With the right marketing plan, you set yourself—and your clients—up for success. However, the opposite is also true. When you use outdated marketing tactics, you can damage your brand and tarnish your reputation. While it's sometimes difficult to make a good impression, it's often all too easy to make a negative impression. And when you do, customers remember it.

Bestselling author and business owner Aimee Tariq says there are some marketing moves that sales professionals and business owners should retire if they want to get the results they desire. In this issue of Promotional Consultant Today, we take a look at six marketing strategies to avoid.

1. Trying to serve people en masse. Blanket personalization doesn't work. Instead, it's better to cater to people as individuals. If you're not already collecting data on your customers and using it to target specific demographics through your marketing efforts, Tariq encourages you to start. Doing the bare minimum, such as addressing a customer by first name when you send a promotional email, simply isn't enough anymore.

2. Relying solely on paper marketing. What do you do with most of the mail that arrives at your home or office? Do you read it? Brochures and flyers can be expensive and time-consuming to produce, and, depending on your audience, may not be the most effective marketing media to reach prospects.

3. Neglecting your video production. Tariq advises marketers to avoid videos with stock content, vague business words and optimistic background music as these are outdated and overproduced. Instead, aim to create videos that your customers will find valuable.

4. Being overly promotional on social media. Expect to lose customers if you use social media only to advertise. According to Sprout Social, 77 percent of consumers are more likely to buy from the companies they follow on social media. But making money should never be your sole purpose on the app, according to Tariq. After all, customers abandon brands that are overly promotional on social media. Before you think about social as an advertisement, consider how you can use it to drive engagement and strengthen your brand's following.

5. Moving away from email. Email marketing isn't dead. In fact, when done well, you can capture your audience's attention and lead them down the sales funnel. Tariq adds that marketing your services or products by email can be a quick, manageable and cost-effective method of reaching new clients and keeping the existing ones.

6. Failing to go beyond the basics. Digital marketing is constantly changing, which means there are more analytics you can put into your marketing strategy than ever before. You may believe that the measures you're currently using are fine, but they can likely be much better. Tariq says that the more you study analytics and put them to use, the better your ROI will become.

If your marketing approach needs to be modernized, start with the guidance above. You'll help move your customers forward and improve your bottom line.
 
Source: Aimee Tariq is founder and CEO of A Life With Health. She is most passionate about empowering professionals to live their best lives by removing toxic triggers and maximizing energy, focus and productivity. At the age of 23 she became a No. 1 bestselling author for health optimization.