As is the same in a lot of industries, inbound marketing strategies have a shelf life and what worked one year ago may be completely futile by the next.
In order to work well, inbound marketing strategies need to increase brand awareness, capture qualified leads and help your sales teams increase revenue.
With that in mind, if you are working with an e-commerce agency, it may be time to ask them to fine-tune your marketing strategy by getting rid of any trends that no longer work and making room for those that will help your company thrive and build its brand.
Read on to find out about the inbound marketing strategies that you should no longer be using in the New Year.
Drip campaigns
If you are looking for high engagement rates and heaps of client responses, drip campaigns just won’t cut it. While they are easy to both produce and disseminate, their lack of personalisation tends to mean that they go largely unanswered.
Fix the problem: Next year, commit to producing more focused emails that will include content that is relevant to your audience. That means you’ll need to be well-versed in your customer demographics (personas will be a big help here), online behaviour and recent engagement levels across your key channels.
Text-heavy eBooks
It was inevitable that it was going to happen and it’s no surprise that mobile internet usage has surpassed desktop usage. Because of this, long eBooks in pdf format are a less desirable way for people to receive information.
Fix the problem: Create short, snappy content that is easy to digest and works well on mobile phones. Examples include quizzes, surveys and interactive landing pages. Your e-commerce agency should be well placed to advise you – and if not, why not get in touch with Icing Digital?
Prioritising quantity over quality in blogs
The internet is flooded with content, so users are now much more interested in reading something that focuses on thorough information that relates to their pain points than something that is just wordy. In other words, relevance, usefulness and meaningful content matters.
Fix the problem: Create blogs that are more focussed by limiting yourself to one topic per post. If you are working with an e-commerce agency, ensure the content that you are putting out has a particular purpose such as supporting a recent campaign.
Only using organic Facebook strategies
You might think it’s an easy and manageable way of using the social media site, but studies have shown that Facebook organic reach is at an all-time low, with only 2-6% of posts being viewed by their target audiences.
Fix the problem: Facebook boosted posts will help you to increase your reach and ensure that your message is hitting the right people at the right time.
Relying on a text-based SEO strategy
As suggested above, the way that people want to consume content is evolving and people are now less interested in being bombarded with lengthy amounts of text. Users would rather engage with videos, images and audio.
Fix the problem: Work on optimising all of the content on your website including the text, images and video.
