Ericka Lewis
Arya ready for this?
This Sunday, Game of Thrones, the wonderfully epic screen adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s beloved book series sweeping the world returns for the first part of its final season. I don’t know about you, but in our inbound marketing agency here in Houston, we are absolutely stoked!
This season (according to the trailers at least), whist our lovable (and the not-so lovable) GOT characters engage in big battles — for the throne, for revenge, for redemption, for shits and giggles — one major potentially catastrophic battle is brewing semi-incognito.
The undead are finally coming to annihilate Westeros and everyone seems to be too distracted with futile bloody shenanigans to notice. Plot twist. Jon Snow who we accused of knowing nothing turns out to be the man who knows all. Dun dun dun…
Shame!
Unfortunately, just like most of our spunky GOT pals who are unaware of the real battle that lies ahead, some of us in B2B marketing are just as oblivious when it comes to fighting our way to success.
It’s not hard to get too distracted by fads or algorithm rumors. If you’re doing any of the following below, you’re missing the real battle (and Jon Snow will be very disappointed, tsk tsk).
1. Trying to win SEO by Keyword stuffing.
First, let’s address the obvious. If you’re still keyword stuffing, you’re definitely fighting your battle for digital marketing domination in vain.
You know who was a prime example of keyword stuffing in Game of Thrones? Hodor. And what happened to Hodor? He died a horribly painful and extremely traumatizing death. And this my friend, is what will happen to your business online, if you’re still using the ancient dark arts of over-stuffing your webpage with unnaturally occurring irrelevant keywords in your attempt to climb SERP rankings.
If you think you can outsmart search engine algorithms with spammy content, think again. Search engine algorithms have long evolved from the days where simple keyword density gave your website a nudge on search results.
These days, keyword stuffing can land you costly penalties that can bar your website from every climbing search rankings, or seeing the light of day at all. While there are still a number of SEO tools out there who feed on the idea that keyword density is an important metric, It's not.
The value you can get from placing 8 additional keywords on your website or more, is far less than what you can gain from a high-quality inbound link or lengthy visits from target audiences who finds your website content compelling, relevant, and valuable.
So if you’re guilty of keyword stuffing, I have a brilliant advice for you: replace all of your unnatural sounding keywords with “Hodor”. If your sentence is pretty much undecipherable after doing so, you’re better off doing away with the keyword.
2. Knowing nothing (like you know who)
If you know nothing, how can you tell if you’re winning, losing, or needing to re-strategize? Knowledge is everything when it comes to marketing. If you want to reap the best possible return on your marketing investment, you have to put in time to do it the right way. You can start with an in-depth buyer persona discovery to get to know who your ideal buyers are well and be able to develop marketing strategies that truly captivate them.
A part of knowing is being vigilant when it comes to your campaign performance. Don’t go trigger happy spending your marketing budget on one-off ideas that are not backed up by an overarching strategy or by measurable and attainable goals. 
Get in the know and be sure to track your campaigns so you can establish baseline metrics, see what’s working and what’s not, understand why that is, and adjust components of your marketing campaigns accordingly without wasting resources.
3. Failing to nurture your leads
This little piggy piggy, Littlefinger, once said: “Chaos isn’t a pit, chaos is a ladder”. And right he is! If you want to be an industry disruptor, you can’t just spam your leads with bottom of the funnel calls to action on a whim like a horse heart eating Dothraki marauding around town. Nope.
You gotta summon your dragons or your impressive navy fleet on queue at the most strategic points if you want to conquer your market effectively. Take it from the Queen of Dramatic Entrances, First of Her Name, the Unburnt, Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons, Daenerys Stormborn of the House Targaryen.
If lead nurturing is not a part of your campaigns, you might be missing out on a whole lot of potential clients and turning off leads who are just not ready to buy yet.
When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die
Marketing these days is a very competitive landscape. In B2B, even big, well-established companies are being outmaneuvered left and right by relatively newer industry players, and a lot of this has to do with poor and outdated marketing strategies.
In order to win the Game of Marketing, you have to give it the full shibang. Don’t waste your resources by pursuing tactics without a strategy. Know what your goals are, know who your ideal clients are, measure your campaigns, tweak them proactively, and most importantly, don’t forget you’re marketing to humans — not to algorithms, not to search engines.