Published by Ritu Poddar on July 19, 2017
Marketing has the power to make or mar your business. If done well, it can boost business like nothing else can. And if done in a wrong way, it can cause irreparable damage to your brand.
While there are innumerable tips and tricks out there that talk about the do’s of good marketing, but it is equally important to know the don’ts lest you should cause yourself any loss.
Here, we are listing down 8 ways, marketing practices that can bring you sure-shot failure. Please ensure you DO NOT follow them!
Focus only and only on generating leads through all means, and don’t put in even half the effort in nurturing them. This is the unfailing formula to ensure all the marketing investment goes in vain, and none of the leads ever convert to customers.
Despite having the ability to contact 92 percent of leads, Forbes’ research shows that brands touch base with only a quarter of them & 71 percent of generated leads spoil because companies don’t react soon enough. This is where lead nurturing can play a vital role, enabling you to educate, inform, and build a solid relationship with those leads to push them closer toward the bottom of the funnel.
Bombard your contacts with messages, emails, and notifications. Send them as much content as you can. This way, you are sure to piss them off and ensure they hate you.
As rightly said James Gleik, “When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.”
The customers are not foolish. They smart enough to cut through sensationalist, opportunistic, spams or thinly-veiled attempts to market to them in the past. Too much of information overload does more harm than good. So send personalised and relevant content only, at the right time and through the right means.
Keep on spending on marketing but never analyse, track and measure the results and impact of your campaigns. Assume whatever you are investing is bringing you absolutely desirable results. This is the most foolish way of doing business.
If you fail to measure the results of your marketing campaigns, you have no idea what’s working and what’s not. You might waste money on marketing efforts that are doing nothing to help you grow sales, and you might fail to do things that could improve the bottom line. Failing to analyse the success of your marketing efforts can cost your company time and money.
Use all possible ways to reach out to your contacts, without trying to understand their
Preferred channels. Use email, SMS, social media, voice calls – any channel without any thought. This is another perfect way to put off your contacts and losing out on opportunities.
Before choosing a channel for your marketing, you must understand your audience. You might have more than one audience and each will have its own channel they use to receive information and spend time on. Rushing into marketing without knowing your audience and how to choose the right channel is likely to result in a disappointing ROI and wasted money.
Just turn a blind eye to need of making mobile responsive website. Tell yourself that all your customers visit your website through laptops or computers, and even if they do so through their smart phones, they would not mind distortions in the website when opened on phones. Well, congratulations! You just gave your customers a terrible experience.
The fact of life is the customers of today are not sitting in front of desktops or laptops. They are using their phones and tablets for viewing your website.
If you don’t give them a seamless mobile experience, so that they can browse and shop while mobile, they’ll go someplace else. No matter on what device your potential clients view your website, they’re getting the experience they want – A great one!
Forget those who forget you. Just do not bother to reach out to those who once were loyal customers or were brought to you by your sales team as hot leads. Retargeting – what does that mean?
Well, that is another mantra to ensure you are losing out on potential customers and all the marketing effort is going in drain.
Jeffrey Eisenberg rightly points out, “online customers are exactly the same people as offline customers, yet advertisers tend to think of them as an entirely different species.” Don’t you want your brand to be the one people think of immediately and feel the best about when they finally need what you sell?
Give no value to loyal customers. Always tell yourself that they are coming to you because you are that good. Leverage on the loyalty of repeat customers – what? We are too busy for that.
Keep in mind that when marketing 80% of your business comes from existing customers and 20% comes from new customers. Failing to resell to your current customer base could have a very bad effect on your ROI. It costs you five times the expense to sell to a new customer than to sell to an existing customer.
Never pay heed to what your competitors are doing. Because, you are not afraid. You are super confident about what you offer, so why waste time on researching on competitions. Chuck that! We are the best.
The moment you start thinking in this way, your decline would begin.
It is said, “Great people learn from other people’s mistakes.” You can leverage every one of their successes and failures. You can learn from every mistake they make. You just have to pay attention. And knowing what your competition is doing, with always keep you on your toes! It is highly competitive world after all.
So, are you making any of these mistakes? It is never too late to correct yourself.
For any assistance, feel free to contact our experts today!
Ritu is a Technical Writer & Content Developer by profession, and a Poet & Creative Writer by passion. She works as Assistant Manager, Content Development at Netcore.
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Ritu Poddar