The Five Deadly Sins of Contemporary Marketing Strategies

David Ogilvy, the father of 20th-century advertising, once quipped, “If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.” This same lesson can be applied to contemporary marketing strategies today. Creativity strikes at the core of digital marketing and is the biggest challenge for small and big businesses when trying to generate sales.

After all, how does your brand even begin to be creative (needless to say, stand out) when you are still just trying to figure out what the heck SEO really means? Throw in the hodgepodge constellations of digital marketing acronyms (e.g., PPC, CPM, ROAS, A/B testing), and you’re left spiraling toward a black hole of utter confusion.

So, while you may not understand the market forces behind a dynamic ad-pricing auction, you can educate yourself on the everyday small business digital marketing pitfalls.

Overcoming the Most Common Barriers to Contemporary Marketing Success

As a small business or brand owner, you’re generally left to your own devices to do everything, often with a limited budget! 

This can be challenging for many reasons, the least of which are the many small business marketing pitfalls you’re likely to encounter.

1. Creating Consistent and Engaging Content

Creating consistent and engaging content helps to improve sales, but it’s no easy feat for a small business. Coming up with fresh content consistently is a full-time job. Companies have entire marketing departments dedicated to this task. 

If you’re a small business, besides digital marketing, you’re almost certainly also handling inventory, sourcing products, human resources, and operations, among many other tasks!

An easy way to fix this is to outsource your content creation to a freelancer or specialized agency that can help you pump out high-quality content. Your mileage will vary, and you often get what you pay for with freelancers. 

Another challenge you might face is deciding where to place your focus. Is it worth procuring quality and original content, or do you think generic content designed for advertising will suffice? 

In our experience, it’s always better to publish high-quality, original, and evergreen content–whether generated by you, your team, or your contracted content creator. 

High-quality, consistent, and organic content will remain on the web forever, while a paid advertising campaign will quickly end when the money runs out, which is often sooner than you may expect.

2. Generating Quality Leads and Driving Traffic

Another challenge you might face is getting quality leads that convert to purchases. 

You might run a digital advertising campaign that gets a lot of interested people to click on your ads, but if people don’t actually buy, then the campaign is not very effective. 

This is why segmentation in digital advertising is so important when generating quality leads and traffic.  

For example, if you’re selling wedding dresses, it might make sense to market only in media that women primarily visit, such as online bridal magazines or fashion sites. 

However, this doesn’t mean that you should artificially bias your segmentation. Going back to the above bridal example, if you owned a wedding dress business in Los Angeles, it would make sense for you to run a Facebook campaign targeting unmarried women aged 25-65 living in the Los Angeles area who recently updated their Facebook profile status to “engaged.” 

However, this means you may accidentally exclude the 65+ marriage segment, which saw weddings grow by 54% from 2009 to 2014. You could easily have excluded a potentially lucrative segment without realizing it. 

Contemporary marketing strategies improve the quality of leads, and the many available tools make targeting and segmentation for high-quality leads even easier. It is important to experiment to capture the best leads and drive high-quality traffic to your brand. 

3. Getting to Know Your Target Audience

Another challenge with digital marketing is knowing your target audience. David Ogilvy, full of advertising quips, speaks to this when he says, “the customer is not a moron. She’s your wife.”

After all, how many of us truly understand our spouse’s preferences? Even though you live with them, do you actually know what brands they prefer? Do you know why they’re motivated to buy one type of coconut-scented shampoo over the other? Does your spouse actually care about organic products (or are they only pretending to fit in)? Will a 20% discount convince them to buy more from one brand over another? 

The great thing about digital marketing is you have a lot of data available at your fingertips—more data points = more informed decision-making, which leads to capturing more sales. Take advantage of the data to truly understand your customers!  

4. Sustaining Brand Uniformity Across Multiple Channels

Like point #1, not only is it difficult to be creative, it’s hard to maintain a high level of quality across multiple ad platforms and channels. 

For example, TikTok ads are shorter and vertical in dimension, while YouTube is not. Instagram requires postings of a particular pixel dimension, while Google has its own universe of rules. X may work for big brands, but does it make sense for your small brand?

Without a system to produce content quickly and consistently, you’re often just scrapping things together and firing shots randomly.

Tools such as Canva can help you maintain a consistent brand identity without breaking the bank to hire a designer. Some brands will create an entire social media calendar and schedule content automatically to ensure consistency. A copywriting industry exists to help brands have a voice. 

Does your brand have a consistent, authentic, and uniform voice and design aesthetic across platforms? Does it make sense to play it so uniformly?

5. Optimizing Your Efforts for Mobile Devices

Mobile devices now account for most purchases made online, yet many brands still regard (to their detriment) mobile as secondary. 

Optimizing for mobile is more than just resizing images to fit a smartphone screen. It’s also about creating a more enriching user experience.

Brands that take this seriously often create their own apps, allowing users to do more than possible on a desktop (e.g., IKEA uses augmented reality on smart devices to place furniture in a virtual room). 

If you’re a small business, investing in a mobile app may not make sense, but adapting your copywriting and design to be snappier and cleaner on mobile devices makes sense. These things require effort, but the dividends will surely pay off if you’re willing to invest in the work. 

So, What Contemporary Marketing Strategies Work Best? 

We all understand that contemporary marketing strategies help to improve sales and reach wider audiences. However, there are many different small business digital marketing pitfalls, compounded by the fact that there are equally as many digital marketing platforms and solution providers. 

It’s almost impossible to be effective at EVERY digital marketing channel, so brands often specialize and focus on a few platforms or channels that give them the most traction. 

Any way you slice it, the fundamental goal of these tools and strategies is to produce creative, consistent, high-quality content. There’s a reason why content is always king. It works!

The next time you agonize over investing more in direct advertising, spend more time with the creativity and content.

Does your digital marketing material sound like every other copycat brand? Perhaps it’s time to reconsider and try a different approach. 

If your brand works well with email marketing, capitalize on that channel. If SEOs are critical to your business, take the time to invest in producing content that directly answers the queries your customers are searching for on Google. Experiment with affiliates, and always have mobile in mind.