Marketing Mythology: Debunking 4 Awful Ad Strategies

We talk a lot about strong marketing strategies for driven ad teams and businesses that want to grab customer attention—and keep it. But once in a while, it’s good to delve into the negative stuff too. In this case, that would be bad marketing and advertising strategies. Mistakes are natural, and they’re incredibly effective at teaching. If it blows up in your face, don’t do it again! Pretty straightforward. Sometimes, though, you can accelerate the learning process by learning about mistakes ahead of time. 

This is one of those times. Here are 4 awful ad strategies that will irritate customers, raze your company reputation, and generally dump a lot of hard work down the nearest sewage pipe. Avoid these bad ad strategies at all costs!

1. Content for Its Own Sake

Don’t create advertisements simply because you think you ought to – it does more harm than good. Content for its own sake is basically just a marketing campaign with no foundation—it’s not based in or on anything. Even if your customers/clients happen to forget the bad advertising, it’s not unlikely that they’ll remember the negative or critical feelings they got from seeing it said advertising. Like they say, people will forget what you say, but they’ll remember how you made them feel.

2. A Big Old Can of Spam

Have you ever met anyone who liked receiving junk mail? Have you ever thought fondly of opening your junk mail and really digging into the contents of that spam folder? We didn’t think so. Attracting and holding customer attention? That’s your job, and spam ain’t gonna do it. If you bombard customers with junk mail (unwanted/unsolicited content), you’re damaging your own business’ reputation. Not a great idea. If email is a part of your ad campaigns, try doing it on a semi-weekly or monthly basis. Forget daily – it’s out of the question. The less often you email your leads/clients/customers, the more likely they are to open your messages.

3. Cold Calling 

Just don’t cold call. It really, really doesn’t work. Maybe sometimes you can get lucky with a cold call, but for every cold-call success, think about how many more you’d have enjoyed with a more targeted strategy. In the age of the internet, telemarketing is little more than an annoyance. Customers feel annoyed at the interruption, uncomfortable about ending the call with a hopeful telemarketer, and those feelings will stick around whenever they think about your company in the future. These are associations you don’t want to make. Remember the last time you got really excited about something a telemarketer was offering? No? That’s because it has never happened. If calling is a significant or otherwise important part of your marketing model, stick with customers who have actually signed up to be on your call list, and only call at reasonable times during the day. If you catch them just as they’re sitting down to dinner, you can kiss that customer goodbye.

4. Falling Behind the Times 

Lightning-quick social media spreads trends faster than anything in human history. If you ignore what people are talking about on social media, you’re probably damaging your business and generally wasting the business’ time. As a marketer, you have to know what people want—and where they tend to go in order to get it. If you’re not in on the social party, like it or not, you’re going to fall behind. You need data, trend awareness, the ability to project and predict the direction of public interest (at least within your targeted audience). Skipping social media and failing to pay attention to trends would be like running a physical video-rental store after Netflix went fully digital. Good luck ignoring modernity!