Are your marketing campaigns annoying your clients?
Creating a successful marketing campaign is like making the perfect meal – you need to mix together the right ingredients, cook the food at exactly the right temperature and serve it up in a way that is appealing both to the eye and the tastebuds.
One little mistake can set the whole plan awry. There’s a singular issue that seems to be more troublesome for marketers than others – that of annoyance. Irritating your customers with your social media habits, taglines, concepts or even the jingle you use could cause your client base to shrink.
Here are some common ways marketers with good intentions end up annoying their customers, and how you can avoid making the same mistakes.
Too much too often
We live in a world where our cell phones are always buzzing, our email inbox always growing and advertisements on every street corner. That doesn’t mean customers don’t want to hear from their favourite brands, but there is such a thing as too much marketing.
This is a key issue – particularly for those who are fond of social media marketing. Just because you have the resources to send out a tweet about your project on the hour every hour doesn’t mean you should. With constant stream platforms like Twitter and Instagram, if you post too much content, you’ll take over your followers’ feeds. This could result in them deleting you so they can once again see updates from their friends and family.
Tip: Instead of posting 10 mediocre tweets a day, write four that will get you more traction.
Not what I wanted
When creating a marketing campaign, think about what your customers will want to get out of it. For example, if you’re creating new sidebar advertisements for a website, obviously you want customers to click on them to bring more traffic to your site.
The clickers, on the other hand, want the advertisement to take them to the most relevant page that will give them all the information they need. They don’t want a pop-up ad to suddenly crowd their screen, or a page with a video that plays automatically or even the flashy entrance page to your website.
Tip: Cut to the chase. Circuitous marketing techniques will drive customers away, so make it useful, beautiful and entertaining.
Be unique, don’t borrow
Remember when your mother used to say, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”? For marketers, a better adage would be, “If you don’t have anything unique to say, don’t say anything at all.”
It can be tempting to take one of the many internet memes floating out there on the web and use it to push your products. If done creatively, this sort of campaign can resonate with customers and increase sales. If done in a boring or lazy way, you’ll end up making your client base cringe.
Tip: Before you fall back on an idea that’s already been used, spend some time trying to come up with an ad never seen before
Ryan Bonnici is head of marketing APAC for ExactTarget
Um… is this an advertorial or paid placement? Reads like it’s been written for some purpose other than this…
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I doubt it., Allison. In my experience, there would need to be a product pitch somewhere for that to be the case.
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Seems like useful information, regardless.
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