It’s that time of year again when kids go around town in their best costumes to ask candy from neighbors, college students hitting coffee shops to quench their annual thirst for pumpkin spice, and when a group of teens unknowingly summoned an unspeakable evil upon the world.
All sorts of crazy stuff happen during Halloween, and that’s what makes it so fun. For businesses, this day when ghouls and goblins stalk the streets offers a lot of opportunities for profit-making. Take for example how a lot of B2B businesses publish Halloween-themed content in the form of infographics and (coughs) blog articles. Seasonal marketing campaigns provide the right conditions to stimulate a company’s target audience, which is why they spend a hefty sum in developing such content. Let’s think about freebies and discounts that coincide with the occasion.
Still, to truly make an impact to the bottom line, B2B marketers should implement the right strategies that will surely benefit their lead generation and appointment setting campaigns. At any rate, a great deal of knowing what approaches to use has to be involved. Equally important is how to approach target audiences using techniques that will help them make a decision to purchase – and not to scare them away.
We all know that Halloween is about creeping each other out, but when it comes down to generating qualified sales leads and improving revenue generation, companies should know better than to make a grotesque presentation out of their campaigns.
Here are some of the nasty stuff you can do in your marketing that may put your business to the grave.
#1. Adding contact to your mailing list – without them knowing
If there are Ten Commandments for email marketing, this will be on the top of the list. But instead of incurring fire and brimstone from the skies, businesses that commit the illicit practice of arbitrarily adding people to their mailing list will have to suffer legal and operational consequences. Contacts should be added organically via fill forms and subscriptions, or else you will see a good bulk of your emails going to spam folders. Also, it’s creepy to add just about anyone to a mailing list as if they wanted to. It’s like something a serial killer would do.
Related: 5 Things Australian Companies Should Consider When Buying a Marketing Database
#2. Never clickbait
One particular film features a family of cannibalistic mutants catching their prey through good ol’ hunting tactics. And some of these tactics involve the use of a bait. Although it sounds like a good survival strategy in a post-apocalyptic world, baiting people in the B2B world does not in any contribute to higher sales. What most prospects don’t want is to be fooled by a message specifically designed to catch anyone’s attention. So, it’s better if you tell your prospects in advance about what to expect from a product, service or offer. Doing so will give prospects a better reason to have you as their partner.
Related: Top 5 Digital Marketing Tools: How to Use Them to Capture B2B Clients
#3. Newsjacking – the wrong way
What’s not to love about newsjacking? It’s obviously an effective content marketing strategy that enables you to increase your brand’s visibility. A lot of companies in both the B2C and B2B arenas are doing it. Check out their blogs and see how many of these are, in some way, related to a trending issue. But newsjacking is essentially an approach that involves a lot of sensitivity, particularly in terms of choosing the subject matter to talk about.
Writing a blog post about a deadly terrorist attack, for example, can put a bad taste in your prospects’ tongues. Such situations are better left out in a company’s content strategy because these are events that mustn’t be trivialized.
Related: 12 Tools to Hack Your Content Creation Workflow [Plus Free Content Calendar]
#4. Don’t be too hasty
Sure, you can run frantically away from a undead murderer, but in terms of engaging your prospects, taking things too fast will only leave your brand behind. Audience engagements are supposed to a well-ordered, systematic process where audiences are analyzed based on their interactions with you and where you are able to develop content ideas that resonate with their actual needs. Making assumptions and just churning out content you think matters to your prospects will only put you in revenue limbo.
What are other strategies that marketers should exorcise from their content plans? Tell us in the comments below, along with spooky urban legends you might want to share.
