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Make The Most of The Web: How To Avoid These 7 Common Online Marketing Mistakes


How well are your online marketing campaigns doing? Are they helping you reach your goals or impeding you? Is your traffic thriving or declining from the marketing campaigns you’re employing?

Digital marketing is no easy enterprise. If you’re learning about it and doing it alone, chances are you’re making mistakes. Below, we’ve got a list of digital marketing mistakes you can learn to avoid for marketing success.

If they’re doing fine, that’s good for you. If not, you may be making some of the most common online marketing mistakes. Even if they are doing well, avoiding the following common mistakes is still a good idea. 

1. Neglecting to Measure ROI or Return on Investment

Let’s say you’ve found marketing strategies that fit your business best. They help your traffic grow or stay the same at least. Yet, how do you know how well they really work for you if you don’t measure your Return on Investment (ROI)?

It’s not enough that your marketing plans give you good results. It’s also essential that you find out the nitty-gritty details about why and how. Measuring ROI ensures you know where your money is going. 

It’s also a way to see if each strategy is doing as well as you thought. This is especially helpful if you’re using a lot of marketing campaigns for your online business. With this, you’ll know which one is contributing and which isn’t.

When you root out which marketing campaign is failing, you can make plans for a new one. When you don’t find and remove a failing marketing campaign, you have a chance of using it over and over. Keep using it long enough and in time you will burn through your bank account.

When you start looking into your ROIs reports, do an in-depth analysis of it. Don’t look at the traffic, leads, or general sales only. Keep an eye on conversions, click-through rates, and other numbers.

2. Overlooking a Marketing Budget Plan

Online marketing is free. This is a common misconception for many business owners. While there are tools and services that come free, not all are.

This is why some entrepreneurs fail to create a budget for their marketing campaigns. Good online marketing strategies cost money as non-online marketing campaigns do. Knowing which of the many marketing strategies promote your business best is important.

Campaigns vary from SEO and content development to email marketing and paid advertising. The more diverse your marketing budget, the better. Note that you can create a less diverse marketing budget plan as well if it will suit your business.

While you can do this alone, it’s smart to hire professional help when you need to. Digital marketing specialists can help you create a budget as well as a marketing plan. Marketers in https://digitalshiftmedia.com offer a range of tactics for your site. 

3. Marketing to Everyone and Neglecting Existing Customers

A crucial step when creating a marketing campaign is to identify a target audience. Skip that and you’re likely attempting to market your products to everyone. As clever an idea it may seem, it isn’t in actuality.

If you try to market to everyone and anyone with an internet connection, you’re looking at a blank profile. You won’t be able to understand certain demographics and how to best appeal to them. You’ll end up making assumptions about your customer base and end up missing out on real data about them.

The solutions here is to narrow down your target audience. Remember, not everyone who visits your site is part of the “right” traffic. The right traffic consists of visitors that convert into customers.

A skin care company, for example, cannot assume that their target audience is only women. If you do, you’ll be focusing on marketing your products to women only. When you do, you’re missing the chance to market to other demographics that want your products too. 

Also, don’t abandon your existing customer base, especially when they are already loyal to your brand. Remember to reward them with membership anniversary discounts. After all, they’re likely to shop more and spend more money on your products.

4. Not Converting to Mobile

We live in an era where smartphones are a necessity for communication. Yet, people use it for more than calling, sending messages, or video-calling. People also use it to play games, shop, and more.

If you want to know how to do online marketing well, convert to mobile. In 2016, statistics found that 136.3 million people in the US use mobile to shop. If you rely on PC-based sites only, that’s millions of potential customers you’re losing.

One way to give customers with phones a positive experience is to have a site optimized for mobile use. You can use conversation tools available online. Some of these may already even be part of your website development software or platform. 

If you want, you can also create an app specific to smartphones or tablets. Though this may seem like another thing to spend money on, it will be worth it. The key is to find an app developer who can create an intuitive and easy-to-use mobile app.

Promote your business by creating a discount app for it. Make your blog accessible through your mobile app. Use your mobile to hold games or raffle draws for users.

It’s also good to know Google has an algorithm that ranks mobile-friendly apps higher. Most important is that you need to make sure your mobile site load speed is quicker than most. Otherwise, Google may ignore your site for ranking anyway.

5. Relying Too Much on Paid Ads

One of the common online marketing mistakes is being too reliant on paid advertising. How much of your marketing budget do you place on paid advertising? Are there other strategies you have that bring traffic in other than paid ads? 

Yes, paid advertising works fast to get you the right traffic. It’s also reliable and it often produces results. No matter how beneficial it is for your business, paid advertising is only a short-term solution for attracting traffic.

Moreover, PPC advertising is expensive. Facebook Ads and Google Adwords have varying prices for different industries. How much you pay per click can also depend on its quality and other competition.

The solution is to invest in other digital marketing strategies. Inbound marketing is a good, long-term investment. This includes SEO, email marketing, and social media marketing.

Often, these inbound marketing strategies will take time before you see their results. Yet, they produce better ROI in the long run. They are also much cheaper than PPC advertising.

Still, don’t come to neglect paid advertising. As we stated, it’s the quickest way to gain traffic and it’s reliable. Invest in a well-balanced combination of paid advertising and inbound marketing campaigns.

6. Underestimating Good Customer Experience 

One of the worst digital marketing mistakes you can make is to undervalue good customer experience. That includes truthful marketing, an easy-to-navigate site, and customer service. Who doesn’t want a smooth and awesome shopping experience after all?

Customer service is one element where you want to invest time and people in. It’s important that your customer service reps respond to any queries or complaints as soon as they can. Otherwise, you might lose sales and loyalty. 

Three of five customers won’t commit to e-commerce store conversions if you have a slow response time. This means no subscriptions, purchases, or notification alerts.

Not to mention unsatisfied customers can spread the word about terrible service. Imagine how much damage it can do to your business if an influencer was an unsatisfied customer.

If you don’t offer 24/7 customer support, make sure you have quick responses to customers who try to reach you. Be consistent when you do offer 24/7 customer support services.

It’s a big advantage to your company if you have exceptional customer support services.

7. Making the Common Online Marketing Mistake of Ignoring CTAs

Let’s say you’ve hooked your potential customers in. They’re ready to buy from you but something is keeping them from doing so. Do you know what you need to seal the deal?

You need an effective call-to-action method.

A CTA engages customers further by telling them to do a certain action. This can be as simple as subscribing to your email newsletter. It can also be as direct as giving them a discount when their purchase totals to a certain amount.

Get them to buy your products by adding a CTA after a scarcity count. These are often phrases like “Only 100 stocks/products left! Order now before we run out.”

The most common place where people place CTAs is their contact page. Don’t let yourself feel limited by that behavior. Make creative CTAs that will inspire visitors to visit your page again.

Move customers to action by adding a CTA at the end of your blog posts. When writing content on a product page, don’t forget the CTA. Write a CTA even on your homepage.

Learn from These Common Online Marketing Mistakes

These are 7 common online marketing mistakes that many people overlook. If you’re able to avoid these common online marketing fails, you gain an advantage against your competitors

If you want to look up more enlightening guides like this, feel free to read our other posts today.



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