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As a consequence of the rise of the internet, businesses worldwide — both big and small, have been forced to admit that internet marketing is no longer a secondary consideration to traditional media because it provides a statistically backed and more accurate method of making their voice heard by their target audience.
In today’s highly competitive market, having an internet marketing strategy should be a key part of the entire digital marketing plan of any business. In this article, I’ll be sharing some common internet marketing mistakes small business owners make and how you can avoid them.
1. They Think Building A Website Would Do All The Magic
It is so unfortunate that many small business owners fail to acknowledge the amount of time and effort that would be required to make any meaningful impact online, thus getting frustrated along the way and not able to take full leverage of digital marketing.
Some business owners think all they need to do is build a website or open social media accounts and the orders will start rolling in. Well, I am here to break the news to you;
Expectations: Creating a website would automatically help make more sales if you haven't been making sales before. Reality: Creating a website would put you into more problems; (Technical, SEO, Design, Content, and Marketing) and you must solve them all to make sales and break even. Your inability to solve that problem (perhaps due to lack of time, funds, or knowledge) would put you at risk of losing your initial capital.
As you may deduce from the snippet above, I have revealed the truth to let you know what many Web Design Agencies would typically hide from you.
So, never make anyone sweet-talk you into believing that building a website or opening social media accounts for your business would automatically solve your marketing issues — No, it won’t. However, if you can dedicate some of your time and money to growing your website and social media accounts, then I can guarantee that the return on investment (ROI) would be massive.
Building and abandoning your website would not give you any ROI, instead, it’ll put you at risk of losing your capital.
You can subscribe to any of our monthly website maintenance plans and we would take care of the technical side while allowing you to focus on other aspects such as generating content that is relevant to your target audience.
2. Unknowingly Targeting The Wrong Audience
It is a nice idea to pitch your product and services in front of a large audience for the purpose of gaining more exposure, but it is counter-productive when you have no targeting strategy. You must know that “more contacts” does not really translate to “more profit”. Thus, it is very important that you really know your target audience, and communicate messages that they will find attractive and relatable.
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3. Always Chasing, Not Attracting
Another common internet marketing mistake small businesses make is aggressively advertising (or more informally, shoving their products/services in people’s throats). In other words, chasing their customers by continually pushing a product or service out in the faces of their audience. It shows a lack of emotional intelligence, and prospects would instinctively start to get defensive.
When you chase, what you do is that you push your prospects away because you approach them with desperate energy. Successful marketers create systems that are designed to educate and attract their prospective customers and clients.
This is why the inbound marketing or content marketing strategy exists.
According to Wikipedia, Inbound marketing is a technique for drawing customers to products and services via content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization (or SEO), and branding.
4. Ignoring or Disregarding Feedback
A way to demonstrate a high level of brand equity is to answer all complaints and address all feedbacks and allegations against your brand on the internet — timely and properly.
Your brand should see complaints as an opportunity to improve its products and services. Repeated removal of negative public reviews can be perceived as a desperate attempt to conceal some shortcomings in your brand’s customer experience.
5. Having No Internet Marketing Budget
You just launched a brand and you thought the catchy logo would help you sell it out. Nope! you’re most likely going to fail.
Investing small amounts of money in sponsored social media or search engine ads (e.g CPM, CPI, and PPC), can increase traffic to your website or brick and mortar store or office.
Internet marketing or online digital advertising allows small businesses to compete for market share with a much smaller advertising budget. When managed effectively, it gives them granular control over where and how they spend their ad budget.
6. Failing to Track Ad Performance
More often than not, small business owners put their sponsored ads on autopilot. In other words, they start a sponsored ad campaign in a set-and-forget manner and then hope for the best results. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.
Digital marketing campaigns thrive when tracked closely. Monitoring and making changes to your ad strategy results in the desired outcome.
Conclusion
As a small business, getting your products and/or services sold on the world wide web can prove to be a daunting task, but if you can avoid all the mistakes mentioned above, you’d be in a very good position to reap massive benefits.
If you need help or guidance in improving your digital marketing strategy, simply contact us or schedule a phone call. We’d be very happy to assist.
