It's easy for marketing managers to become overwhelmed by all the buzzwords and trends vying for their attention nowadays. SEO, social media platforms, real-time analytics, paid advertising, mobile advertising — the list goes on. Some of these things should remain critical components of your marketing strategy; others, however, can get tossed in the proverbial trash.
Lucky for all of us, our friends over at Hubspot produced a tremendously insightful piece articulating what, precisely, can get cut from your strategy to drive marketing optimization. And here are the ten components that can go:
1. The On-Page SEO Fixation — Optimizing your own Web content for SEO can be full time work, and it can involve trying to "game" the system, namely, Google's algorithm. And guess what? The payoff isn't worth the time. Hubspot recommends marketing managers simply "eat their vegetables," meaning focusing on keywords, links, user experience, and conversions.
2. The Firehose Blast of Blog Content — Blogging remains an important part of any modern marketing strategy, but publishing a ton of long-winded, uninteresting, and re-purposed content will get you nowhere. Most firms can get by posting only once a day; just make sure the post is 500-750 words and directly speaks to reader interest.
3. Your Go-To Marketing Offer — We all have our favorite fall-back marketing offer that we whip out when we need a quick conversion. However, like anything else, if you use it to much, its value will become diluted. Think outside the box and create new offers that will intrigue prospects.
4. Those Millions of Microsites — Back in the day, the notion of creating and managing smaller sites to drive in-bound quality links to your site seemed reasonable. Reality suggests otherwise. It takes a lot of work to manage these smaller sites and besides, since the links are coming from your own sub-site, the links themselves aren't even "high-quality." Instead, kick it old school: attract good, old-fashioned organic inbound links.
5. All That Over-Reporting — There isn't much value in the 60 page metrics report. No one reads it, especially your boss who is primarily concerned with but a handful of metrics. Less reporting, not more.
6. Pretty Much All of Your Press Releases — Press releases help get the word out, but if it's generating high-quality inbound links you're after, they're not worth it. Take the time you'd normally spend on press releases and instead create quality blog content that attracts better links.
7. Your Untargeted Paid Media Spend — Your advertising dollars are finite and any cent that is spent without targeting and customization is essentially useless. The technology is there, so target your ads to the people you want to reach, particularly on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
8. That Mobile App You're Developing — Creating a mobile app just for the sake of it won't yield much value. That's because, among other things, 25% percent of apps are downloaded only once and never used again. We're a low-attention span society, after all. Instead, Hubspot recommends brands optimize their website for the mobile experience.
9. Your Unneeded Website Redesign — Speaking of Web optimization, many site redesigns, in the big scheme of things, are unnecessary (and expensive.) Take an incremental approach, be practical, and conduct A/B testing to determine which components need tweaking.
10. Those Social Networks No One Uses — Do your buyer personas frequent, say, Pinterest? No? Then why is your brand spending so much time and money on the network? Understand where your leads and customers are spending their time and allocate your resources accordingly.
What steps are you taking to drive marketing optimization? What items not mentioned in this piece are unnecessary? What items in this piece, are, in fact, important to your brand, and why?
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