If you want your business to remain in the world of the living, you can’t be afraid to partner with a fearless digital marketing agency like Leverage Digital. We’ll equip you with all the weapons you need to prevent your brand from walking among the undead. When you waste your money on outdated marketing and advertising, your business can become possessed by a spirit that doesn’t fit your brand. Now, that’s scary.
Halloween is approaching and the malevolent ghosts of dead brands are playing tricks on businesses. Not all marketing strategies are effective; there are tricks and there are treats. If your business wants to avoid mummified web design and zombified content marketing that fails to log conversions, you need to be able to tell the difference between obsolete marketing tricks and innovative marketing treats.
Branding – Treat
Halloween is just like any other day of the year if you don’t dress up in a costume, and your business will be just like any other business if you don’t develop a strong brand. If you go door to door without a costume, nobody will be encouraged to give you candy. The same is true for your business; without a strong brand woven into every aspect of your business, customers won’t feel particularly motivated to purchase your products or services.
Branding is a powerful tool. Just look at iconic companies like Coca-Cola, Ford, and John Deere; they all possess instantly recognizable brands that help them connect with customers and drive revenue. When you develop a trusted brand, you’ll never have to worry about scaring away customers.
Billboards – Trick
Some agencies are trying to resurrect billboards as an effective advertising platform. Unfortunately, their attempts to give life to this outdated, virtually extinct form of advertising has lead to inept billboards that lack the ability to track conversions, views, and engagement. Billboards are like Frankenstein, they’re large and imposing, but they can’t clearly communicate your brand’s message and are an eyesore for locals. Billboards are best left resting in peace on the side of the highway.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Treat
SEO is the backbone of digital marketing, so if your business is lacking a strong SEO strategy, the result could be spine-tingling. Maintaining a high ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) helps your business boost traffic to its website and prevents you from joining the vampires on pages 3 and 4 who rarely see the light of day. In order for your SEO strategy to deliver the results you desire, you need to make a strong commitment and remain patient. Organic results take time, but once you’ve established yourself as a page one resident, your business won’t need to fear returning to the land of the dead.
Direct Marketing – Trick
If your business sells physical products, but you don’t have the capital or reputation to procure shelf space in retail stores, you can partner with a direct marketing agency to have your products sold in stores like Costco and Sam’s Club. Unfortunately, direct marketers require your business to supply promotional materials like cutouts, signs, and pamphlets to garnish tables staffed by underpaid college graduates who earn commission or hourly exclusively depending on their sales numbers.
Direct marketers often resemble zombies as they pursue customers around stores with arms outstretched, one hand clutching a hair dryer designed by Kim Kardashian’s stylist and in the other, an activated charcoal face cream promoted by Beyonce. They can be overly persistent, which means driving customers away from your brand is just as easy as driving them to it. Direct marketing might help you sell off some stock in the short term, but the damage to your branding will haunt you forever.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – Treat
If you’re already running a successful SEO campaign, you can boost its efficacy by implementing a PPC campaign, too. In addition to getting listed twice on SERPs, you increase click-throughs to your site and the probability of conversion. It’s easy to get spooked when you invest in a multi-tiered strategy that combines SEO and PPC, but this potent combination works together like garlic and silver bullets to keep your business safe from the marketing monsters.
Television Commercials – Trick
Commercials crawl out of your customers’ televisions to scare away their program for an extra thirty seconds, so it comes as no surprise that people aren’t particularly fond of them. Today, cable television is merely a skeleton of what it once was and the prevalence of streaming services like Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime have led to an influx of “cord cutting,” or canceling cable subscriptions.
Cable service providers are losing hundreds of thousands of subscribers every year and streaming services are the ones digging their graves. Insights from Nielsen can give you a small-picture perspective of the success of your commercial, but television is outclassed in nearly every way by digital marketing. If you are still interested in representing your brand with video, you can shoot trendy video content on a budget without investing in a full-fledged commercial.
When you partner with an award-winning digital marketing agency like Leverage Digital, you can rest easy knowing that your business is supported with valiant branding that helps you survive the zombie marketing apocalypse. Stay away from ill-conceived marketing strategies that leave your business dead in the water and embrace innovative marketing solutions that keep your brand shining.
Running a business is scary. With competition at all-time highs, there’s never been a more vital time to differentiate your brand from the competition. By outfitting your brand with a customized digital marketing strategy from Leverage Digital, you can outclass your competition on every front and grow your business. Our agency busts the bad marketing ghosts and focuses on strategies that help your business succeed in the world of the living.
