Things Marketers Should Stop Doing in 2020

Its once again the start of the year with more predictions, gyaan and everything else you need to know about the things you need to go and everything else you need to stop doing in 202O.

Personally, 2019 has been great learning for me with a few side projects I've worked on and people I have met over the year, experiments that failed and few experiments that worked like a charm.

Here’s to a happy, healthy, and successful New Year! Its time when we ideate and think about what we should implement-test and try out things differently to make our year successful

Learnings: Things Marketers should stop doing in 2020

But over time I understood there are few things you shouldn't do and worry about.I have tested these things as many times as possible at various instances

• Using too many forms in landing pages /websites/Popups
• Relying too much on paid acquisition
• Buying paid links to rank better
• Choosing content quality over quantity
• Trying to market your product to everyone in prospect accounts
• using non - conversational chatbots which can't understand intent and psychographics

1. Using too many forms in landing pages- Forms are a great asset in "Lead Nurturing process" but too many of them would, in turn, your visitors to never visit your website again

Use case - Alternatively, if you want to have the inbound funnel filling at 2X speed, you can choose to have intent-based popups with multiple trigger points at various landing pages which have high exit rates

You can use your GA to find out which of your pages have high exit rates

Analytics -> Behaviour -> Site content -> exit pages

-> Look for pages or blogs with above 75 % exit rate and add intent popups which trigger a user to fill details.

Triggers in B2C

- Spin wheel offer - promo code

-Offer on next purchase

-Free shipping offers

Triggers in B2B

• Ebook on Best Industry practices
• Free trial -> extended free trial
• webinar recording
• Client case study
• Free 1:1 Consultation

Here is an interesting Journey suggested by -Stephen Wenger

Lead Management is an exchange of valuable information for personal information. That is as old as mankind. A trade.

? Use a journey

? Ask for one piece of information and give one piece of content. E.g.:

- e-mail address for a whitepaper

- first and last name for a webinar

- job title and company for a case study

? Picture a puzzle. That‘s how you gather a full picture of the user/customer step by step

? Go an kill your contact form with it’s 10 mandatory fields. It’s not working

Relying too much on Acquisition - Paid acquisition is the most important channel is you want to fill your marketing funnel but you need to nurture these leads a lot for at least 3-4 weeks before you pitch your product or service

Paid acquisition should be one of your marketing channel, but not the only marketing channel for your company

"Uber's of the world" are completely focussing on paid acquisition like spending 10x of acquiring users vs LTV

Acquisition cost

# of Clicks X Visit-to-Lead Conversion Rate = # of Leads

Netflix user Acquisition cost for year 2019

Buying Paid links to Rank better-

More Links = Better ranking and obviously better visibility.

Many of us do pay for links including me till few months, but until I found an outreach method of sending one email per day will give you the same results which you get through buying links from multiple sources like

There are multiple tools like (Mailshake, lemlist ) which can help you to automate your Backlink outreach with free templates

Good things all the outreach tools come up with a great template for every situation, you can pick up one of the templates which suits for you

My Approach of getting Backlinks

Step-1:- Identify keywords which you want to rank for

Look for keywords with Avg volume of 1000-1500 in your niche

Step-2:- Identify at least 30 blogs in the niche you want to rank for

Step-3: Have atleast 5 blogs ready which you want to acquire blogs which are ranking among 1st 10 pages

Step-4 - Use Linkedin sales navigator +Phantombuster/ Texau to identify key people and their contacted details.

Step-5 - use email sequences with a follow-up email to perform your outreach

Choosing content Quality over Quantity

Every page that’s published on your website is a great opportunity to appear on the search engine results page. Generally, this leads to a higher percentage of traffic coming from organic search over time. That’s a good thing, but if the content is poor, and the online signals it creates are identified as such by Google, the search benefits could be lame

There's also strong evidence that content quantity benefits lead generation.

Companies like HubSpot, G2crowd, Freshworks and Drift do a great job in leveraging inbound marketing to fill their lead funnel pipeline with high-Quality marketing qualified leads, you should go check their blogs and resources section

Quality content is in the eye of every searcher who is looking for information - but at the same time, you can produce the world’s greatest masterpiece, but if no one reads, it or can find it, there is something wrong with your content marketing strategy .

There are a lot of companies in B2B space who blog not more than twice or trice per month and they still try to perform well on search with high-quality content

Organic Virality is no more a dream if you identify the right persona and intent of your users by having the right structure to your blog

*Your job is never done once you publish your blog you should continuously optimise it for keywords, tags, keywords, backlinks,..etc

Trying to market your product to everyone in prospect accounts-

Persona is your first step to better marketing

If you are selling a sales automation then your ideal persona would be people in sales teams

If you are selling a chatbot tool then you are ideal persona would be people in marketing and growth teams

There are enough examples I can think of where I have seen people prospecting to everyone in the company whatever the product they are selling , you're are not only wasting your time but also wasting other person time who has nothing to do with your product

using non - conversational chatbots which can't understand intent and psychographics

One of the main goal of implementing a chatbot in your website to provide the user with a conversational experience during his journey

@Drift is one of the chatbot platforms which I love for reasons like

-Conditional triggers

-intent-based triggers

-Multi-touch triggers

-Playbooks

-user routing

-Retargeting

content engagement triggers

Like drift, there are many other conversational chatbot platforms like many chat, intercom. etc

Final thoughts

If you haven't screwed things up, then you haven't learned anything new. Every marketing experiment should be a learning opportunity to make things better

if you choose to do 100 experiments 10 experiments would work, even I made mistakes that are not new

If you recognize any of the mistakes in the list above, don’t feel bad: remember that you are not alone in making them, and use this realization as an opportunity to avoid them in the future.

Cheers to a successful 2020!

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