5 Harmful Marketing Practices You Should Avoid at All Costs

No one likes to think about the worst-case scenarios when they develop a marketing strategy. In reality, it’s neither healthy nor beneficial to contemplate negative outcomes  too often. However, you’d be remiss if you didn’t at least double-check the way you currently market yourself. Indeed, you may just find an area where you can make significant improvements. With that in mind, we’re here to outline five marketing practices that will cause more harm than good –– so that you can avoid them and instead stay on the right track.

Social Media Mishaps

It’s a great idea to attempt to grow your business online through social media. Nevertheless, businesses still occasionally make some grave errors on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms. Take your social-media posting seriously. Proofread everything before you publish it and always stay on message.

Keyword Stuffing

At this point, most of us have encountered a website that was written without care or precision. And while that’s obviously not something to strive toward, even the worst-written pieces of content are still preferable to pages inundated with a targeted keyword. Once upon a time, keyword stuffing actually did help increase your website’s standing, but Google and other search engines have long since altered their algorithms to prevent keyword-stuffed pages from ranking highly.

Plagiarism

Want to incur a hefty punishment from Google? Then copy/paste someone else’s work and try to present it as your own. Not only is this an unwise way to attempt to market yourself, it’s unethical as well. Plain and simple don’t do this.

Ignoring On-Site SEO

Optimizing your own pages for certain keywords and phrases is a basic staple of good marketing. Though this isn’t the most glamorous task, it’s imperative to lay this groundwork before you attempt to build anything else up. Leaving your website’s meta descriptions under the generic settings will hamper your company’s potential for growth.

Staying the Course

This should be painfully obvious to anyone who’s worked in marketing for any amount of time, but if a certain strategy isn’t working –– change your approach. That’s not to say you should abandon a campaign after a bad couple of days; you do need to give your efforts time to take effect. If you’ve failed to make an impact after years of work though, then you need to try a new method.

Conclusion

Effective marketing is almost always a work in progress. Note that whether you’re trying to promote a new yoga studio or online physician loans, you’ll likely have to improvise from time to time. Just remember to use common sense and be willing to adapt. And of course, a positive attitude can go a long way toward finding success –– in any field!