When it comes to marketing, the times they are ‘a changing. Keeping up with these changing marketing trends is especially important for small businesses, who generally have smaller marketing budgets and a larger need to get themselves out in front of customers. That said, If you run a small business, it’s wise to ensure that you’re on the cutting edge of today’s digital marketing tactics.
5 Outdated Marketing Tactics to Ditch Today
If you’re spending time and money on these marketing formats, it’s likely your resources would be better used somewhere else.
1) Press releases
Press releases, especially those known as “vanity releases” (these generally make “announcements” about the company in a self-serving way), are just ineffective. Often, they’re filled with unverified hype that nobody actually wants to read.
Keep in mind that public companies often still do press releases because they’re required to by the market. If you’re running a small business, though, you should strive to keep press releases to an absolute minimum. Because press releases rarely aid in the acquisition of new traffic, you’re better off spending your marketing efforts on methods that actually draw in new customers, like content creation and distribution.
2) Explicitly sales-y content
If you think that your blog should be spending more time talking about how awesome your company is or why people should purchase from you right now, think again. In today’s marketing environment, it’s imperative to take a longer-range approach. This involves pulling the focus away from the bottom of the funnel long enough to spend some time focusing on how to get people into the funnel in the first place.
Right now, for example, there are 80 million millennials living in the United States and, with a total buying power of $200 billion dollars, they’re the most lucrative market in existence. Millennials, though, do not want to hear about how awesome your company is because this makes your business seem like it’s trying too hard. Instead, millennials want authentic content, value, information, and authority. To put it another way: today’s consumers are smart and if you want them to eventually work their way to the bottom of your funnel, you’re going to have to earn it through valuable content rather than showy fluff.
3) Not listening to market feedback
There’s nothing that can spell death quite so quickly for your company as refusing to listen to your customers. If you’re not surveying customers or doing market research, you’re missing out on opportunities at best and putting your company in danger at worst.
Today, consumers want to be the co-creators of your products and if they’re not allowed a chance to have a say, they’re going to walk out on you and find a company that values their input. To prevent this from happening, use tools like NPS surveys, read the comments on your content and ask your users for their opinions. If you need an example of someone who does this exceedingly well, consider Tim Ferriss, lifestyle mega-mogul who asks his readers for content ideas at the end of every single blog post he writes.
4) Rebranding
In today’s marketing environment, rebranding your small business can easily cause disaster for your company. This is because, today, the world is hugely interconnected and brands are built one interaction at a time. If you feel that your company values aren’t clear to your customers, you need more than a new tagline to fix the issue.
To market yourself better without the hassle of rebranding, focus on getting better at SEO, updating your marketing and editorial strategies, validating your approaches with customer feedback, and altering the way you interact with customers.
While these approaches don’t come to fruition as immediately as rebranding, they’re effective and long-lasting in the end. Consider Old Spice as an example: instead of changing their logo or turning their entire company on its head, Old Spice used young personalities like NFL Player Isaiah Mustafa to shift their company’s focus and direct the product at a younger set of customers.
5) Telemarketing, direct mailing, and spamming
These things should all be avoided like the plague. Today, consumers have more ways than ever to dodge these marketing tactics because, frankly, they’re annoying, intrusive, and unsolicited. In fact, 84% of people between the ages of 24-35 have left one of their favorite websites because of intrusive advertisements.
That said, don’t spend your precious marketing budgets on these tragically outdated forms of outbound. Instead, focus your efforts on stellar content creation, good SEO, building a subscriber list, and gaining great customer reviews – all of which will help you rank well and pull in sales.
Conclusion
If you’re living in the yesteryear of marketing realities, it’s time to enter 2018 by ditching invalid marketing ideas for small businesses. Today, effective small business marketing is about three things: value, information, and content.
By providing these things for your customers, you can ensure that your marketing budgets are well-spent and that your customers aren’t searching your site frantically for the “back” button, citing invasive ads or uncomfortably, sales-y content.
For help updating your marketing strategy and ensuring it’s as effective as can be, contact Bigfoot Media. Bigfoot Media is here for all of your digital marketing needs and would love to help your business create a game-winning strategy.
Call us today for a FREE consultation or shoot us a quick email to learn more.
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