Regardless of the size of your company in this modern digital age, one thing holds true; the internet is a powerful tool when it comes to marketing your business or product and reaching your potential customer base.
With this in mind, making sure that you are using this tool in the most effective way becomes all the more critical, so it pays to take a look at your digital marketing strategy to see if you are making some of the most common mistakes.
And if you are, it is easy to fix these mistakes and therefore bring more customers to your company.
#1 Not utilizing SEO means you’re missing out
While it is true that using non-SEO means, such as banner ads, is a good and legitimate way to bring customers into your webpage; by not using SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you will be missing a decent chunk of your potential customer base. A considerable percentage of people will ignore paid ads that they see on websites and search results, instead opting to visit the first two or three sites that appear on the search result page from a manual search.
Imagine it’s your ad that puts a product idea in someone’s head, yet it is another company that gets the sale as they appear at the top of a search result while yours is buried several links down. And that’s not taking into account the people who have installed ad blockers, meaning they won’t have seen your banner ad at all in the first place.
#2 Poor utilization of SEO, you’re still missing out
Once you have started using SEO to increase your website’s visibility and bring more customers to your business, you will need to make sure you are getting the most out of your website and how it interacts with search engines. A poorly configured website means that even with SEO in place, your business’ website will still come lower than ideal in search results, causing those potential customers to look elsewhere first.
One cause of poor SEO performance is having orphan pages on your site. Orphan pages are pages that have no internal links meaning a user needs to know the direct URL to get to the page, nor will search engine crawlers be able to see the page so that it will not come up in search results.
By running an analysis of your website and identifying any of these orphan pages, you will be able to either create the necessary links or remove the page altogether.
#3 Appeal specifically to your target audience
Regardless of how you choose to spread the word of your product by either targeted ad, SEO, or a mix of these, who you are trying to reach is another essential consideration. It is easy to think that you need to spend your time, energy, and money getting the word of your product or company out to as broad an audience as possible. This can actually be damaging to your marketing strategy.
Instead, aiming for a narrower, more tightly focused audience will pay off in the long run as you will not waste significant resources on marketing that ultimately has a poor conversion to sales rate. When you choose your audience well and target those that fall within it, that conversion rate will be much higher and ultimately better for your company by saving money that will increase your profit margin.
#4 Spamming your target audience is a turn-off.
In your enthusiasm to connect with your chosen target audience, be sure to find the right balance of marketing to them, as spamming your customers will ultimately turn them away from you. When doing an email drop, consider if they are relevant to your whole customer base or only some of them because if a customer is receiving an email that is of interest and relevance, they will open and read it, leading to hits on your website.
In contrast, a customer who receives an irrelevant email will likely hit the delete button without looking past the preview. Should they receive a large number of the latter, they will either start to ignore all your emails or unsubscribe altogether, possibly taking their business elsewhere as a result.
#5 Customer retention, not just new customers
It’s not just large multinationals that offer fantastic incentives to draw in new customers and then never take care of their existing customer base; the same can happen for any size business, and it is a real turn-off for people who can and will go elsewhere.
An email drop offering 20% off for new customers is going to bring in plenty of one-time customers but will leave those who have bought from you before feeling slighted; however, an email drop that offers 10% off for all customers, sent out a few times a year makes your company a much more attractive place to spend money repeatedly. It’s about balancing bringing in new customers, for example, offering a one-off discount for signing up to your mailing list and giving existing customers first access to special offers.
#6 Good customer service every time
As with goods and services in the non-digital world, good customer service and reputation are essential when it comes to businesses and their online marketing. Online reviews are increasingly important when choosing a business or service to go with, and the old adage of negative feedback reaches many more people than good feedback still holds true, so those reviews really need to be positive.
A benefit of review sites is they usually allow the business to respond to reviews, and this is a valuable tool if unjustified negative reviews are left, as it will enable you to defend and clarify the situation and therefore giving other potential customers a balanced view of the situation. Responding to positive reviews will also build your reputation as it shows that you care about your customers and gives that personal touch that can be lost on the digital platform.
