10 marketing no-nos to quit cold turkey in the New Year

by | Dec 31, 2014 | Content

Never mind quitting the cookies and eggnog in the New Year. If you want to rock 2015 with your marketing prowess, take a powder from these 10 items and you’ll be even more amazing than you already are.

1. Social media for your company brand when you’re not personally using social media. To truly understand social media and wield it well for your brand, you gotta get in the game yourself. That means firing up the mysterious Google+, posting some pics to Instagram, pin something on Pinterest and get in there on Twitter. It doesn’t matter what you post or for whom, just using these platforms will make you more knowledgeable about them and what they could do for your business.

2. Pumping out volumes of content that doesn’t mean much or accomplish anything – We all know content marketing can be extremely effective. IF the content is good. And we’ve all seen the bad. Don’t create just for the sake of creating, it wastes everybody’s time. You might be getting pressure to pump more out, but you’ll reap more rewards if you spend more time on quality pieces that will actually create ROI for your business. Sonia Simone of Copyblogger nails it, “Some call it page-view journalism. I like to call it Content Regurgitated as Product. Perhaps we can call it CRaP for short.” More on Surviving “Content Shock” and the Impending Content Marketing Collapse from Sonia.

3. Meetings with no purpose. Enough said. Just don’t go. And in case you need more convincing, here’s how Steve Jobs handled meetings.

4. Working through vacation time. The world won’t end. Leave your phone and laptop at home. You need rest to be good. More from Renee Jacques of the Huffington Post.

5. Policing your staff’s social media or blog posts—set them and yourself free, it’ll be ok, I promise. In fact, you may end up with an army of brand ambassadors.

6. Worrying that your marketing effort will flop. Some will, some won’t, but you learn something every time.

7. Using social media only to promote your stuff—it can’t be “social” if you’re not actually engaging with people and no one wants to engage with someone who is always trying to sell them something.

8. Spending money on marketing efforts that you’re not tracking. If it takes time or money, you better know if it’s worth it. If you haven’t yet, your big investment for 2015 should be a marketing automation system like Pardot, Marketo, Eloqua or Hubspot.  They give you insight into which marketing activities are driving results. Plus they make it easier for you to get it all done. More details here.

9. Focusing only on acquiring new clients. Marketing should play a center role in keeping existing clients and ensuring their experience matches the expectations you set when you were courting them. More and more the marketing department is taking on the customer journey, more from Forrester here.

10. Illeism – Stop writing about you and them in the third person. It’s awkward. Lots more on that here.

So eat the cookie and drink the leftover eggnog while you’re making your plans for next year. Just clear your diet of these don’ts for 2015 (or really, forever). Happy New Year!

Photo credit: Excelglen via Flickr Commons