By Aileen Barron, Green Acre Marketing
There is lots of advice from well-informed marketeers to guide marketing teams through marketing tactics that work, how to implement them and how to measure their success. However, to change tack a little, it is also worth considering the marketing activities that are irritating and should be avoided.
The reforms in the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws in 2018 made companies take note of what was and was not acceptable, in terms of using their customers’ data for marketing purposes.
The public also became well informed in terms of what qualified as unsolicited communications, further compelling companies not to breach these laws.
As a result of GDPR laws, many companies and individuals have gone to great lengths to qualify and build their databases in a way that makes it compliant.
However, due consideration is still required in your marketing efforts, so that your correspondence to this database still adds value, is timely, not relentlessly repetitive and doesn’t border on annoyance.
Relevant and timely
Rolling out generic bland marketing messages will not resonate with anyone and failing to segment your market and target accordingly is a big oversight in marketing practice.
Segmentation is the method of dividing out your market based on demographics, needs, priorities, common interests, and other behaviours relevant to your product or service. Failing to do so can leave you with a broad approach, thus not resonating with anyone, and in some cases, running the risk of making yourself irrelevant to a potential customer.
Sales and marketing teams hold a lot of knowledge about their customers and not using this knowledge is wasteful. From the customers’ perspective, receiving irrelevant information often triggers the ‘unsubscribe’ button!
Some companies will be using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to streamline and optimise marketing campaigns, but human input is fundamental to truly connect with your customers.
Here are some of the top marketing annoyances:
- While delivering bland, generic marketing material is one thing, receiving it constantly in multiple channels is another level of annoyance. Avoid repeatedly posting the exact same content. A good tip is to use different lead-ins that resonate with different target groups;
- Do not send relentless follow-up emails about the same thing;
- Predetermined content calendars are a must-have tool; however, failing to react to unforeseen changes will impact the timing of your content, making you look ill-informed and irrelevant. Ensure your content stays relevant to what is actually happening on farm, etc;
- Do not use misleading headline grabbers;
- Do not push marketing messages through social media messaging tools such as Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. These should only be considered for closed groups, in which people have agreed to be part of;
- Use the platform that someone has signed up for, solely for the purpose of why they signed up to it in the first place. If someone signed up to be notified of service dates for their machinery, do not start sending marketing messages unless this was part of the agreement;
- Your marketing message will resonate with someone when it is consistent and delivered across a number of different touchpoints. Being consistent is very different to being repetitive. Nobody wants to keep seeing the same thing over and over again;
- Finally, please ensure you can live up to the expectation that you promise. Do not promise things in your marketing messages, that you cannot deliver on, as word-of-mouth will ensure this works against you.
Good marketing is about delivering a message that is relevant and timely. It is the actions you take to build trust in what you do and being clever about the platforms you use to do this. From there, it is up to you to ensure you can deliver on these marketing promises.
For any support with your marketing tactics, you can contact: [email protected].