The entire point of marketing is to boost sales, increase engagement, brand your business, and keep your company at the forefront of everyone’s minds. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always seem to work out the way you originally imagined. If you are putting money, time, and effort into your marketing campaign without seeing any kind of return, you may want to check out these examples of techniques which are counterproductive instead of productive. If you see your sales and engagement dropping, you are definitely using one of these too-common techniques.

Shameless Self Promotion

Promoting your company via blogs and social media accounts is fine if done in moderation. The point of these marketing outlets is engagement, however. You are not going to receive a high level of engagement if all you do is post buy this, buy that, do this for me, do that for me. Plus, it’s annoying. Seriously. If you aren’t sure on how often is okay to post pure self promotion, try to keep it down to a 10:1 maximum. For every ten things you post to engage your audience, post no more than one self promotion item.

Blasting

Blasting is a technique where you throw your information out on all possible outlets and repeat yourself often. This is another annoying technique. Eventually people will start unfollowing you or avoiding you at all costs. Don’t blast.

Getting Comfortable

You have now reached a really big goal and now is the time to relax, right? Wrong! You should never get comfortable with where you are at. The world is continually moving forward at a steady pace and so should your business. Getting comfortable is probably the most counterproductive marketing technique (or lack thereof). Keep moving forward, and never get comfortable so your company doesn’t grow stale or stagnant.

Putting Sales Before Engagement

This is something which 90% of all start up businesses make a mistake with. You should not put sales before engagement. If you engage your target audience first the sales will eventually come naturally. These naturally occurring sales as a byproduct of engagement tend to be worth more. Why? More of these sales tend to come from loyal or repeat customers. This doesn’t mean you should never put forth effort into selling. That is the whole point of running a business. The point is that you should always put engagement first, sales second.

Relying Entirely on Virtual Marketing Techniques

Just because online is the place to be these days doesn’t mean you can ditch all of your physical marketing efforts. You may not need them as much, but you still need them. If you rely entirely on virtual marketing techniques you may be missing out on a large portion of your audience. Although it may seem as though everyone is online, the truth is that there are still some people out there who are rarely or never online. Continue to implement offline strategies, whether they be big or small. Flyers, billboards, commercials, posters, promotional items, or whatever else. Just remember to use a good mixture of booth online and offline techniques if you want to succeed.

If you have been making use of any of the above counterproductive marketing techniques, now is the time to make a switch. Alter your plan of attack by first getting rid of all these techniques. Replace them with techniques proven to be truly productive. You will see a nearly instantaneous shift in the downward spiral of your sales and engagement.