As everything is becoming more digital, businesses are looking towards online marketing firms like third.co.uk to increase their business' reach. However, online marketing is not an easy task, especially when you're running your own business, managing employees, your sales, and everything else all at once. Whether you're new to marketing or a new business owner, starting your online marketing path can be confusing.
When you're new to online marketing, it can be easy to make mistakes and error that affect your business. Choosing the wrong strategies and implementing them incorrectly can damage your business.
To prevent mistakes and succeed, the neatest thing someone can do is to master the ropes of the business.
Here is a list of common mistakes that beginners are making. Are you making any of these?
Spending Too Much Money Too Soon
Spending a lot of money right away is not always necessary when starting a profitable business. It might be exciting to see the power and potential online marketing has for a business, thus tempting you to spend a lot of money in the start.
However, it's important to realize that the success of your marketing campaigns and business does not increase when your marketing budget increases. There is no correlation between the two.
The best attitude would be to learn about your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities in the market. Stay informed and knowledgeable about the industry trends and marketing tactics of your competitors through research and analysis.
It's best to be prepared first before committing to marketing strategies that will not produce results.
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Ignoring SEO
Many small business owners are in a great position to power SEO, but countless push this course to a corner burner. In fact, many businesses believe that SEO require lots of money and can only be accomplished by big enterprise companies.
That’s a misconception that should be broken because even the smallest of business can rank on search engines. A high standing on Google, Yahoo, or Bing can bring traffic to your site, which in turn, can generate leads for your business.
SEO can definitely be managed by yourself. However, as an entrepreneur, it can be a relatively difficult task to monitor and analyze your performance. Therefore, it's best to allow professional SEO experts and agencies to help.
From the title, the title tag, and even the description of your links, the content of your website can be optimized for search rankings to crawl.
Not Obtaining Local search
For the past few years, Google has gotten hyper-personal. When location aware is enabled for search engines, the results that are made in SERPs are tailored towards your location.
Thus, companies with Google My Business are able to cater towards to users searching for their relevant terms in their servicing areas. This allows businesses to capture leads and customers that will come directly to the storefront.
If you're an online business without a physical store, it's important to create pages or content on your website that allow Google to know that you're servicing specific areas. This way, customers are able to know that they can contact your business if they need a specific product or service you're offering.
Misusing Satisfied Customers
Another great feature of Google My Business is its ability to show reviews and your business' rating.
Many businesses have loyal customers and satisfied customers that have purchased or experienced their products and services. These happy customers are a great opportunity to promote your business online.
Try following-up or contacting many of your pleased customers with a link to leave a review on your Google page a few days after their purchase via email.
These reviews and testimonials are also powerful equipment. Satisfied customers are eager to share his or her excitement about your business, so be sure you capture their positive experience.
Not Focusing on Quality Content
Over and over again, marketers talk about the importance of content marketing and having content on your website.
Although businesses are creating content, they are neglecting to focus on creating quality that is relevant, powerful, and can generate traffic to their website.
Many business owners and new marketers tend to focus on quantity, rather than quality. They create numerous blogs and write lots of content, but fail to write articles that can attract customers.
It's important to note that content marketing does not generate conversions right away like PPC. Even so, a great piece of content can generate leads, inbound links, improve search engine rankings, engage readers, and improve conversion rates for your business.
Ignoring Comments
Comments on your posts, products, services, and content are feedback from your clients. These comments are extremely important because it allows for you to engage with your customers.
Sometimes, these comments are questions to concerns that users are having. You can use this as an opportunity to prove your business as an expert by replying and educating them.
Whether the comment is a simple "Great Post" or in-depth response, it's important for you to answer them and acknowledge their comments. Take advantage of these opportunities to build a strong relationship with your customers.
Neglecting Social Media
Many business owners and new marketers fail to realize the importance of social media. Many believe that social media is a place for friends and people to connect, but why can't businesses connect with them over Facebook or Twitter too?
Big brands like Coca-Cola and Sony have proven the power of social media through their brand popularity and engagement on social media platforms. In fact, these types of success can be replicated with small businesses too. In a world of billions of people, there is no doubt that there is someone searching for a service related to your business. The ability of Facebook Business Pages and Twitter profiles allow you to connect with them like friends.
These two social media platforms have targeting options that help you to reach your Facebook advertisements to the customers you're looking to target. The different call to actions allows you to attract users to call you, visit your website, or simply just build engagement on your social page.
Poor Allocation of Budget
Sometimes, you're just not familiar with where to allocate all your budgets. When you're first beginning your online marketing efforts, this is a common mistake that everyone can make.
Different businesses have different needs for their marketing efforts. Their target audience, their conversion goal, and overall marketing goal can differ. The PPC and SEO budget for Business A will be different for Business B. Even when businesses are in the same industry, their targeting efforts can be different.
Therefore, it's important to test which marketing strategy is working best for your own business. If you're generating more results on PPC, then allocate more budget towards PPC. If most of your conversions are generated through Facebook, then it may be a better idea to push more Facebook Advertisements instead.
Too Much Self-Promotion
Of course, everyone likes to talk about themselves and showcase their advantages and benefits. However, not all customers want to hear and read everything about your business.
In fact, customers are more engaged when you focus on their needs and wants instead. Becuase like I stated earlier, people like to talk about themselves. So, why not create content that answers what the customers want to know.
Instead of stating how amazing your business is, talk about how you can generate results for them. How can your business be beneficial for the customer? What can you do to help them with their problems? Why should they trust you?
Lack of Knowledge
Finally, the lack of knowledge. It's crucial for business owners that run their own marketing and new marketers to be informed about new trends in the market.
When Internet marketing moves so fast, we must stay informed with any new algorithm changes and updates on search engines and strategies.
When you're not familiar with new changes, you may be jeopardizing your business' performance. Therefore, stay informed with internet marketing news and trends by reading forums to ensure that your strategies are up to date. You can check out a great list of digital marketing resources here.
These are the some of the common errors that is made by the beginners in the internet marketing. Taking these things into consideration will make you to do a good campaign for your business and internet marketing clients. Knowing the clear tricks to be successful is very important in becoming successful in online business.
on
Awesome post! Thanks for posting this informative, comprehensive article.
on
I’ve been searching about the experts tips for online marketing and let me say it that this is the best article i’ve found so far. It has greatly help me to optimize my website in an efficient manner. I hope to see more informative content in the near future.
on
thanks for sharing this article sir, this is so useful information as I m a fresher in this market
and your this post will surely help for me
on
Hi Felipe,
We all know that Marketing is not a rocket science. But we must not shy away from using some of our Brain Cells.
This is a very great post that covered all the good aspects of Marketing. A very good Marketing Tactic Must have the following ingredients:
#1. Market only to Target Your Ideal Customer.
#2. Marketing strategy must also cover how to keep in touch with the existing customer base and keeping your relations solid.
I used these same tactics to consult my clients and wrote a few of them to tell their importance. I’m glad that I visited to this amazing article. Thanks for sharing it with us.
on
very informative
on
Such a great article. I feel like I made all these mistakes(ignoring SEO and neglecting social media being the biggest mistakes), but I’m learning and getting better at it! Thanks for sharing!
on
Hi Felipe
Indeed a great post about internet marketing mistakes.
I am glad that you have covered the major internet marketing mistakes which almost every internet marketers do.
Internet marketing is the best way of making money online and the best part about it is, It allow internet marketers to earn with few but potential visitors. We don’t need huge amount of traffic to earn. We only need 10 targeted visitors who can purchase the product.
The most common mistake which internet marketers make is, they promote so many products at once without having any experience with them.
To earn more, internet marketers pick every high paying product and start promoting them but don’t get any sales from them because they don’t focus on each product correctly that’s why they are unable to makes sales.
Every successful internet marketer suggest to promote only those products which you have personally used.
I would like to thank you for sharing such a great piece of content. 😀
on
This article has lots of great points! Did you know that the winner of the most recent series of The Apprentice, Mark Wright, won a £250,000 investment in his digital marketing company, ClimbOnline, but has already made some rookie mistakes like problems with the Domain Name, missed marketing opportunities and issues on the twitter account? It just goes to show that even the best can have hiccups in the beginning, so the point about ‘lack of knowledge’ in this article really is crucial. It’s so important to familiarise yourself with what Felipe calls the ‘clear tricks’ before you begin, to ensure you end up with a really good campaign.
on
I have to agree with many of the points in this article. As an SEO manager of two websites and in the process of creating my own, high-quality content is so crucial. It takes time to write, but it’s absolutely worth it in the long run. Also, SEO is not the hardest thing to learn. I’m self taught and have been teaching myself the last year and a half. There are so many online resources that people can take advantage of to learn the trade. One of my clients was spending $600 a month on SEO before me with a local company, and he was being robbed blind. Sometimes it pays for the site owner to learn about SEO to ensure they’re getting what they pay for, or so they can do it themselves. As a customer of website, I agree with the (self promotion) point that was made in this blog. If I go to a website for help or a service and the entire website seems to be about the company, I will turn away. I want to know who you are, yes, but then I want to know what you can do for me and why I should choose you with as little words as possible. I want to see that you care about your customers or I will turn away. I hate websites that only focus on themselves. I also agree, SEO is very important. But social media marketing is also becoming increasingly important as well.
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I definitely agree that interaction and communication with potential customers is important. Many old school businesses don’t seem to realize how important social media is to younger and middle-aged clientele, and they make the mistake of ignoring it because they’re not comfortable working in that realm, but that can result in lost sales to competitors who are active on those sites.
on
I think one of the point that mattered the most to me from this list is building a relationship with its customers. Doesn’t matter how much present is computer and how much help articles you write, sometimes, you just expect to talk to humans, and even if you don’t expect you, you would like to because having an human contact into brand make it feeling better. I am often unhappy when I am on a blog or on a website and the person just basically put the content and never answer, it feels “snob”.
The other point I will talk about is self promotion. Basically, the more a website or business self promotes itself, the less I find it more serious and the more I find it related to nasty popup where someone explains you how to win every time at Poker while it isn’t possible.
on
Very informative post, I think that many people without this type of information can be a very hard start on blogs, I think that the main benefits that are SEO. Last I read an article about email automation marketing it was good.