5 Digital Marketing Cliches You must Avoid

You have a business and you know how important the internet is to increase sales and survive in today’s world. You must have heard hundreds of tips out there or even formed your own opinion of how best to follow any digital marketing strategy for your company.

The problem is that you are often following a strategy that is not the best idea you had for your business or even something that there are so many companies using that has become a cliché for your potential customers and may even cause a bad impression about your company.

In this article, we have separated some clichés and the best way to deal with each one.

Cliche 1: Our Company is the Best

It’s everywhere and not just in digital advertising: It’s on billboards, banners, radio calls, Google Ads, social media, email marketing. Everywhere there is a company whose name is that it is the best company in that segment, technically called the use of superlatives.

The great truth is that in a company, mainly in the B2B business, having some kind of differential that makes it the best of a segment in general aspects is something very rare. And even if it was true to use superlatives praising yourself, it can be a negative sign for a potential prospect of your business.

Not to mention that there are rules of self-regulation that do not allow any company to use superlatives for itself. There are also platforms like Google ads that have already condemned the use of superlatives or comparison with competitors in ads, except in cases where an independent authority confirms that your company is the best in the industry in some respect.

So avoid comparing yourself with your competitors using phrases like “we are the best”

Cliche 2: Exaggerated Positivism

It’s been a long time since I remember seeing a company landing page with the main image of a person celebrating some kind of victory, or an image of a group of people doing exaggerated celebrations for something like the example below:

exaggerated positivism in digital marketing

This kind of exaggerated positivism can make your company less original to its customers because it portrays a fanciful situation. A fanciful situation can be interpreted by your client as an attempt to deceive him about the qualities of his work.

If you are going to use an image that portrays your company or the services it provides, try to be soberer and more real – portray more realistic situations and thus gain the attention of your potential customer.

Yes, I know here at the agency we also celebrate some things, we clap, we celebrate victories, etc. But this excess of positives has become more of a cliché in the digital world and portraying it can put your company on a par with all those others.

Happy people in a digital marketing agency

It is important to portray a group of happy people or celebrating something but opt ​​for more normal images without excessive positivism.

Cliche 3: We want to be recognized as the…

Everyone is looking for digital marketing to be recognized as an industry reference. “I want to be recognized as a reference for footwear sales over the internet“. And here I am not referring specifically to what you communicate with your client, but in the way that you set your marketing and advertising goals for your company.

It’s nice to want to be the next Amazon, but I’ve seen a lot of people who come to us at the agency with the aim of raising brand awareness.

Raising brand awareness is something very specific in digital marketing and it is not something that you do and achieve super results in a year, nor something that you get unless you have millions in budget to invest in marketing in the coming months.

The main objective of digital marketing should in most cases be to capture leads for your sales team and thus increase sales.

Not that digital marketing is not going to make your company known, that’s not it – I am referring here to your main digital marketing strategy, which is 99% of the cases must be a direct response, ie lead generation for sales.

Cliché 4: My Site must be first on Google.

Another cliché of digital marketing that has existed for more than a decade and is still very frequent, is the idea that it is important to appear first in Google’s results.

Here there are two different situations that we should portray each of them: that is to appear for a keyword in the first position in the natural results and the other is that it is to have the first result in the paid results.

First place in organic results

When it comes to natural results in search engines (SEO), of course, the value of appearing first in search engines for something that your customers search for with certain frequency, that is, with a high search volume, is undeniable. But in this case, there is still the question of what the difficulty would be and consequently the cost of placing your website in the first place in the natural results. This is a point that we are not going to detail now, we are not going to focus here on search engine optimization for this topic, we are going to focus here more on the idea of ​​staying first in paid results, that is, by Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords).

First place in paid results (Google Ads)

When it comes to having the first place for keywords in Google ads or sponsored links, there is a difference between the natural results. I do not recommend aiming for any strategy in a Google ads campaign, having the first place for Google ads.

Results from old AdWords Ads

First place in paid search results should not be the main objective of your Google Ads campaign, of course having a well-positioned ad is positive, but trying to get your ad on the top of paid search results is something that can be very expensive and quickly make your ROI stall: imagine investing R $ 1,000 and earning only R $ 500. It would be a nightmare, correct? So always do the ROI calculation as this is a likely scenario if you get into a bidding war with your competitors first.

CTR graph by Google Ads ad position

The correct way to manage your Google Ads campaign is to choose the lowest possible bid that can consume your Google Ads campaign budget. If the budget for example that you intend to invest is R $ 1,000 in one day and you manage to balance the budget with a low CPC, you should invest a smaller amount per click to appear in the 4th position than in the first position.

And again it is not to be misunderstood that it is bad to be first in Google ads, but that this should not be the main objective and that one should not get into a bidding war.

There are strategies that make you better positioned in Google Ads that go beyond the value of CPC such as having an attractive ad, with high CTR%, or using ad extensions properly.

To avoid this to be first in Google ads, it can be very expensive and inefficient for your campaign.

Cliché 5: My Sales Are 100% Online

The dream of every entrepreneur, especially in the e-commerce segment, is to create an automatic sales system. The dream scenario is one where the agency creates a strategy to attract its segmented audience, the prospect accesses the website and makes the purchase through the cart, that is, a fully online and automatic sale.

Of course, one of the advantages of digital marketing is being able to create a campaign that ends up becoming a continuous process that matches your sales process, but sales automation itself is still a big challenge. Believing that your e-commerce sales can be 100% automatic is a serious failure for not correctly understanding your target audience’s buying journey.

The truth is that this scenario of 100% selling online is just a dream, a fantasy. Although most sales are online, an e-commerce company should try to stay as close to its customer as possible to assist in the sales process. Using your inbox only to answer questions from your customers without proper follow-up will make you lose a lot of money.

fantasy

You should rather invest in a good online system where your customer can access your website and make purchases or provide lead data to your sales team at 3:00 am, but you should never neglect human service channels like example a good phone conversation.

Always give the customer the option to contact and ask questions about the products or your company before making the purchase. And this goes beyond providing a sales phone number in the header of the site, use other strategies to let your customer communications, such as making contact data capture via chatbot and making a Whatsapp number available to all your customers.

Come to me

Linked to this issue, a common mistake of those who make online sales is not to pursue contact when they get in touch to answer questions about a product.

Conclusion

So you should not be in a passive position before your customers to wait for them to decide to make the purchase. If your customer provided the data and asked a few questions about your product, you should keep track of whether he actually made the purchase.

A good strategy is to take all the doubts from the customer and wait a maximum period of 1 day, then you must actively contact this customer and follow up until he declares to have abandoned the purchase or to complete the purchase at the end.

In order to properly monitor your customer in these situations, your sales team must use some type of CRM to monitor the process. Hubspot has a free CRM forever very good.

To avoid waiting for your customer to come to you and make the purchase online, if you have the contact of a customer who has engaged in answering questions about your product, call him and follow up. This type of process will increase your company’s customer acquisition.

Get Digital Services