Small business owners are dedicated to doing whatever it takes to bring in new customers. After all, the success of their product or service hinges on ongoing sales. However, it’s not enough to simply rely on a great product and word-of-mouth to keep business churning. And while many understand the importance of marketing their business, there’s one powerful piece that cannot be neglected: digital marketing.
In order to make any kind of impact online and reach today’s customer, digital marketing is an absolute must. But it’s more than just building a website and creating a bunch of social media accounts. In order for digital marketing to be effective, your business needs to show up where your potential customers are looking. While many business owners have the best intentions when trying to market online, not understanding how to promote your business can lead to costly marketing mistakes if not done correctly.
With that being said, we’re going to uncover 5 mistakes small business owners make with digital marketing to help save you a lot of time, energy, and money.
Not Having A Marketing Plan
Trying to market your business without a clear strategy is like trying to drive to a new restaurant without the address. Sure you may eventually get there, but you’ve wasted a lot of time trying to figure it out.
If your marketing plan consists of getting more sales, that’s not a plan. You first need to identify what you offer and how you’re going to share your message. Start off by asking key questions about the personality of your brand and what your ideal customer looks like.
Some important questions are:
- What social platforms align with our key demographics?
- What content or media does our ideal customer respond to?
- What message do we want people to know about our business?
- How are we different from our competitors?
- What tools do we need to reach our customers?
It’s important to establish objectives from the beginning when developing your strategy and it is equally as important to map out the steps to take in which to achieve them.
Not Using SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the portal into your business. Nearly all customers begin their search for a business online. With Google processing over 3.5 billion searches per day, optimizing your content for search engines is the only way to gain visibility and attract organic traffic.
SEO is ever-changing, and there are specific techniques that improve your chances of ranking higher in the search results. Not using these techniques can severely hurt your chances of being seen. Knowing the right keywords that your target audience is searching for and incorporating that into your content is a must for SEO. Additionally, search engines favor high-quality and relevant information that is useful to the end-user. Along with other SEO techniques, the businesses that maintain consistent and useful information on their websites and social networks will receive more favor than those who are not.
They Don’t Know Their Audience
You can’t bring in the right customers if you don’t know who your customer is. Before you start any online campaigns, make sure you spend the time defining who your target audience is and how to find them. Define their demographics, interests, online preferences, and nurture path to making a purchase. When you build up your customer persona you’ll develop a clear understanding of how to reach them with the right content.
Once you’ve discovered your audience, find the platforms that best match that persona. A common misconception is more social networks means more eyes on your business. It’s a waste of effort to join every social platform if that’s not where your customers are. Only engage with platforms that match your community. Additionally, one of the more common marketing mistakes is simply not devoting the time to post the right content consistently. If you can’t efficiently manage that channel, stop investing time until you can.
They Only Focus on Likes and Follows
We posted a recent article on the differences between reach, impressions, and engagement. While it’s important to increase your reach and engagement, having 20,000 followers doesn’t equate to sales.
You want to focus on conversions. Conversions are actionable steps consumers take that drive them closer to making a purchase. These actions include scheduling a meeting, filling out an online contact form, calling your business directly, or requesting more information.
Boosting your conversion rate comes from creating online content with an effective call-to-action (CTA). It’s important that your content contains eye-catching images or video, useful information to the consumer, and prompts them to want more.
They Don’t Track Their Results
How can you understand the success and pain points of your campaign if you’re not paying attention to your results? Your analytics show the fruit of your labor, so checking these numbers can help you understand what’s working, and what’s getting low traction.
Nearly all social media platforms provide several performance metrics that help evaluate how your audience is responding to your content. Google AdWords offers A/B testing to help identify the most successful ads so you can redirect your marketing dollars on those. Additionally, knowing how many clicks to your website you are getting and where they are coming from will help you understand the source of your marketing initiative. Without hard facts, it’s nearly impossible to track your most effective methods of marketing.
One of the best ways to track all your marketing efforts is by using a dashboard. Marketing dashboards enable business owners to easily track the performance of all their marketing campaigns in one place. Dashboards provide concrete data that help owners make quick decisions and avoid costly marketing mistakes.
If you would like more information on how to improve your digital marketing or other ways to optimize your business, contact us directly at https://fusiononemarketing.com/contact-us/