Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the business world has seen a massive wave of marketing redundancies and unethical practices, with brands operating in panic mode. To do more with less, these marketers are creating the perfect storm for themselves in a desperate attempt to fuel their lead generation funnels using some maddening B2B marketing tactics.
In this arriver, I’ll talk about the rise of unethical and duplicate B2B marketing and share five annoying B2B marketing tactics to avoid and eliminate from your strategy.
The Rise of Unethical and Duplicate B2B Marketing
As a marketer, you want to make honest claims to attract your desired target audience. The idea is to build trust by fostering a positive perception, so people see your brand as honest and genuine. Unfortunately, unethical marketing, the flip side of this coin, is becoming unusually popular, with many brands sending the wrong messages out to prospects about their products and services for one-time or short-term gains. Popular practices include:
▪ False or Misleading advertising
▪ Spamming (Consent-less communication)
▪ Emotional exploitation
▪ Fear incitement
▪ Plagiarism
▪ Smearing competitors
▪ Hidden fees
▪ Scare tactics, etc.
Secondly, whether you turn on the TV or tune into social media, you’re likely to be bombarded with commercials, ads, and other forms of promotional content. This shows we have entered an era when marketing and advertising are not only pervasive but also repetitive. However, in the business world, duplicate marketing has become rather controversial and counter-intuitive.
Promoting your goods and services requires skill and artistry, whether you’re selling to consumers or businesses. It only works when you make it hard for your target audience to forget who you are and what you do. However, by forcing the audience to remember through redundant content, you’re practically forcing them to ignore it.
According to consumer psychology, this practice usually backfires. The more eager businesses are to sell their products and services, the more reluctant customers become to buy them. This not only affects the overall marketing ROI but also can have a drastic effect on your brand and product image.
5 Tactics to Eliminate from Your B2B Marketing Strategy
With the business world rapidly evolving into the new normal, now is the time to sit down and revamp your marketing strategy to get the best return on investment. However, instead of adopting new marketing tactics, you should start by eliminating the ones potentially damaging your progress. Here are five annoying B2B marketing tactics to avoid:
1. Email Redundancy and False Campaigns
Congratulations! You’ve adopted a powerful email automation solution to reach out to your business prospects quickly and cost-effectively. However, if you overuse email marketing, your emails will likely end up in your recipient’s spam instead of their inbox.
Moreover, according to Hubspot, one of the main reasons prospects unsubscribe from email campaigns is that the emails fail to offer promotions or content described in the subscription promotion. The problem is most modern brands are eager to sell their products as quickly as possible. As a result, they fail to build trust or have any impact on the prospects’ minds.
Therefore, if you’re planning to use email marketing, perhaps, you should provide more practical, empathetic, and educational content so your prospects can learn about your business and your value proposition.
2. Confusing Advertising with Marketing
Another annoying B2B marketing tactic is flooding your prospects’ social media feeds with ads and promotional content. Unfortunately, many marketers believe running Google or Facebook ads equals marketing. Undoubtedly, advertising is a huge part of marketing. However, just focusing on ads without any organic inbound marketing either shows the lack of a long-term strategy or an unsustainable one.
Ideally, your marketing strategy should combine organic content with earned media placement activities, so you can expand your reach long-term. Ads are great for short-term success, but they fail to build trust or authenticity – both crucial branding elements.
3. Being a Marketing Lone Wolf
In the age of data-driven digital marketing, trying to be a one-person show usually backfires, especially if you’re working with colleagues. Failing to delegate marketing activities and trying to do everything can stretch you out so much that you make fatal marketing mistakes or decisions that could upset both your team and customers.
With the abundance of skills and technologies, B2B marketers can’t handle every aspect of their marketing due to the lack of time, expertise, or money. Therefore, you should stay focused on your specific area and prioritize your activities. More importantly, you should be ready to bring in experts to fill any gaps in your marketing mix.
4. Complacency and Redundancy
Another annoying tactic that upsets customers is duplication marketing, as discussed above. Doing the same thing over and over again might work for a while but over time, it might become effective, resulting in poor conversion and wasted marketing budget. Redundancy might also be perceived as a lack of creativity which can harm your brand’s reputation.
Therefore, you need to spice things up and keep testing. You might not get the desired results every time, but by learning and revising, you’d eventually find what makes your audience tick and try to replicate it differently.
5. Agency Apathy
When marketers are short on time and resources, they often fail to share their expectations clearly with their sponsors and media partners. This can be incredibly dangerous from both a financial and reputation perspective. By failing to give clear, concise feedback, causing delays, or overcomplicating briefs, you’re likely to annoy your partners.
Instead, you should try to get the most out of your partners during this period via collaborative conversations and resolutions. By taking the latter route, you’re bound to waste money and potentially lose your partners.
Wrapping Up
And there you have it – 5 annoying B2B marketing tactics to avoid in the new normal. As a marketer, now is the time to rethink your marketing strategy as businesses enter Q2 2022 with new initiatives and targets. If you’re looking to build strategic and scalable partnerships with other businesses, you’ll need to focus on driving growth using innovative, creative, and engaging marketing tactics and activities.