Halloween is a truly spooky time of year that features horror movies aplenty. Yet those monsters creeping in the dark aren’t half as terrifying as certain scary mistakes in marketing. They ought to send marketers running away screaming, but just like the teens in horror flicks, unsuspecting businesses will walk straight into the jaws of doom. In today’s post, we’ve collected a trio of advertising horrors along with the tips you need to survive and avoid marketing mistakes like them for a happier, more successful Halloween.
Not Targeting a Specific Audience
This is a particularly scary mistake that’s sure to creep up on you. While trying to target everyone sounds like it ought to make your company appealing to the widest audience, in truth it will cause you to miss the mark with everyone. That, in turn, means you’re wasting both your time and marketing budget on top of generating minimal results.
How To Avoid:
You see, personalized marketing is more meaningful to audiences and allows you to appeal to them in a way that can influence their purchase decisions. Determine your target demographics that are most likely to use a business like yours, then make efforts to understand how they like to be communicated with. This will allow you to pick the best medium to reach them. For instance, when designing a radio campaign, you can make the strategic decision to use the radio stations and programs that target your goal demographic.
Not Focusing Your Content on a Specific Purpose
Making sure your advertising is seen and heard by the right audience isn’t enough to ensure you get the treats instead of the tricks this Halloween. If you’re creating content just to have content, no one is going to care about it. There’s nothing to make them care about your business, remember your advertising, or take any action.
How To Avoid:
As we mentioned, you need to target your audience to choose the right content mediums; you also need to do so in order to craft the right message. Choosing topics, designs, and creative that appeal to your audience will catch their attention. Be sure you take this a step further by including a powerful call-to-action, like linking to premium content related to the topic or promoting it in your radio ad, to ensure your audience does more than simply consume your content.
Not Optimizing Your Content
You don’t want your audience to get lost in the dark woods, but that’s exactly what will happen if you’re not optimizing your content for discoverability. You can produce the best content that will convert lots of people into paying customers, but it won’t mean anything if they never actually find your content or connect it to your business and your website.
How To Avoid:
Always leverage keywords. In your website design and static content, you should utilize keywords that help your business stand out when people use certain search terms. This is even more important for your content because SEO rankings are determined on web page by web page basis; by creating amazing content featuring the right keywords, you lift your rankings and make it easier for your audience to find you.
Heed our warning and avoid marketing mistakes like these in the future! Always have a specific audience, craft content with purpose, and optimize your content for discoverability. Otherwise, these three scary mistakes in marketing will wreak havoc like it’s Mischief Night, leaving you struggling to clean up your results instead of enjoying the fun and success of a great Halloween.
