The Experts: Less Important Marketing Tactics in 2019

In this blog we ask some of our favourite marketing experts what strategies and tactics they plan to put less focus on in 2019. This is the second blog in a series of blogs where we ask marketing leaders for their feedback on a number of questions. This blog will address the question “What marketing tactic will be less important to you in 2019?
 

Here’s what they had to say:


Two things as well. First, I’m not going to stop using and recommending Twitter, but it definitely won’t be a focus. The average engagement rate on Twitter is 0.049%, so people are abandoning the platform and/or choosing not to engage – and for a social media platform where people are meant to be “social”, that’s not good. The second thing is SEO, as there’s still some fundamental best practices you should follow such as keyword research, link-building, clean code, fast page loads, etc., but delivering valuable, contextually relevant content to a specific audience is still the best thing to focus on, especially when resources are limited.
 
Robert Clarke, CMO at Sensei Marketing, @robertclarkey
 
PPC is a marketing tactic that will be less important in my honest opinion. I do not believe a PPC campaign is for everyone and although it is very popular and helps many businesses, I think there are a lot of more affordable ways of marketing your business and reaching your customers online. It is very easy to aggressively burn through a marketing budget by using PPC, when those funds can be invested in plenty of other powerful marketing tools available today.
 
Bianca Sicilia, Marketing Manager VA Partners
 
It may sound strange but I’ll spend less time on social media. I’m not sure it drives as much ROI as other marketing channels. One of the problems with social media is brands do it because every all brand is doing it. The smart brands determine if social media supports their goals and, if not, other channels that make that happen.
 
Mark Evans, Principal at ME Consulting, @markevans
 
We’ve decided to move away from paid social media ads as we found that the audience we were reaching was too broad for our purposes. Even on LinkedIn which has a b2b focus, we found we just weren’t reaching the right senior decision makers in the same way as sending a direct line of communication such as a call or email would. Instead, we are focusing on building and nurturing authentic relationships to grow our business organically. If we do use paid social media ads, it will be to raise awareness or promote a specific activity such as a webinar or workshop.
 
Jennifer Paukman, Social Media and Content Specialist at Ramp Communications, @jenniferpaukman
 
I think paid advertising will be less important to us, such as Google AdWords or Facebook Ads, although there is definitely still a place for it in the market.
 
Vincent Panepinto, Co-Founder at Spently
 
Using one-step popups. If online marketing is becoming more personalized, why are businesses still using the same, boring popup for everyone? People have been trained to immediately dismiss these templated, generic intrusions that offer little value. Instead I’ll create conversational UI experiences and deploy dynamic trigger-based campaigns.
 
Sarosha Imtiaz, Co-Founder at Aiva Labs
 
In 2019, we will be moving away from gating our downloadable content. We’ve noticed that within our marketing efforts, forms before our whitepapers weren’t leading to leads within our target audience.
 
Kayla Thomson, Marketing Manager, VA Partners
 
I think a good mix is really important so I can’t say I’d cut anything, but less and less is being put into organic social media. It’s been going this way for a while, but it just keeps continuing. You need to do to keep the lights on, but I’d rather post less organically and put more effort into promoted social media if I had to make the choice. We need to pay for reach these days sadly, even with a massive following.
 
Sourov De, Managing Partner at Stryve Digital Marketing, @Sourovde
 
What is a new marketing strategy or tactic you plan to use in 2019? Please add your feedback in the comments section below.
 

The Experts: Less Important Marketing Tactics in 2019