Online marketing methods are constantly changing in order to keep up with the fast-paced evolution of the internet. As a result, tactics that were once suitable ten years ago are no longer appropriate now. This is important to understand when marketing your business online, so that you know which tactics to avoid. Here are some examples of such tactics that have been proven to have a negative effect.
Limiting loyalty programmes
Loyalty programmes are a way of getting people to sign up to your website, generally as a way of sending newsletters and deals. With the advent of social media, there’s no real reason to have these loyalty programmes (most of the emails end up in people’s spam anyhow). An even worse type of loyalty programme is one that only allows people to see certain content if they sign up. Forcing people to have to enter a form before they can see your content will only deter visitors and it has since been dropped by many companies that previously adopted it.
Keyword spamming
There was a time when all you needed to do to improve your site’s Google rankings was to spam your website with keywords. For example, if you were a plumbing company – all you needed to do was write plumbing a thousand times on your website and it would feature higher on search engines. However, most search engines now have algorithms that counteract this, in some cases causing your site to score lower on search engines rankings if it contains too many spammy keywords. It can also put off visitors that arrive at your site, affecting the readability and professionalism of your site. Instead, companies hoping to improve their rankings are better off investing in an SEO company such as Nu Studio that can do it in a more natural way.
False scarcity
Claiming something is ‘limited’ when it isn’t or that a deal is only on for 24 hours when it isn’t is one of the oldest poor taste marketing tactics in the book, offline and online. Whilst screaming ‘LIMITED OFFER NOW’ will lure in some visitors, most will see it as spam if it is constantly repeated, especially if it’s an email. Be honest and only claim something is ‘limited’ when it really is.
Exploiting celebrity deaths
Whenever a celebrity dies, they become big news on social media platforms. Unfortunately, this has caused many businesses to exploit such events in order to promote their businesses (just look at this article of ways businesses exploited Bowie’s death). Whilst this can be tasteful in some cases, it’s a fine line, and has been proven to sometimes create reputation-damaging angry backlashes.
Excessive hashtagging
Hashtags are used on Twitter to link your content to current trends. It’s been proven that tweets containing hashtags get more interaction. However, more than two hashtags can actually damage the impact of your tweets by making them look spammy, decreasing interaction.
