Five Online Marketing Mistakes That Are Hurting Your Business

We all make mistakes – we’re human, after all. The unfortunate thing is that we often tend to make the same mistake over and over again – especially when it comes to marketing our ideas. It doesn’t matter whether you’re marketing a B2B product or a B2C product, the following mistakes could put a major snag in your online outreach efforts.

Five Online Marketing Mistakes To Watch Out For

1) Forgetting About Your Niche

A niche is not a demographic – if you’re marketing to a demographic online, rather than a niche, you’re making a rookie mistake. A niche can be described in various ways. Wikipedia defines it as a “a focused, targetable portion (subset) of a market sector.” Simply put, a niche is a group of people that have come together due to a common problem. A demographic, on the other hand, is just a group of people. Women over the age of 40 is a demographic; women over the age of 40 who are trying to lose weight is a niche. The more you can narrow your niche, the more successful your online marketing campaign will be. Why market to a million women over the age of 40, when only 600,000 are interested in your weight loss solutions?

2) Forgetting to Collect User Details

Once you’ve started marketing to a specific niche, it’s imperative that you start to capture visitor details in order to retain customers. The simplest way? Set up an email newsletter. Encourage visitors to sign up for your newsletter by offering a free report or ebook. Once you’ve captured their name and email address, you can continually market new products, ideas, and articles straight to their inbox. Of course, email marketing isn’t 100% foolproof – open rates are often dismal statistics to review. But, for ever six people who ignore your email, another two might open it, click through to purchase a product, or forward information to a friend.

3) Mistaking Traffic for Results

Clients are constantly asking me how they can drive more traffic to their small business website. And while traffic is great, it’s not the defining factor that you should be basing your online marketing strategy on. Focus on the conversion rate first. Sure, 60 visitors a day doesn’t sound like much, but if 58 of those 60 visitors are converting (making a purchase, contacting you via a form, signing up for your newsletter etc.) you’re onto something great. Once your marketing strategy has the proven ability to convert visitors into customers it’s time to start going after more eyeballs.

4) Don’t Be Cheap!

Anyone can slap a blog up on the Internet today and start “marketing” online. Need some graphics? Stock photography sites sell them for pennies. Business cards are practically free on sites like Vistaprint, and content can be syndicated from any number of sites. Talk about easy, eh? Not exactly. If you’re trying to build a reputable online presence (and business), you don’t want to look cheap. Setting up a free Blogger site with chintzy graphics and copied content makes you look a) lazy, b) broke, and c) unprofessional. Sure, there are corners that you can cut in order to save money and keep costs down. Just try and avoid them if they will reflect badly on your online image.

5) Settling for One Angle

Finding a single message that resonates with a large segment of your customers is tough. It doesn’t matter how hard you try, you’re going to leave a significant portion of your customer pool feeling indifferent. Shake things up when you’re marketing online, especially across different platforms. Your Facebook fans are different from your Twitter followers, so why market to them in the same capacity? Segment your efforts on different platforms and in different niches (see #1). Sure, it creates more work for you, but that extra work could help increase your conversion rate (#3), and will make your company appear more professional and polished (#4) – makes sense to me!

What other common online marketing mistakes have you encountered online? Leave a comment and let us know!