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Despite all the effort you’ve put into creating and honing a set marketing strategy for your business, you might not be reaping the kind of results you’re going for. There are a lot of reasons why a business’s marketing efforts will fail, but one of the most damaging is a reliance on weak, outdated marketing tactics. Here are a few marketing strategies which are on their way out, and should be ditched immediately!
Keyword Stuffing
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This is usually a symptom of business owners and marketers gaining a little bit of knowledge about SEO, and then applying it like they think they’re an expert! While there was certainly a time when keyword stuffing could do a lot for the rank of your website, those days are long gone, and search engines are now much more adept at filtering out the bad content from the good. When you’re choosing the keywords you’re going to use in your digital marketing, you need to be very selective, and maintain high quality standards. These days, if your content isn’t well-written and valuable, and contains high-quality keywords that are well spaced-out, then you’re going to have a very hard time getting the top spots on SERPs.
Pop-Up Banner Ads
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If you still think that pop-up banner ads are a viable way to get people interested in your product or service, then I can only assume that you’ve been living in a cave for the past five years! Like most people, you’ve probably had at least one instance where you’ve been reading a fascinating article, and then had your stream of thought interrupted by an irritating, flashy pop-up ad. Even if the ad was for something you desperately want or need, I’m sure the delivery made you resent the business! Most modern consumers have taken the initiative to start using pop-up blockers on their web browsers. The ones that haven’t still aren’t going to be all that receptive to windows randomly taking up their screens when they’re trying to read something else! If you’re still using pop-ups, this should have been ditched yesterday!
Self-Promotion Overloads
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If your blog is full of content about how great your products are, and your social media feeds are bursting with sales-heavy content, then you’re committing a serious marketing sin. True, it’s important that you keep all your marketing channels active. However, if you saturate it with all kinds of boring, self-promotional posts, then the only thing you’ll convince your target market of is that they should ignore you. Selling is an art, and any art form is all about getting the right balance. Your content needs to be engaging before anything else, containing interesting stories which will hook your target market in from the word ‘go’. I’m not saying that you can’t talk about how amazing your product or service is. I’m just saying that you need to get the ratios right as a matter of utmost importance.
If you’re using any of these tactics in your marketing, then it’s time to make some big changes!