The internet has been public for thirty years now. In that time, digital marketing has evolved drastically. Below are some of the digital marketing strategies that are no longer effective in 2021 – and what you should be doing instead.
Keyword stuffing
In the early days of Google, it used to be possible to climb to the top of the rankings simply by stuffing a website full of keywords. Google and other search engines have since altered their algorithms so that this is no longer possible – in fact, stuffing a web page full of unnecessary keywords can have a negative impact on your rankings nowadays.
Use of keywords can still affect the rankings of a page, however keywords have to be incorporated naturally. There are also many other tactics that make up search engine marketing including increasing loading speed and generating more inbound hyperlinks – these are worth also trying alongside implementing keywords if you want to rank highly.
Blanket emails
Want to create leads through email marketing? Sending exactly the same email out to everyone is not the way to do it. Research shows that personalizing emails is much more effective at getting responses and reactions (plus, in the case of cold emailing, you won’t get filtered into spam).
When sending out emails to strangers, try to cater the email to your client. In the case of mailing lists, segment your mailing lists into different groups so that you can cater content to each group.
Solely promotional social media
Social media posts should not solely be used for promotional purposes. In fact, only 20% of your content on social media should be exclusively promotional if you want to get engagements.
Why is this? And what should you do with the other 80% of your content? Well, it’s important to remember that social media is a recreational tool for many people. If you want people to engage with your content it needs to be entertaining or interesting. This could include asking questions, hosting polls, posting images, sharing memes or sharing opinions. You can do all of this without hard selling your product.
Blanket Emails
Want to create leads through email marketing? Sending exactly the same sales email template out to everyone is not the way to do it. Research shows that personalizing emails is much more effective at getting responses and reactions (plus, in the case of cold emailing, you won’t get filtered into spam).
Clickbait
Clickbait can be an effective way of generating clicks, but it’s not an effective way of generating leads. By deceiving people into clicking on your content, you could just end up angering people. In some cases, it could even be illegal (as is the case with false email subject lines).
You can still use exciting titles and subject lines to get people to click on your content, but you need to be honest about the content that you’re leading people towards. Does it really live up to your bold claims?
Buying fake followers and fake reviews
Buying fake followers and fake reviews isn’t just dishonest – in most cases, it doesn’t work. When you buy followers, you’re often buying follows from inactive accounts. It will look suspicious to many people if you have 1000 followers but not a single like or comment on your posts. As for fake reviews, a lot of people can spot these a mile off. Social media sites and review platforms have been stomping down on fake followers and fake reviews lately, deleting inactive accounts and taking down fake reviews. In other words, you could end up losing all those fake followers and reviews. It’s much better to encourage followers and reviews naturally.
