Online marketing can have fantastic results for your business. However, it’s easy to make mistakes that can waste your time and resources or even have a negative impact on your business. Here are five common mistakes that can derail your marketing. Are you making any of these?
- Not Having Goals
Never go into any marketing campaign without clear goals in mind. Before you do anything, you need to work out what you are hoping to achieve so that weeks or months down the line you can determine whether it has been a success.
This could be to increase sign-ups to your email list, to increase calls to your sales team, to boost social mentions, increase sales or anything else.
Just make sure you know what you want to achieve from the start so that you can judge whether it has been a success.
- Not Measuring Your Results
Besides not having any goals, another big mistake is not measuring the results. One of the great things about online marketing is that it is highly measurable, whether you are measuring email opens, clicks on AdWords ads or visits to a web page.
If you don’t measure, you don’t know what is working and what isn’t working. You need to know what’s not going wrong so you can change it, and what is going right so you can do more of it.
Don’t just set up a Google Analytics account and then never look at it. Take the time to understand the data, or hire someone who knows what they are looking for.
- Not Putting In the Effort
It can be easy to get caught up in the latest fad with great enthusiasm, only to stop putting in effort once the results don’t immediately come through.
Blogging is a classic example. You set up a blog hoping for more visitors and better website rankings. After a few months you realise it’s not having a big impact so you end up running a half-hearted blog that never really gets the attention it deserves.
If you’re going to do something, make sure you do it well. Otherwise it’s just going to end up wasting your time.
- Not Knowing When to Stop
Not every type of online marketing is going to be successful for your business, so it’s important to know when to stop.
Perhaps you have been running a PPC campaign that has not been getting the results you want, despite all the time and money you have put into it. Or perhaps your social media marketing is not working no matter how much effort you put into it.
If this is the case, change something. Then learn from that change, whether it has positive or negative results. Never just keep on doing the same thing and hoping for different results.
- Following the Crowd
It’s very easy to read a blog post on a new type of marketing that is taking the web by storm and to get carried away with it. You end up spending time and money on it, only to realise months later that it was never going to work for your business.
Never just do something because everyone else seems to be doing it. Don’t just launch blog or a Twitter profile because you feel you ‘should’. Instead, have a clear reason for doing it in the first place.
That does not mean you should never try new things, but just make sure you are doing it for the right reasons.
Avoid These Mistakes with Your Online Marketing
These are some of the most common marketing mistakes made by businesses both large and small. While online marketing can be fantastic, it can also be easy to get it wrong, so check to see whether you are making any of these mistakes and change what needs changing.
As specialist digital marketing consultants consisting of a number of highly experienced account managers, Web Results Direct is expertly placed to support its clients with advanced digital marketing consulting services. To learn more, contact us – call us now on 01483 429222.
