If you’re serious about improving your marketing, you have to know what some of the common mistakes are as well – as if you are making some of those mistakes. Chances are, you might be.
How do you know where to start? How do you know what you’re doing wrong? How do you know what you need to improve? How do you know when you’ve made a change?
These are the questions that we hear from small business owners every day.
In reality, marketing mistakes are a dime a dozen, everything from stuffing envelopes with pizza flyers to making “customer” calls in the wee hours of the night.
It might be worth running a quick audit on your business to see where you stand today. You can do so at https://grouprb.com/get-your-free-online-audit-report/.
So here are seven common digital marketing mistakes we see every day. Maybe you are making some of these mistakes. That’s ok because you can fix it.
1. Having a slow website. In today’s instantaneous world, a slow-loading site is the kiss of death for impatient potential customers. The audit report above can tell you how your website is doing both on desktop and mobile.
2. Not having a mobile-friendly site. Today, 70 percent of web traffic comes from mobile phones (Source: Blue Corona). If your site isn’t super mobile-friendly, you may lose potential customers.
3. Not working on increasing your search engine optimization. 71 percent of marketers say using strategic keywords was their number one strategy for SEO. (HubSpot State of Marketing Report, 2021). If you have a brick-and-mortar shop, local SEO will be key to driving calls (and people) to your store.
4. Targeting everybody on the web. You probably don’t want to target everybody that has internet for your product. It is important to understand the demographics of your current customers and your prospects. You know who you are selling to, target them!
5. Not measuring your return for every marketing dollar you are spending. You should track your return on your digital marketing dollars for every campaign. If a campaign is not meeting your ROI expectations, pause it, review it, and determine how to proceed. And how to proceed could be “stop the campaign.”
6. Not using calls-to-action on your website. When a prospective customer gets to your site, what do you want them to do? Call you? Visit your store? You should make your call-to-action abundantly clear and equally enticing to encourage them.
7. Trying to do digital marketing all by yourself. This is my favorite one. When I have a leak in my faucet pipe, I know I can fix it myself. But it will take me three times as long and cost five times as much because I don’t have the right equipment and I don’t do it every day. Digital marketing is similar. Sure, there are things you can do better and faster than an agency (social media posting is often one area I see as best to stay “in-house”) but there may be things that are better done by an agency.
So what does it all mean?
Decide what is the value of your time to do digital marketing and what may be best to outsource or contract to an agency. No matter what you do, make sure you measure your returns to ensure you are not throwing money away.
Until next time, remember that you deserve marketing that actually works.
