Digital marketing often sounds straightforward. At the end of the day, it is all about using the internet to make people aware of your product or service and its benefits. It doesn’t sound too difficult, yet despite there being around five billion internet users worldwide, many businesses struggle to drive traffic to their offerings.
In some cases, this is the result of misdirected marketing or poor planning. However, there are also some common mistakes that are easily avoided. Here are the ones that all businesses should know about.
Targeting the wrong audience
There are two ways this happens. The first is to target an audience that is too broad. It is unrealistic to think everybody will be interested in what you have to offer, and often, things which try to have mass appeal end up exciting nobody at all.
But targeting too specific an audience is also risky, in case you get it wrong. A useful exercise is creating several buyer profiles by thinking about the demographics, hobbies, and habits of people interested in your products. Target each and see whether you get more sales with more of them or fewer.
Poorly designed website
In the early days of the World Wide Web you could get away with a single-page website, flashing banners, and all kinds of other non-user-friendly features. Well, you can’t anymore. User-friendliness is an essential part of appealing to customers.
As a minimum, you should make sure you have a navigation bar with a search feature and call-to-action buttons or the shopping cart button should never be far away. Also, make sure that pictures and videos are not so large as to make the page load slowly, and everything should be scalable so it fits smartphone or tablet screens too.
Not including SEO
Search engines are the most popular way for people to find things on the internet, and that includes customers finding your business. However, if all your competitors are ranking higher in the search results, chances are any potential customers will choose them first
without ever seeing what you offer.
The essential idea of SEO is finding out what your potential customers are searching for and then producing content relevant to it which will ultimately make them aware of and interested in your products. SEO is a tricky, highly competitive business, and many firms outsource it to digital marketing specialists like King Kong and others. Whether you choose to do it in-house or look elsewhere, make sure it is not neglected.
By fixing or avoiding these three fatal digital marketing mistakes, you should be well on your way to online success.
