Marketing isn't always the easy concept to grasp, and often times people who are looking to employ such tactics need to seek outside guidance. If you need help starting your marketing campaigns for your business, searching for a local marketing company will be beneficial to you.

However, problems can arise when you aren't taking advice from a credible marketing firm who can give you relevant and proven strategies to improve your business.

If you've recently recieved some marketing tips to intregrate into your marketing planning, make sure you research whether or not the advice is worth its salt. Below are a few examples of perfectly horrible marketing tips you shouldn't use!

5 examples of bad marketing advice:

1. Add as many hashtags to your tweets and Facebook posts as you can. Social media can be a powerful tool when you know how to use it properly, but there is a fine line between proper usage and annoyance. By now I'm sure you've heard about the purpose of the hastag, and why it can be beneficial to incorporate into your Twitter and Facebook posts. But, did you also know that using too many hashtags can actually have adverse effects as well? You've probably seen these kinds of tweets, they often look like this:

Okay, maybe that's a little over the top, but you get my point. We know you want to get discovered, and hashtags can be a great way to connect with other people using the same trending topics, but if you want to get retweets, favorites, and responses spamming hashtags isn't the right approach. Tweets like this may seem like a smart idea at the time, but they actually don't do much for you or your customer base because they just aren't engaging. It's true that tweets with one or two hashtags can get you more engagement, and according to Salesforce, tweets with only one or two hastags will get you 21% more engagement than if you add three or more. Keeping appropriate hashtags in mind is important, and remember to get engagement don't over do it!

2. Need more email address for your email marketing campaigns? Buy some! At the time, buying email address lists may seem like a pretty brilliant idea. Your business may be interested in increasing its email marketing, but instead of investing your extra capital in building a email list of your own (with customers that are actually interested in your products and services) you've decided to take the easy way out and buy someone else's. Now, you have tons of email addresses to send your content to, but in the long run will any of those potential prospects even care about you, your business, or your content? Probably not. Growing your own email list is essential if you want a more engaged target audience. That way the content you push out is exactly what your clients are looking for, and can help you generate more leads. 

3. You don't need a mobile-ready site. I can't stress enough the genuine importance of having a mobile ready site. Mobile ready sites are becoming a necessity for all businesses and companies that are looking to gain traction over the internet. More people shop and search the web on mobile devices such as phones or tablets than do on regular laptops and desktops. Without a responsive and mobile-friendly website, internet users will turn away from building a relationship, or doing business with your company. If you haven't invested in developing a mobile site for your business it's time for you to take action. According to Econsultancy, 62% of companies that designed a website specifically for mobile had increased sales.

4. Only certain people should blog for your company. Everyone at your company has an important job, and that means that they all have great content they can input into your blog posts. Here at ImageWorks, we have inbound marketers, web designers, SEO gurus, programmers, sales people, and more. Each one of our employees has valuable content that our readers could benefit from and enjoy reading. Whether they have an eye for design, an insight on sales, a master brain for programming, or a knack for finding great keywords, each of them has a set of particular skills that can produce content that help us generate leads and engage with customers. Content doesn't mean it has to be in written form, so don't worry if each employee isn't a grand writer!

5. If you don't put X amount of keywords into your blog post your page won't rank. There is a lot more that goes into SEO strategy than just keywords and keyword density. Although it's important to have keywords in the body of your article, you shouldn't be concerned or push to make sure your keyword appears in every (other) sentence. Especially since keyword stuffing can be a red flag for web crawlers resulting in a penalty for your company. If you are looking to increase your page rank, don't forget to add keywords to your alt tags on your images, titles, meta description, and blog post tags.

How well is your marketing working? Download our FREE marketing assessment tool and find out!