The Scariest Things to Say to a Marketer

Marketers are multi-taskers, big thinkers, dedicated researchers and always working with a variety of clients and departments, which leaves very little left to surprise them.

However, there are a few phrases that if a marketer hears, they are sure to quiver.
 

The following are 5 of the scariest things a marketer will hear throughout their career.
 

"We bought an email list."

This is not something that a marketer is going to want to hear. To start off, utilizing a list of emails that you purchased violates the rules of consent outlined in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This is a European act that legally requires recipients to explicitly consent to emails by opting-in to communications coming from your organization. Beyond the legalities, this strategy will likely end in failure as the addresses for sale are usually of low-quality and unresponsive anyway. The address you bought may have been contacted dozens of times in the past already and they will ignore any messages you send. Even if you try to establish a positive relationship with the recipient, your reputation has already been tarnished due to the negative views surrounding companies that send unsolicited spam emails.

Instead, try implementing strategies that will organically increase your email lists. Offer free resources, such as webinars or templates, to a user if they sign up for your newsletter or provide free access to tools that are usually gated on your site when they submit their email. By adding a value proposition, people are more likely to sign up for emails or a newsletter. To increase your contacts even more, turn to social media and your other marketing channels to promote the free resources. Once you have an inflow of email signups, you can focus on curating the perfect email to send out!
 

"We don't use social media."

In the United States, 82 percent of the population uses social media, making it fast and easy to increase brand awareness and reach your target audience. Globally, the average user spends about two hours and 25 minutes on social media every day. This creates the perfect opportunity to promote curated content and drive traffic to your site through actively posting and optimizing your profiles. Additionally, social media is the place to directly interact with followers to increase their engagement and even serve as another destination for customers to reach out with questions or concerns. If you implement strategies successfully, the benefits compound as 71% of consumers that have a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend it to their friends and family.
 
The tracking capabilities available will provide valuable insights into your audience that can be used to make educated decisions about your marketing strategy. Outside of the benefits coming from your own pages, social media also provides a convenient way to keep track of what your competition is posting and how consumers are reacting to their content. 
 

"Facebook is down."

After learning how impactful social media can be for your marketing efforts, you can imagine the horror of marketers everywhere when Facebook and Instagram shut down at the beginning of October. Fortunately, the outage only lasted about five hours, but during that time businesses had lost a form of communication with their customers and their social media schedules were put on hold. Since then, Instagram Stories have also gone down, making user engagement more difficult as Instagram’s poll and question features are used to gain instant feedback from followers. This teaches a valuable lesson about having several backup plans and utilizing multichannel marketing. Multichannel marketing allows you to reach a wider variety of users by implementing your marketing strategy in a variety of channels. These can include both traditional and digital channels such as direct mail, social media, and paid advertising.
 

"We don't need tracking."

You spend time, money and effort to curate and promote content but without the appropriate tracking methods, you will never know if the campaign was a success. Tracking is a marketer's best friend because everything from website traffic to follower engagement provides vital data that can be used to evaluate your page’s performance. If you are not currently tracking, start now because the longer period you have recorded, the more insights into trends you can understand. Going forward, you can utilize those insights to edit your marketing strategy to better reflect the users’ engagements and set realistic goals. There are many tools that can help analyze your data, but make sure to pay attention to the relevant points that affect your overall goals. For example, if you are trying to build brand awareness, engagement rate and impressions should be your focus over conversion rates.

Most social platforms provide their own analytics, but you can also use other tools, such as Hootsuite or HubSpot, to simplify and better understand your data. Google Analytics is a free tool that tracks web analytics such as bounce rate, the number of visitors to your site, and how many pages they visited. Within Google Analytics, they offer a number of tools that can help you dive deeper into the performance of your website.
 

"The deadline was moved up."

Marketers are managing the brand, producing promotional materials, creating content and handling other responsibilities, so when they hear that a deadline has been pushed forward, it may cause a moment of panic. In order to prepare for this possibility, make sure you are staying organized and setting realistic goals throughout your day. Be sure to record your strategies and processes from past projects to look back on and utilize going forward. Outside of keeping checklists and a neat desk, make sure you are still taking plenty of breaks so that your mind can stay fresh and uncluttered.

In a world where social media platforms are constantly changing and new ones emerging, marketers are usually ready for anything that can be thrown their way, but there are still a few things that can startle them. Be sure to utilize these helpful strategies and you can avoid a day of fright!