The world of marketing requires a variety of unique talents depending on the industry, format and exact strategy. Digital marketing in particular utilizes many different skill-sets to create broader marketing campaigns that are both cost-effective and that resonate with audiences.

With a number of revolutions in online marketing, virtually anybody can take the reins and become a marketer with just a small budget and a bit of know-how. Unfortunately for some, this has led to many inferior marketing outcomes for businesses and brands that otherwise mean well.

To avoid this fate, we’ve put together a few examples of highly ineffective marketing elements and strategies that could be discarded and/or avoided in the future.

Selfish Copy

The entire point of marketing is to make a pitch to others and persuade them to care. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to do this when you’re so self-absorbed that all you do is talk about your brand. Whether you’re writing actual ad copy for campaigns or creating content to be shared on social media, pinging users with content that consistently brags about your brand, lists technical details or otherwise focuses too much on the brand itself is guaranteed to flop.

Good marketers understand that solid copy must be designed to influence and entertain those who read it. By adding personal elements, emotional pleas and other factors designed to entertain audiences, marketing campaigns can perform resoundingly well with any target audience.

Rambling Messes

Marketers understand that detailed content is in high demand. Whether it is in the form of an ad or a blog post, most people want details. This, however, shouldn’t be confused with long-winded rambles that fail to deliver concrete information to the reader.

All too often, brands focus on elements such as word count rather than spending their energy detailing exactly what readers need to know – and nothing else. With attention spans shorter than ever and pressure from search engines to produce long-form content, this is a difficult balance. Nevertheless, it is imperative that marketers evaluate their content for unnecessary elements and eliminate them prior to publication.

Poor Adherence to Grammar

Even those with less than perfect grammar can recognize content and marketing efforts that are poorly written. There are many instances in marketing where keeping things short may lead to the temptation of truncating your message. Many people decide to sacrifice punctuation, syntax and grammar overall to make this work.

Whether you’re beginning sentences with conjunctions, ending them with prepositions or using punctuation inappropriately, each instance ultimately affects how your content is perceived. There is always another way to express yourself without sacrificing the structure of your message, so pursue a different approach rather than pinging users with poorly written material.

There are a hundred different elements to consider when formulating the right marketing strategy. Each campaign has an opportunity to be successful – but only if you avoid ineffective components that can sabotage their potential. Whether it relates to grammar, self-promotion or verbose descriptions, any of these ineffective elements can ruin an otherwise perfectly good campaign.