Marketing is supposed to be a means of attracting new customers – not pushing them away. If your tactics are annoying, you’ll likely end up doing the latter. A few examples of marketing strategies that can be viewed as annoying include overusing pop-ups on your website, posting unwanted flyers through people’s doors or relentlessly cold-calling customers.
To make sure that your marketing strategy isn’t driving customers away, here are five tips for making your marketing less annoying.
Be less salesy and more informational
Over the last decade, there’s been a big shift to focusing on informing the customer rather than relying on persuasive language. Customers don’t want to hear you harking on about how your product is the best – they want facts and figures to prove it. By presenting the customer with detailed information on your product, you can win over their trust without having to do much persuasion. Informative content marketing campaigns can often have a big impact on generating leads – this content marketing strategy checklist offers a few steps on how to deliver a successful content marketing campaign. Content doesn’t even have to revolve around your product – it’s possible to generate leads simply by handing out relevant advice.
Allow customers time to digest information
Being too pushy will almost certainly annoy your customers. Your customers need time to digest information, so don’t bombard them with new information and offers straight away. Bombarding a visitor with multiple pop-ups as soon as they visit your site is a common example of this – trigger some pop-ups to appear only after a visitor has been on your site for a certain amount of time. Similarly, when selling to someone in person or over the phone, make sure to speak slowly and don’t talk over customers.
Know who your audience are
Make sure that you’re not targeting people who are unlikely to have any interest in your product. This is particularly important with invasive marketing tactics such as posting flyers through people’s doors or cold-calling people. Know who your target audience are and focus on these types of people.
Don’t tell lies
We all get annoyed when lied to. In business, it can be particularly dangerous, as you could risk getting sued if a customer can prove you’ve told a lie. Only present information that you know is true. If your product has flaws, you can use some of these tactics to help promote your flawed product.
Ask yourself, ‘would I get annoyed by this?’
When engaging in any marketing strategy, ask yourself if you would ordinarily find such a tactic annoying if a business was using this tactic on you. If the answer is ‘yes’, it’s probably not a tactic worth using. Some people are more susceptible to certain marketing tactics, so you shouldn’t completely discount certain types of marketing. However, you should consider what it is that makes a certain type of marketing annoying – you may be able to learn from spammy emails or irritating pop-ups directed towards you and use them to make your own marketing campaigns less annoying.