If you want to grow your small business or acquire another company, it’s important to devote sufficient time and resources to digital marketing.
But there are many ways to market your company online, and it’s easy to make mistakes. But you can market your company effectively online if you don’t make the mistakes below.
Targeting The Wrong People
Many small businesses are eager to start marketing digitally and don’t put in the research to figure out who their audience is and where they are. Also, companies tend to want to attract the most customers, so they market too broadly.
If you target too many people and try to appeal to everyone, your marketing may fail. Or a company may think they know their audience but really don’t.
Avoid this mistake by researching who your audience is. Do testing to figure out who is interested in your products or services. Some of the information to find out about your audience is:
- Interests
- Hobbies
- Demographics
- Buying habits
Say your company sells workout clothes. You should target your marketing to men and women who tend to be wealthier, work out often, and care about their appearance.
If you focus your marketing on people who don’t work out or don’t have the money for workout clothes, you may not have the results you want.
Not Improving Your Website
Most consumers buy products and services online every day. You’d think that every small business would know to make their website user-friendly, but that’s not true. It’s vital to have a website that is easy to use on PC and mobile devices.
If your company doesn’t put time and money into optimizing the website to offer a great user experience, your competition will beat you.
Be sure that very site page scales, so it fits on a phone or tablet. If the page doesn’t work on mobile phones, you will lose half of your audience.
Also, check that every page loads in no more than a second. Users will bail out if it takes several seconds for the site to load.
Creating Clickbait Advertising
The goal is to get consumers to your website, but investing in clickbait content isn’t the way to do it. This is content that spins words to get people to click to the site but doesn’t offer what was advertised.
Let’s say your Facebook ad says your product is the most amazing thing ever. But when people click there, it’s just like a dozen other products online. Clickbait advertising will get people to your site once, but it isn’t effective.
Clickbait makes people feel cheated, and they don’t buy from companies they think misled them or wasted their time.
It’s much better to craft content that provides value to your prospects. The advertisement or article should tell the reader what they will learn and why they value the product or service.
This means the prospect won’t feel disappointed with what is offered. They also may become a daily or weekly visitor to find more helpful content.
Only Doing Paid Advertising
Paid advertising on Google and social media are essential. But there are other digital strategies that also are important.
Experts recommend only spending on paid advertising if you want more brand visibility. If the brand has followers growing over months and years, you could be better off developing high-quality content and posting it on social media.
Or, devote money to your website to make landing pages more effective.
Only Focusing On Products
Facebook altered its rules a few years ago; that means not all your followers will see your newsfeed. For more followers to see it, you need to provide ‘meaningful interactions’ with followers for more followers to see it.
You can get more customer engagement with customers and prospects by creating content that focuses on the reader or viewer. This content should be on your social media feeds as well as the website.
But if a company creates content that only focuses on their products and services, their marketing won’t be effective.
Consumers have a lot of online choices, and all of them view content with the idea of ‘what’s in this for me?’ Your content must create value for the viewer, and this is done by making a connection with that person.
When writing about your products, make sure you spend just as much time telling customers how they will benefit. Tell them how they will solve this or that problem by using your product or service.
Brand Inconsistency
Your brand won’t be built online in a week. Being consistent with your digital marketing brand is vital to long-term success. You can build your digital brand by updating your social media feeds with content that builds on the last post.
You can create a consistent brand by having a marketing and social media schedule. Plan your posts by writing down how often you’ll do it and what the topics will be.
Also, post your content at the same time every day. You should experiment with different times to find out when you get better user engagement.
Digital marketing offers so much potential! It’s easier and less expensive to reach a large audience than years ago. But there are many choices to make, and your advertising won’t be as effective if you make the mistakes above.
Now you’re more knowledgeable about digital marketing, so you’re sure to be more successful.
