You didn’t make the decision to go into business for yourself arbitrarily. You did it because your skills, knowledge, and experience were not being utilized. Hours of unpaid overtime were lost to suppress your wages and insulate its profit margins. Finally, you decided to take your career into your own hands. Now you run your own business. As an entrepreneur, you are charged to find and recruit employees, increase sales, and avoid digital marketing mistakes.
Sometimes Being The Best Isn’t Enough
Operational excellence is important, and a key component of growing your customer base. However, this can be hard to accomplish with a failing digital marketing strategy. Many businesses have failed because it didn’t know how to market itself in the digital age. Being great at running a business isn’t the same as being great at marketing a business.
Digital Marketing is a complicated and multifaceted discipline that involves a discrete set of skills. Well-meaning business owners make mistakes in their digital marketing that devalue their brand. What’s more, these mistakes will garner the unfavorable attention of search engines. This can cause them to plummet in search engine rankings and lose ground to their competitors.
Determining Outsource Needs
Do you want to build an in-house marketing team or hire an outsourced third party? If you’ve yet to make that decision, hang fire until you read this! You need to know your own needs and which option will best facilitate them within the desired time frame. If you’re keen to get off the ground quickly, an SEO or Digital Marketing agency may be the way to go. If you have a limited budget, this option is not only quicker but often cheaper and tends to have a pretty favorable ROI. There is no right or wrong answer, however, the better you know your own needs, the easier it is to make this call.
Unclear Goals for Success
One of the most common digital marketing mistakes you can make is launching a campaign without a purpose. Digital marketing efforts may be less costly than advertising in traditional media. However, it still represents an overhead cost and an investment.
What do you expect to get out of the campaign? Are you trying to promote a certain product or service? Are you trying to build brand awareness? Perhaps you are trying to generate leads? The intended goals of your campaign will determine your parameters for success. Think about which metrics you need to watch to determine your campaign’s success or failure.
Without clear goals, you can’t expect your message to resonate in a meaningful way. And if people aren’t paying attention to your content, you can expect search engines to notice.
Inadequate Content Marketing Priorities
Content marketing is a wonderful way to build value in your brand. It can establish your knowledge, experience, and expertise. Furthermore, it can demonstrate that you know your market. It can also show your commitment to operational excellence to a much wider audience.
However, many assume that blogging regularly is the same as content marketing. What’s more, they will knowingly sacrifice quality for quantity because they assume that search engines will reward them for posting regular content, even if it’s of poor quality or (worse still) duplicate content copied and pasted from other sites. Plagiarism is not a good look on any brand.
Sure, keywords are important, but don’t get into the habit of writing to appease algorithms. That invariably leads to bad (or even incomprehensible) copy. Instead, write from a “customer-first) perspective. Create content that will be valuable, helpful and informative to them. Do this and users will read your content. They’ll also be more likely to navigate through your website to find more. They’ll leave a comment or share it on social platforms. All of these can garner the favorable attention of search engines and give you a competitive edge in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Assuming Too Much Knowledge of Your Target Audience
Many an embarrassing marketing faux pas has gone to print or gone live online because brands didn’t put in the market research prior to launch. Many entrepreneurs start out with comprehensive market research when developing their business. However, market research is never a “one and done” exercise. It should be constantly employed to ensure consistent operational quality and it should certainly play a part in developing your digital marketing materials.
There have been a number of spectacularly wrongheaded campaigns that have failed to take the needs, feelings or politics of their target market into account. This has led to embarrassing campaigns which have caused significant PR damage to the brands. From ads hailing Kendall Jenner as a political activist to unintentionally “racist” beer commercials, even the remotest knowledge of the market would have saved these face brands. Never let a campaign go live until you’ve read the room in terms of your target market.
Letting Your PPC Do All The Work
Organic is the gold standard when it comes to driving traffic to your website. But when you have a new and unfamiliar digital presence, it can be very difficult (and time-consuming) to grow a sizable following organically. With this in mind, a good Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign can prove an effective springboard for your campaign and drive a flood of traffic to your website as well as sowing the seeds of genuine consumer interest in your brand.
However, if you let your PPC do all the heavy lifting, you will fail to capitalize on this surge of interest which will slowly but inevitably dissipate. What’s more, when search engines realize that users aren’t genuinely engaging with your content, you could see it tumble in SERPs.
You need to follow up your PPC with lead capture efforts to help gently coax users back to your site time and time again. Over time, you can ease these leads through your sales funnel and convert them into repeat customers.
Use lead magnets like free white papers, guides, e-books, and other free resources to incentivize customers to leave their contact details with you in order to get that elusive something for nothing. This will then allow you to deliver highly targeted email marketing campaigns and exclusive special offers which can tempt them back to your website or your physical premises. Use remarketing to ensure that your brand and products they’ve looked at online follow them around wherever they go online.
There is a multitude of ways to capitalize on the momentum from PPC. Just don’t assume that you can buy your way to a devoted online following.
Steer clear of these common mistakes and you’ll find that your marketing campaigns strike just the right chord and position you above your competitors, giving your brand the visibility it needs to shine!
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