Five Most Common Online Marketing Mistakes You Need to Avoid

Having a sound digital marketing strategy is imperative for online success. If the same old mistakes are holding you back from making it big, it is important that you take note of them and ensure they do not recur.

Here are 5 major mistakes business leaders make in their online ventures:

Generic objectives such as ‘making more money’ or ‘engaging customers’ won’t keep let you make much headway. You need to set up specific goals such as increasing the number of leads generated by your website from 5000 to 10000 per month or make the lead conversion rate increase by 15%.

Tangible, measurable goals will help you devise an appropriate strategy for yourself. Different marketing methods such as SEO, PPC and mobile marketing  are available online. Your goals will enable you to determine the right marketing medium, set a budget and stick to it.

You need not hit and try when a plethora of analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Coremetrics, HubSpot and many more are there for you. You can use any of these to provide critical data about your website. These insights will let you know of the pages on your website that are most popular, the keywords that are bringing visitors to your site, the most effective online marketing channels and a lot more.

Thanks to analytics, you can have precise information on how your website is performing. Armed with the required tools, you can frame an effective strategy for attaining your defined goals. Performance can be reviewed on a regular basis and the marketing tactics can be adjusted accordingly.

Before you initiate marketing of any sort, you must know who you are marketing to. Understanding your target audience and building customer personas prior to content creation will help develop effective content. You need to do adequate research to find your prospects’ pain points and their expectations from your products or services.

Knowing your audience and their specific problems will help you communicate with them effectively. You need to conduct a detailed research for having a crystal-clear picture of your target audience. This will help you determine the best ways to address their requirements and expectations.

Great that a stream of visitors swarms your website every day! But how will it benefit you if they leave without doing anything? They won’t if you advise them about the action they should take. You can’t just create a website and expect that people would purchase or download stuff on their own.

Be explicit about the action that you would like your visitor to take. Should they proceed to purchase something, or call for the consultation? Specify.

Having a one-size-fits-all approach is a sure-shot recipe for failure. It is like going to a restaurant where you can order just one dish. If you find this abominable, how can you think of offering something similar to your visitors?

You need to come up with offers that appeal to your prospects at the various stages of the buying cycle. For instance, someone in the initial stage may appreciate an offer for a free download of a white paper, but someone on the verge of purchasing will find a free trial better.

If you have been guilty of making these mistakes, you need to take out time to mull over them and build an optimal online marketing strategy.