Ten marketing ‘tips’ to ignore

“Does this sound right to you?”

It’s a question I hear a lot. And it’s inevitably followed up with an absolute belter from the Tomes of Truly Awful Marketing Advice.

There’s a lot of them out there: these ten are just a selection from my favourites, and the ones I get asked about most often.

Photo by Jeremy Bezanger via Unsplash

1) Gaming the algorithm

If anyone tells you they can ‘beat the algorithm’? Run.

No matter what the platform, no matter what the context, this is always terrible advice.

You cannot beat the algorithm. You may, temporarily, be able to game the system and see some impressive-looking, short-term upturns in your vanity metrics.

But come the next algorithm update? All your hard work and money will be wasted. Gone. Crushed. (NB: ‘beating the algorithm’ invariably takes either a lot of work or a lot of money.) But, actually, it’s worse than that.

If you try to beat the algorithm and, at the next major update, you’re not in a worse place than when you started your algorithm beating campaign - banned, shadowed, zero reach, followers removed? Then you can consider yourself very, very lucky.

Algorithms are the lifeblood of Google and social media platforms. Anyone who thinks they have the secret sauce to ‘beat’ the algorithmic armies and geniuses of Google, Facebook et al? Well, let’s just say that’s an embarrassing lack of self-awareness, right there.

Working WITH the algorithms - that’s good practice. Attempting to beat the algorithms? It’s one of the most unsustainable pieces of marketing advice you’ll ever come across. Steer clear.

2) Using engagement pods

Engagement pods are groups of people who like or comment on each other’s content - the idea is to trick the algorithms into thinking your content is popular, therefore increasing the reach of your content.

Social media platforms really don’t like engagement pods - not just because of the obvious. (See No 1: Gaming the algorithm…) They’re used by a certain type of ‘influencer’ to inflate how popular they appear, in order to charge more - so it’s unsurprising that the social media networks are working hard to spot pods and shut them down.

Even if your pod feels harmless, it’s worth avoiding - as soon as you’re flagged as taking part in a pod, you can be pretty sure that even if you post the most incredible content ever, it still won’t see the light of day.

The time and effort spent on pods? It’s almost certainly better spent by creating genuinely useful content that doesn’t need to be artificially boosted.

3) Quantity over quality, part 1 (AKA Size matters)

A potential client recently told me that he wants to increase the size of his email list fivefold by December. Now, I’m all for targets.

But take that proposition to an unethical marketer and they’re going to rub their hands with glee. Because increasing the size of an email list - that’s really, really easy.

Making sure you’re attracting the right people? That’s the tricky bit.

An email list with 500 engaged subscribers is far more useful than a list of 5,000 people who have zero interest in what you do.

What would you prefer? 300 Instagram followers who share your posts and say lovely things? Or 3,000 subscribers who give you zero?

On its own, the number of likes is a vanity metric; it doesn’t matter.

The size of your list? Useful to know, but not that important.

Number of followers? Why give a monkey’s if they’re not interested in what you do.

Size - when taken into account alongside other factors - can be useful. But anyone who tells you that you need xx followers, or an email list of xx? Forget that.

I worked with someone recently who had an email list of 93 subscribers - and made $2,700 from one beautifully crafted campaign.

It’s not how big it is, people, it’s how you use it.

4) Quantity over quality, part 2 (AKA How much?!?)

No, you don’t need to post to Stories eight times a week, your Square five times a week, and LinkedIn four times a day, then go live on Facebook daily, before engaging with ten hashtags and 50 comments.

What would you rather see: two posts a week that are worth reading, or four posts a day that are boring and spammy, and clog up your feed?

Quality matters. Quantity - not so much.

The other thing that’s forgotten in this simplistic “BE VISIBLE!” mindset is that consistency matters far more than quantity - for your sanity, as well as your ‘reach’.

There is no magic formula for how often to post - and if there was? It wouldn’t be as simple as frequency.

The best rule of thumb: post as often as you can to maintain a consistent schedule of content that remains interesting.

We all know, in our hearts, that one great post a week is better than one terrible post every day.

5) Use your personal Facebook page for your business

If you have a small business and you share your business posts via your personal page every so often? That’s totally OK.

If you use your personal Facebook page as a business promo page, friending potential clients?

Please, stop. Now.

The argument is simple: business pages on Facebook have terrible reach. Personal pages have great reach. Therefore you’ll get more reach if you use a personal page.

Which looks like it makes sense.

Except that it’s against Facebook’s Terms of Service. All it takes is one person to flag you or report you, and that’s it, all gone. Account suspended; all your ‘leads’, all your customers: gone.

It’s back to No 1: don’t try to game the algorithm.

6) Blogs should be 500 words

This one has history - at least 10 years of history. Someone, somewhere, decided that 500 words is a sweet spot. That if you wrote more than 500 words then the search engines would penalise you. (?!?) That people can’t be bothered to read more than that. And suddenly, 500 words was where it was at.

It’s tosh.

It was tosh at the time. And it’s even more bonkers now.

Even the gurus who made a living off this mantra have now updated their figures. But still, the 500 words thing lingers on.

And whether it’s the old school ‘500 words’, or the updated ‘2,000 words’? The reality remains the same.

It’s wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

The ideal length of a piece of content doesn’t arise from SEO. The ideal length of a piece of content comes from the content itself.

If you’ve got a checklist of ‘five things’? It’s entirely possible that 500-750 words is enough to say everything you need to, in a succinct, readable and useful way.

If you’re looking at the Life Cycle Analysis of paper cups? Then it’s unlikely that it will be meaningful and useful in less than 2,000 words.

And if you’ve produced the bees knees’ of in-depth, useful guides to promoting your blog, and that takes 3,600 words? Go for it.

The key word in all of this?

Useful.

The right length for your article depends on what it says - not on some weird ‘study’ using a dubious methodology, that some guy wrote a few years’ ago with the sole intention of promoting his own website.

7) Keywords should appear three times in the first 10 lines and have a density of 2.5%. (Or something.)

Just. No.

If you write good content, then your keywords are already in your content. Their distribution will appear natural (because it is).

Don’t get me wrong, there is a place for keywords and all the rest of it. But unless you’re a skilled copywriter, and super-serious about ranking at no.1 on Google?

Then concentrate on writing great content. Get the quality of the writing correct, and the keywords will look after themselves.

8) Boost your Facebook posts

No matter what Facebook wants you to believe: this is a Big No. It’s about as effective as taking a bunch of flyers, throwing them in the air in an empty street, and hoping that someone bothers to catch one and read it, before changing their plans and taking a ten mile detour to a town they don’t know, to visit your shop and buy your wares.

You know how super-cheap and easy it is to do a quick boost? There’s a reason for that.

A cohesive, considered and on-going Facebook ad campaign can get great results. Boosting a few posts? Not so much.

9) The best time to send or post is at XX pm on XXX day of the week

Some people swear by posting at 9am every morning; others have amazing success when they post at 10pm; and there are those who send business stuff on a Saturday morning and have an open rate in excess of 50%. (OK, that last one is me. You, too, can get the Medley direct to your inbox every Saturday, if you want.)

Newsflash: There is no magic formula for when to post.

There will be a sweet spot for your business - but it’s very individual, and will evolve over time. But working out when it is? It depends on the purpose of what you’re sending, and the ideal action of the reader. It depends on who they are, where they are, and what’s going on in their life at that time. It depends on what you want them to do when they read it - is it a quick scan and a rushed reaction, or a sit down with a cuppa?

And when you’ve started to work out when your sweet spot is? Then it’s time to test your idea.

Just because someone else is over the moon with the results they get by posting at 3:45 on a Thursday, doesn’t mean it will work for anyone else's sector, audience, and intent of what they’re sending. And it doesn’t mean that they’ve even found the perfect time - just one that they think works, right now.

10) “You have to…”

“You have to be on Stories”

“You have to be on Clubhouse before it gets big”

“You have to send a daily email at 6am on a Monday”

“You have to get on top of local search”

“You have to have a presence on every social channel”

I’m here to tell you:

You don’t have to do nothin’, honey.

There is no marketing silver bullet. Sure, email marketing is one of the most effective tools out there. (After 20+ years, it’s my go-to.) Can you achieve great marketing without email? Yup.

Facebook Lives are pretty effective right now. You loathe going live? No biggie. If you don’t like it, then it’s not worth it.

Anyone who tells you that there’s one place you HAVE to be seen, or one thing you HAVE absolutely got to do or get right?

Walk away.

It’s terrible advice.