Online marketing has taken the world by storm. In the era of new media, businesses absolutely have to have a strong online presence in order to be successful and stay relevant. This ranges from having a high-quality, fully functioning and up-to-date website to being active on social media.
Online marketing has a lot to offer businesses and provides a plethora of opportunities for growth. However, while embracing these opportunities can do your company good, ignoring them or getting things wrong can be detrimental to your business.
Here are 10 of the biggest online marketing mistakes that you should make sure to avoid.
Ignore Social Media
When it first emerged in the world of technology and the internet, social media hadn’t yet become part of advertising and digital marketing wasn’t even a thing yet. As it slowly became more and more popular, advertising by means of platforms such as Facebook and Instagram became the norm – this includes utilising the platforms for paid advertisements as well as simply having pages for the businesses themselves.
Today, it’s imperative – if you aren’t on social media, it’s almost as if you don’t exist. Of course, simply having a page isn’t enough either – to be successful, your page needs to be constantly updated so that people don’t forget about you. It’s a lot of work, but it’ll be worth it in the long run.
Targeting a Very Broad Audience
The idea of targeting a large audience may seem like a good idea initially to reach more potential customers, but ultimately, it’s a bad idea. By trying to reach everybody, you’ll likely reach nobody instead – being too general means people will gloss over you completely.
Rather, try and figure out what your niche is and who your target market is – once you know who you’re looking to sell to, it becomes easier to cater to them specifically. As a result, you’re more likely to be successful in your marketing strategy.
Failing to Convert Online Traffic to Real Customers
Having a cool website and being active online is all well and good, but it must convert to real customers at some point. This may be immediately – such as customers visiting your website and then placing orders online – or a little later on – customers reading about your restaurant and visiting in a week’s time. Either way, online marketing is only really successful if it converts traffic to real, paying customers.
Having a Dysfunctional Website
This one’s simple. There’s nothing worse than visiting a website that is slow to load, dysfunctional or difficult to use, especially if you’re raring to play pokies online in New Zealand. Ensure that your website functions logically and that customers are able to easily do exactly what they want – if you don’t, you’ll struggle to convert online traffic to paying customers.
Not Optimising Your Website for Mobile Use
This may seem like a little thing, but trying to access a website on your phone that’s not optimised for mobile use is wildly frustrating – it doesn’t display nicely, it’s difficult to click on things and ultimately, it’ll drive customers away.
