The digital marketing space is evolving quickly; marketing tactics grow and die with every new internet fad.
A good example is the recent focus on inbound marketing. The push toward creating more content to support the inbound methodology is causing the space to become flooded, making it increasingly difficult to stand out.
Testing and improving on the common best practices is crucial in order to get noticed. Here are some of the typical marketing "rules" that you should be breaking.
1. Blog And Blog Some More
This is not as important as blogging with a purpose. The first step is to do some keyword research - then write blog posts that answer specific questions for your target buyer persona. Follow the rule below:
2. Don't Ever Miss An Opportunity To Convert
Scattering CTAs (calls-to-action) all over a page hoping that a visitor accidentally clicks on one is not the best way to get quality leads. Calls-to-action are meant to stand out and direct visitors to one desired course of action. In fact, the fewer CTAs the more your visitors will feel accomplished when they do click one. Don't do this:
3. Your Blog Posts Should Be Between 400-600 Words
Most of my blog posts are actually over 1000 words, and they have been in the top ten for most of the year. I've also read blog posts that are 100 words that get to the point and achieve their purpose concisely.
4. Don't Send Marketing Emails On Fridays Or On Weekends
Weekends actually often have a higher click-through rate than some weekdays. In fact, your email is more likely to get read on a Friday afternoon post lunch slump than on a Tuesday.
5. Gate All Your Content - The More Information We Can Get The Better
Form fatigue is a real thing. Not all content is worth gating and in order to get more conversions on premium content you need to build brand awareness. Giving some smaller content pieces away for free is a good way to get more eyes on them - making people more likely to convert on a premium content piece. There is no need to be this way anymore:
6. Tweet 5 Times A Day
Similar to generating blog posts, quality is as important as quantity when it comes to social media. With 140 characters and an average attention span of 7 seconds, your messages need to stick out in order to get clicks. Spend some time planning out what you should be promoting and finding new ways to promote each piece of content.
7. Personalize Your Email By Addressing Contacts By First Name
You should absolutely personalize your emails. But often marketers "personalize" by just adding the contact's first name into the subject line. That isn't the only element of personalization that's important. Just because an email is addressed "Hi Sumayya" doesn't mean I'm going to read it (everyone does this now). The key is to personalize the entire email. Understand who your audience is, make your email relevant to them, identify the pain points and provide a solution to their specific pain.
8. Have A Huge Social Media Presence
It's much more important to be on the right social networks. You must be where your audience is. Spending time and budget promoting on Pinterest when your audience is all B2B and are primarily on LinkedIn isn't efficient. Take the time to understand who you're marketing to and communicate with them on their preferred platform.
9. Always Stay On Brand
Calls-to-action are the tipping point of a conversion and even the smallest design elements can push your prospect down the conversion path. A call-to-action needs to stick out from the overall brand colours of your site in order to get conversions. Yes, we have got a response like this before:
10. Aim For More Traffic And Clicks
It's very important that you know exactly what your key performance indicators are and only analyze your performance based on these. Getting an unusually high number of clicks on a meme you shared on Friday doesn't necessarily mean that the right traffic is visiting your site. Those people may not be your target audience or be interested in what you're selling. Making decisions based on just numbers such as traffic and clicks rather than conversions is not a good idea since these are not an accurate measure of your marketing performance.
In conclusion, remember marketing 101, always be testing and tweaking, always be learning. Don't let failed email blasts and landing pages that don't convert stop you from trying new methods. When it comes to marketing campaigns, success often comes after a lot of frustration (shooting Nerf darts at your coworker is a great way to deal with this).