Honestly, we get it. Marketing companies can be pretty annoying. Maybe you’ve been burned by one (or more) in the past. Maybe you get tired of being bombarded with calls for a sales pitch for just commenting on a social media post…especially with promises that are clearly too good to be true.
There are a lot of bad marketers out there, and we’re sharing some of the gimmicks that make even us cringe.
1. BIG, AUDACIOUS, BOLD Claims
How many marketing “gurus” out there claim to be able to generate thousands or millions in revenue for your firm in just 30 days? Two weeks? MERE HOURS?!?
We’ll even give them the benefit of the doubt that they were able to do that with a client ONCE. But what they don’t show you are all the asterisks that come with those claims. Maybe you have to pay for the most premium package. Maybe you have to have a very specific set of circumstances.
The truth is that there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy, and *sustained* success surely isn’t going to happen in a short amount of time. It takes patience, consistency, and time to build a stable ecosystem that produces consistent results.
2. Scarcity
There’s a right way to play the scarcity game, and there’s definitely a wrong way. Admittedly, we’ve employed some scarcity tactics before, but it was always done so out of capacity concerns for our team. So when we said we were only going to offer something for a specific period of time or to a specific number of people, we meant it.
The gimmicky side of scarcity is those webinar emails you get that are “only open to the first 50 people” as if that’s the maximum capacity for a webinar room (it isn’t). What makes it worse is that follow up email you get a couple of days later along the lines of, “We had such a MASSIVE response to our webinar that we pulled some strings and opened up 10 more spots!”
No you didn’t. They were there the whole time. (And there are still more available after that.)
3. Inconvenience
How many social posts or emails have you seen with a sentiment like this…
- “I didn’t want to have to do this, BUT…”
- “My boss is gonna kill me for sharing this with you…”
- “I’m going to lose money for sharing this…”
And maybe they’re telling the truth, but why share that sentiment anyway? Frankly, it’s a little odd to seemingly make an audience feel bad about a choice they made. If you’re going to give away the secret sauce, just do it without these sorts of qualifiers. Your audience is typically smart enough to see through it anyway.
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