Marketers love strategies. Search “marketing strategies” and you’ll see countless pages of articles claiming to have the latest and best strategy you have to try now. And while having a solid marketing strategy in place is crucial to lead generation, marketers can easily get bogged down by the sheer volume of “marketing tricks” out there.
These are just a few marketing strategies we’ve found to be huge time wasters. If you’re spending hours on any of the below tactics, it might be time to revise your approach and declutter.
Over-reporting
Reporting a few key pieces of marketing data is important. Reporting every detail is excessive. Now that most social media platforms offer in-depth analytics, it’s easy to get lost in all the numbers and try to draw conclusions from everything. Focus on a few areas and only report on those.
Press releases
Press releases have their time and place, but in most cases, they’re useless. Unless your company is releasing a new app or donating millions of dollars to some worthy cause, there’s no need to spend time writing a press release that will likely only be seen by you. Social media, in many ways, has replaced the function press releases used to serve.
Social media channels no one uses
It’s important to stay up to date on social media trends, but trying to have a presence on every platform is overwhelming. Figure out which platforms make the most sense for your business, and just stick to those.
Hashtagging everywhere
Hashtags are great for connecting with audiences. They allow you to associate with a niche and be found by people who may be interested in your service. However, don’t try to “own” too many hashtags and use them on every social media post. Multiple hashtags can become distracting from your content, and ultimately work against you. Try to zero on one to two hashtags and stick with just those.
Bulky email signatures
Nothing’s worse than scrolling through an email chain that’s 20 percent content and 80 percent email signatures. Keep your email signature short and sweet. We recommend sticking with your name (obviously), a good contact number, your logo and a few icons linking to your social media platforms. Keep it clean, and don’t feel like you need to add a personal bio to your signature.