Looking to build more customers online? Here are a few marketing tactics you don’t want to use. Some are disingenuous. Others are plain annoying. In all cases, you’re best off avoiding them.

Buying followers

Having a large social media following can make your business look popular and well established. However, when acquiring followers, buying them isn’t the right way of going about doing it. A sudden boost in new followers will make your existing followers suspicious. These follows are also likely to be from unused accounts, so they won’t interact with your posts, making your large following seem even more fishy.

You’re far better off acquiring followers naturally by encouraging friends, family and customers to follow you, as well as promoting posts. Posting regularly and making your content entertaining will help to encourage followers.

Faking reviews

When you post fake reviews of your business, you’re lying to yourself. Fake reviews are usually easy to spot and you can get into trouble if you get caught out (some review sites like Tripadvisor are cracking down on them).

Whilst it is important to build a good online reputation through positive reviews, you need to build these reviews naturally. You can do this by asking every happy customer you work with to leave a review – many will be kind enough to do so.

Keyword stuffing

Using keywords can help to bump up your rankings, but you should be careful of using too many keywords. Many readers can be distracted by text containing too many keywords. The likes of Google are also able to detect when someone has stuffed a page with too many keywords and have resorted to negatively ranking these pages.

By using a company such as SEOExplode, you can improve your rankings in a more organic fashion. Such companies are able to use keywords and other SEO tricks that don’t come across spammy.

Pop-up overuse

Pop-ups are a common way of encouraging visitors to read information – however they tend to annoy most people. Too many pop-ups on your site could even cause visitors to leave your website out of frustration.

Pop-ups do have their place – they can be useful for getting people to sign up to mailing lists for instance. However, you shouldn’t really have more than one pop-up appearing per page.

Email spamming

Email lists can be a way of keeping customers loyal, however you should be wary of sending out too many emails. The recipient will either

a) start to ignore your emails

b) unsubscribe from your mailing list, or

c) won’t see your emails as they’ll be marked as spam.

Unless you’ve got lots of people on your mailing list that regularly open your emails, stick to no more than two emails per week and focus on creating quality content. You can use tools like Mailchimp to send out emails.  

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