While we now have a few years of hindsight on Marketing, which is no longer exactly a new science, I am still amazed to see that certain practices persist in spite of common sense.
When you want to promote a company on the Web, there are several challenges:
- Attract prospects to the company’s offering
- Convert those prospects into customers
- Retain those customers
However, these three elements are part of a whole: the market conquest strategy. Web or no web, a product or service with no appeal or competitive advantage has no chance of taking off any better online than in real life.
Fake press releases, bogus Twitter profiles
Unfortunately, since the net is decidedly a world apart, not everyone agrees. So we see pseudo “organic SEO agencies” springing up all over the place and guaranteeing astonishing rankings on Google. To do this, they have a well-oiled method: automatically submitting hundreds of bogus press releases that make no sense and are of no interest whatsoever to readers, but are stuffed with target keywords and strategically placed backlinks. Another trendy “trick”: creating hundreds of fake Twitter profiles to spam the birds all day long with tweets just as hollow as the aforementioned press releases.
In the end, a disastrous effect
Assuming these methods work (and one can must doubt it), and that they therefore bring visitors to a site, how can we not question the quality of the visits obtained in this way and their effect on the company’s business? Who is going to trust a company that writes “supernatural” press releases where sentences follow one another with no connection to the previous ones, and where clownish fakes flood social networks with nonsense?
Don’t be tempted by magical solutions. Work on your copy, look for the topics that interest your customers, produce quality information. It takes a little longer at first, but it sells. Of course, a good agency (and there are some) knows this and will do it for you.
