5 Annoying Marketing Tactics To Avoid
Effective marketing often involves getting in people’s faces and making people notice you. But there can be times when this is simply annoying, possibly having a negative impact on a company’s image.
Here are just a few annoying marketing tactics that you may want to avoid.
#1 Pop-up overuse
Pop-up adverts can be found on many modern sites, often as a way of getting people to sign up to mailing lists or as a way of highlighting a certain promotion.
However, recently there’s been a growing movement against pop-ups – most of us find them invasive and annoying and they only seldom work. In fact, too many pop-ups on a site can often drive away visitors.
You’re best to stick to one or two pop-ups max. These should appear at different times – in fact, many sites are now programming pop-ups to appear after a minute of being on a site, so that the visitor has time to absorb some of the site’s content first.
#2 Daily emails
Email marketing can be a great way of driving traffic to your site and increasing sales. Using a mailing list, you can also allow users to voluntarily sign up to information so that you’re not spamming people that aren’t interested.
However, even in the case of mailing lists, you should refrain from sending emails too regularly. Most recipients will get annoyed if they’re getting daily emails from you and may unsubscribe.
In other cases, such emails may end up going into the junk folder. Only send one or two emails per week and focus on making each one engaging.
#3 Keyword stuffing
Piling lots of keywords onto a page used to be a way of improving one’s search engine rankings. Nowadays, keyword stuffing doesn’t work – search engines like Google tend to lower the rankings of sites that use keywords excessively.
Besides, keyword-stuffing can make text unreadable and could drive away visitors to your site. You’re much better off using keywords in a natural manner to improve your rankings. It could also be worth reading an SEO guide to implementing other ways of boosting your rankings.
This could include speeding up your site’s loading time or posting content more regularly.
#4 Bandwagon hopping
Successful marketing often involves taking advantage of current trends, however, there can be times when this behavior may go too far and seem forced.
Be careful of using current events, memes or recent movies/TV programs to promote your brand if they’re not relevant.
You should be particularly careful of exploiting tragic events like celebrity deaths or natural disasters – your marketing could come across tasteless.
#5 Cold-Calling
Many consumers will likely agree that cold-calling takes the prize for the most annoying form of marketing.
Nowadays, cold-calling rarely works – most people don’t answer unknown numbers and there are even tools to block sales calls.
If you think a specific company could value your services, you’re much better off emailing them or messaging them via LinkedIn.
Are you avoiding these marketing tactics?
