX dollars to ensure that your videos are slick and you can launch the next Netflix.
But you are not nice and you’re not Netflix.
There are several free video tools available today that you could use for creating videos to start making an impact for your business.
There are video prospecting tools for sales, video tools for marketing, and to help make video ads for PPC campaigns. There are video tools to help you record screen share videos, tools for live streaming, and more.
Scruffy looking videos made from your iPhone or android phone are more than enough to start making an impact.
If you want to make videos, go and make videos.
Just don’t make excuses.
What is the worst marketing advice you heard? Follow my LinkedIn business page and let me know.