Outdated Practices to Avoid in Modern Business

The business world is constantly evolving and companies must evolve with it in order to maintain a modern business strategy. Technology and the simplistic modern mindset have made many marketing and design techniques irrelevant or ineffective. A successful business should weed through all their systems and revamp or throw out any outdated applications. Here are seven things to watch out for when updating business strategies.

1. Complicated Designs & Patterns

Bright colors and crazy patterns may have been all the rage from the 70s to the 90s, but now they’re just a distraction. Web design, social media cover photos, logos, and other graphics should be clear and uncomplicated. Use layout to put emphasis on the most important ideas with bold but direct design.

2. Brochures

Paper marketing is swiftly fading and brochures are not as effective as they once were. In a time where products and services need to be personalized, a “one-size fits all” brochure is not something most people will engage with. Customizing marketing to specific people and categories is the new way of advertising.

3. Lengthy, Unnecessary Text

If there is anything that Twitter’s 140-character count has proven, it’s that people like simple, straightforward content. No one wants to fish through wordy text trying to find what they are looking for. It’s important to cover necessary information, but it should be done tastefully and as condensed as possible.

4. Telemarketing

Telemarketing is not only annoying, but it can also scare off new customers and create bad energy around the company. People often end up blocking numbers and associate telemarketing with disreputable marketing practices. There are less time-intensive and more effective ways to pursue new leads (like lead generation ads or email marketing).

5. Taglines

There are a few grandfathered-in taglines still surviving out there, but it’s best to avoid this old technique. Using advertising that is catchy is still very successful, just not necessarily in the use of a tagline or catchphrase. Successful, modern companies will instead infuse their message into their actual brand or product name.

6. Keyword Stuffing

There was a time when polluting your website with the same keywords over and over again was a great strategy for getting the number one rank on search engines, but those days are over. Keywords are a useful tool, but they should be used strategically and not thrown into every space available.

These are only a few ways that business practices have evolved over time. A business should be constantly maturing with its audience, technology, and industry. Don’t let your business strategy get caught in the past and lose customers in the future.