Stop That Now: Dirty Strategic Marketing Pathways You’d Avoid
Marketing could have been easy enough if it weren’t for the fact that there are way too many channels available for marketers and small business owners. There was the traditional media. Now, there’s digital media. On top of these, you have real events you can launch, visit trade shows, make connections at conferences, and even do meetups.
Marketing is both easy and tough, depending on how you look at it. Yet, you’ll either find yourself or many others around you doing marketing the bad way. Here are some of those ways you shouldn’t be doing marketing at all:
Using the website as a “website”
Do you have a website? You probably do.
Here’s another question: What exactly do you use it for?
If you are like most business owners, you don’t use it much really. Of course, you have fancy sliders on the home page, a contact form, information about your products or services, and a few more pages about your mission, vision, policies, and some more.
But you didn’t set out to create an online brochure. Did you? Today, websites are meant to deliver sales, sooner or later. Visitors to your website should convert into sales, relationships, and more.
But is your website doing that?
Push. Push. And Push
If one thing moved out of the building ever since the Internet came about and revolutionized the way you sell and buy, it’s that “push” thing. Those days of old-school sales, “Always Be Closing”, and cold calling are long gone. Granted that these are still effective but not until you plug the Internet (or social media specifically) into your efforts.
If you push, the last thing you’d hope to make is a sale. The first thing you can be certain of is an outright rejection.
If it’s broken, find something else
Here’s a quick exercise for you: head out to any freelance job board like freelancer.com and see what kind of projects are being posted by many small business owners. What do you find? If I am not way off the mark, you’ll see projects on “SEO writing”, “SEO”, and “Link building”, and more.
Flash news: SEO is dead. Sean Jackson of Copyblogger Media wrote a post writing about how the practice is living off on intensive care and how the term is dead, for all practical purposes.
But that’s just one of the many things that business owners focus on. Everything except those few things that can actually do something for their respective business.
Not walking the path
Let’s consider digital marketing for a moment. Here’s the simple step-by-step process to get it right:
Start a blog and publish awesome posts at a regular frequency.
Amplify your content on social media. Plus, engage and connect.
Start building a list of “earned” or “opt-in” subscribers and then send out well-crafted email marketing messages.
Of course, there’s more to those seemingly simple steps. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll stick to those three points.
Now, how many small business owners get it right? How many companies do you know who actively manage all those three points?
Barely any, if you ask me. Now, that’s a shame.
Do you find yourself doing (or not) any of these dirty ways of marketing? Tell me about it.