5 Ways to End Up on the Marketing Naughty List

He’s making a list. He’s checking it twice. He’s going to find out if your marketing’s naughty or nice.  

In all seriousness, with the end of the year rolling around it makes sense to do a quick stop check and make sure your practices won’t land you on the naughty list.  

With marketing advancing as fast as it is, it’s easy to fall behind the curve, so take a minute to make sure you are following best practices with these five examples.  

If not, new year's resolutions are only a few days away!

1. Not Having a Blog

It doesn’t matter if you are a Fortune 500 or a local mom & pop, you can benefit from blogging.  

Often, I find that companies are hesitant to start blogging because they are not sure if it will work for them, or they tried it and didn’t see the results they were looking for.  Let me set the record straight: over 60% of our page views this year were on our blog.  

If we were to delete our blog, we would lose over half of our traffic instantly and considering that every one of our blog articles has multiple conversion opportunities, I would bet that traffic to the rest of our site would plummet as well.

Keyword-focused blogging is the most effective way we have found to drive qualified traffic to a website. If you haven’t started, give this eBook a read.  

If you started and weren’t seeing the results you wanted, shoot me an email - there’s likely a reason why.

2. Purchasing an Email List

Simply put, don’t purchase email lists.  

All reputable email marketing companies, like Campaign Monitor and HubSpot, want you to use their software to market to opt-in email databases only.  

Why is that? Simply put, purchasing email lists is bad news. It’s bad for your reputation, and it’s annoying for the people on that list.

If you buy a list of 1000 contacts and send them an email, according to Campaign Monitor’s rules, only two people have to mark it as spam for you to get a warning.  

If five people mark it as spam, they automatically suspend your account. Remember, the people on these lists don’t know you and they won’t hesitate to mark your email as spam. This not only hurts your reputation, it could hurt your deliverability with even contacts who have opted in.  

Instead of purchasing lists, build your own by creating incredible content and earning the contact information of qualified traffic.

3. Making Your Messaging Self-centric

Ask yourself: what makes great marketing successful?

To me, a variety of commercials, campaigns, and strategies come to mind, but they all have one thing in common; they speak to the customer. Great messaging is great because resonates with the reader.

Often, we see the mistake of messaging being created that tells the tale of a company without including the most important part - their customers.  

The reality is that consumers live in a world of options. The company that speaks about how they solve their customer's’ challenges often stands apart from the mass that speaks about themselves.

If this is you, use this guide to write a value proposition that doesn’t suck.

4. Not Paying Attention to Accessibility

Back during the younger years of internet, the Inventor of the Internet (I feel like that’s his official title), Tim Berners-Lee, said something that has lead to the creation of an internet for everyone:

“The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.”

What does this mean to you?  Make sure you make your site accessible.  This includes, but is not limited to:

• Including Alt-Tags on your images. They’re there for people who cannot see your images (and for search engines to crawl).

• Making your website device agnostic (read: responsive & cross-browser friendly)

• Using semantic markup (that’s developer talk for using tags the way they were intended)

• Using a colorblind-safe color palette.

For more information on how you can make your site more accessible in the future be sure to take a look at the W3 Consortium Accessibility section.

5. Ignoring Social Media

Successful marketing delivers the right message, in the right place, at the right time.

Nearly two-thirds of American adults (65%) use social networking sites. By not leveraging these platforms you are missing the potential to be in the right place for over 150 million adults. That’s quite a big crowd to ignore.

Not only is not using social media a missed marketing opportunity, it can weigh negatively against people's perception of your business.

Social media is in many ways a form of social proof.  I know when I search for local businesses, Facebook, Google+, and Yelp reviews, and activity on social media weigh into my decision-making process; the lack of these things is a huge red flag to me.

Trying to get started or ramp up your social media accounts presence? Check out this eBook to help.

We Will Bring You Diamonds, Not Coal.

If any, or all, of these examples sounds like you, have no fear. Successful marketers are constantly improving.   

Luckily for you, this blog is an incredible resource containing the basics to improving in all these areas.  If you don’t find the answers to your questions, click the little button below and get in touch with me. I would be happy to help.

Happy Holidays,

Kyle