Are your digital marketing strategies doing more harm than good? Here are just a few commonly used strategies that could actually be damaging your business.
Buying Likes/Followers
Having a social media page with 1000 likes/followers can make your company look popular and successful. However, you should be careful as to how you acquire these likes/followers. Buying them can seem like an easy hack, but it can backfire. It will look suspicious if you’ve suddenly gained 1000 followers and even more suspicious if none of these followers interact with your posts (they tend to be inactive accounts). Facebook is also cracking down on this behaviour by deleting inactive accounts, meaning that you could end up losing all your followers in a few months’ time.
While it is a lot more difficult, you’re better off building likes and followers organically. Promoting social media posts can also be an effective way to build exposure and potentially build followers.
Faking Reviews
Having positive online reviews can also be good for your company’s reputation. However, writing fake positive reviews is not the answer. It’s dishonest and it won’t look good if you get found out. Even if you are able to write reviews that are authentic enough to never arouse suspicion, you’ll be ignoring the wider issue as to why you’re not getting any positive reviews.
It’s much more productive to encourage your actual customers to leave reviews. Direct happy customers to public review sharing platforms, while asking unhappy clients to give private feedback (this could deter them from leaving a negative review by allowing them to vent their feelings directly to you).
Keyword Stuffing
Using keywords on your website can help to boost your search engine rankings, but you should avoid using too many of the same keywords (AKA keyword stuffing). A distracting number of repeated keywords in a text will put off potential customers. On top of this, modern search engine algorithms are able to detect when a keyword is being used too many times in a non-organic fashion – and you may get penalised by having your rankings lowered.
It’s much more effective to use an SEO agency that can help implement keywords in a more natural fashion. Your average SEO agency services includes both on-page and off-page SEO as well as using other tactics to potentially boost your rankings. It’s a marketing service that’s worth spending money on.
Email Spamming
Email marketing can begreat for encouraging return customers and keeping current customers in the loop. However, you should avoid behaviours that could be seen as ‘spamming’. This includes signing people up to your mailing list without their permission, sending emails on a daily basis or using misleading headers. You’ll either end up annoying your recipients or your emails will all direct straight to recipients’ spam folders.
To avoid spamming, only sign recipients up to your mailing list with their permission, stick to a couple emails per week and keep headers relevant.
Pop-Up Abuse
Pop-ups can be a way of forcing people to read information. However, they can also be very annoying – especially multiple pop-ups on one site. Some people may even get so annoyed that they leave your site.
Try to use pop-ups sparingly or use them in ways that aren’t as invasive (don’t let them dominate the whole screen or only trigger them after a visitor has spent a certain amount of time on your site).
