Regardless of the size of your business in the modern digital age, one thing is true: the Internet is a powerful tool for marketing your business or product and reaching your potential customer base.
That makes it all the more important that you use this tool as effectively as possible. That’s why it’s worth reviewing your digital marketing strategies to see if you’re making some of the most common mistakes.
If so, you can easily correct these mistakes to attract more customers to your business.
6 Common Digital Marketing Mistakes Should be Avoided
1: If You’re Not Doing SEO
While it’s true that using non-seo methods, such as banner ads, is an effective and legitimate way to attract customers to your website, if you’re not using SEO (search engine optimization), you’re missing out on a large portion of your potential customer base. A large percentage of people ignore the paid advertisements they see on websites and in search results, and instead visit the first two or three websites that appear on a manual search results page.
Imagine it’s your ad that leads someone to a product idea, but it’s another company that wins the bid because it appears at the top of the search results, while your ad is hidden several links down. Not to mention people who have an ad blocker installed, which means they didn’t see your banner ad in the first place.
2: Misuse of SEO
If you’ve started using SEO to increase your website’s visibility and attract more customers to your business, you need to make sure you’re getting the most out of your website and its interaction with search engines. A poorly configured website means that, despite SEO, your company’s website will not rank optimally in search results, causing potential customers to look elsewhere first.
One of the causes of poor SEO performance is orphaned pages on your website. Orphan pages are pages that have no internal links, which means that a user has to know the direct URL to access the page, and search engine crawlers can’t see the page either, so it doesn’t appear in search results.
If you perform an analysis of your website and identify these orphaned pages, you can either create the necessary links or remove the page altogether.
3: Target Your Audience
Regardless of how you want to get the word out, whether it’s through targeted advertising, search engine optimization, or a combination of both, it’s important to know who you want to reach. It’s easy to think that you should spend time, energy and money promoting your product or business to the widest possible audience. However, this can be detrimental to your marketing strategy.
On the contrary, it pays off in the long run to target a smaller, more focused audience because you won’t be wasting significant resources on marketing that ultimately has a low conversion rate to sales. If you choose your audience well and focus on the people in it, the conversion rate will be much higher, which will ultimately have a positive impact on your business as you save money and increase your profit margin.
4: Spamming Your Target Audience is a Sign of Rejection
In your quest to connect with your target audience, make sure you find the right level of marketing for them, because if you spam your customers, they will eventually turn away from you. When sending emails, ask yourself if they are relevant to your entire customer base or just some of them. After all, if a customer receives an email that is interesting and relevant to them, they will open it and read it, which will generate traffic to your website.
Conversely, a customer who receives an irrelevant email is likely to hit the delete button without looking beyond the preview. If they receive a large number of such emails, they will begin to ignore all your emails or unsubscribe completely, which may cause them to look elsewhere.
5: Customer Retention (not just new customers)
It’s not just large multinationals that offer fantastic incentives to attract new customers and don’t care about their existing customers; the same thing can happen to any business, no matter how big or small, and it’s a real disappointment to people who can and will shop elsewhere.
An email offering new customers a 20% discount will attract a lot of one-time customers, but those who have already bought from you will feel disadvantaged. On the other hand, an email offering a 10% discount to all customers, sent several times a year, will make your business much more attractive to repeat customers. It’s about finding the right balance between attracting new customers, such as a one-time discount for joining your mailing list, and giving existing customers priority access to special offers.
6: Good Customer Service at all Times
As with goods and services in the non-digital world, good customer service and reputation are essential for businesses and their online marketing. Online reviews play an increasingly important role in choosing a business or service, and the old adage that negative reviews reach far more people than good ones is still true, so these reviews really need to be positive.
One of the advantages of review portals is that they usually allow the company to respond to reviews. This is a valuable tool when unjustified negative reviews are given, as it gives you the opportunity to defend and clarify the situation, giving other potential customers a balanced view of the situation. Responding to positive reviews also enhances your reputation as it shows you care about your customers and provides the personal touch that can be lost on a digital platform.
