Everyone knows that adding to your customer list is not easy especially when you are a relatively new brand in the market. While going digital can surely help you to an extent, you should be cautious of what you do and be aware of its varying implications in the present and future.
Ways to promote businesses have taken a huge leap from hoardings and banners to displaying personalized banners in online spaces in today’s digital era. While the traditional ways to promote a business were effective at some point, you can’t expect them to work in the present market.
For instance, remember door to door selling? A revelation that shook the charts at one point? Do you think door to door selling can be effective in bringing in revenue in today’s competitive market?
This is the same with online campaigns too. You can’t expect online campaigns that were successful in the past to bring you the same results even today. This article will discuss in detail 10 such campaign ideas that won’t work in 2021/22.
1. Promoting your business through social media handles
When we say promoting your business through social media handles, we only mean expecting your potential customers to purchase from you just because you post promotional content on your brand’s social media handles. Unlike previous years, having a presence on social media or
even having a good visibility doesn’t guarantee you a thing, if you don’t engage with your audience.
Unless you create content that engages with your audience and distribute it wisely through your social media handles, you can’t expect any return on investment. So yeah, any campaign through your social media handle that doesn’t engage with your audience will end up being just another leaky funnel.
2. Generic email campaigns
Email marketing is still a gold mine that marketers leverage. In fact, according to a study done by McKinsey & Company, email marketing is found to be three times more effective than social media marketing. But the key is to personalize the email campaigns.
For better understanding, imagine the promotional emails that you get on a daily basis and analyze the emails from the lot that you actually open. You’d notice that you only open those emails that intrigues you, emails that offer value to you.
This is the same with your clients too. If you want your client to open your emails, ensure that the email is personalized & carefully curated to cater to the unique requirements of your clients.
So yeah, generic email campaigns will not add any value to your marketing efforts.
3. Press releases
Press releases are the announcements you make to reach out to the public. Even though press releases are considered to be vital in measuring the ‘standards’ of your company, it serves no purpose in the real world when it comes to improving the traffic you need to convert.
Ideally you should only treat press releases as a way to aid your SEO efforts and as a way to get public attention. Keep their numbers to absolute minimum, especially if you are a small business owner.
4. Text only or video only content
Video or text only contents such as vlogging, have been an effective tool in the past. But due to the overloading of such content on the digital space, a shift in interests have been observed towards quality and crisp contents. Stuffing a lot of content into your social or Web page won’t help you get the customer attraction you are looking for.
Today’s audience wants to spend less time in front of the screen and get those unique, informative contents.
5. Massive data collection campaigns
Data science is the new world. But spending big on data would destabilize your marketing budget. Instead of focusing on massive data collection, converge your efforts to collecting the exact data your business needs.
6. Physical mass printing
When was the last time you really cared about those pamphlets you got with your newspapers early in the morning? Personally, those I get generally go straight into my waste bin unless it’s really catching my attention.
We’d recommend you to invest this budget on paid campaigns on social media to boost your branding.
7. Ethical Blogging
Blogging has been an effective tool since the digital world took its birth & it was once an efficient way to market your business and get people to buy from you or engage with your brand. But times have changed and it will be unwise to put all your eggs into one basket – ethical blogging.
As a marketer, you need to tweak your blogging campaigns and focus on creating blogs that inform your readers about your product & offerings.
8. Automated and scheduled posts on Social Media
While consistency in posting on social media is key to engaging your followers, automating & scheduling posts on social media is not the way to do it. Social media is all about interaction and personalized communication. This holds true to business accounts as well. When your interaction stops, your business stalls.
Automated posts are more or less the same as post and forget. There is no follow up to the post you update. Such posts lack that human touch your product will ultimately be replaced by a superior or a customer friendly manufacturer product.
9. One sided conversation
As a marketer you need to treat every campaign that you run as an opportunity for a conversation with your potential customers, conversations that are not one sided.
But how do you do it? The key is to run campaigns that will act as a platform for you to build meaningful conversation with your potential customers. Conversation that will help you build trust among your potential customers.
Irrespective of how much time or money you invest, if your campaigns were to be one sided, it won’t work.
10. Focusing only on SEO
Times have changed & getting a good enough traffic flow into your website won’t guarantee you any business. In this competitive market, to be a successful marketer you should also be focusing on building your brand. Gone are the days where customers had limited options & in today’s competitive market customers look for a lot of factors before they decide to purchase from a brand & this is where branding comes into play.
Know that only focusing on SEO without building your brand will eventually give you one failed campaign.
To sum up
These 10 campaign ideas that we discussed above are just the tip of an iceberg. In today’s competitive market the chances of a campaign becoming unsuccessful is quite higher than it becoming successful. Know that it takes a lot of time, research, & resources to actually design & run a successful campaign that can bring about the results you expect.
