The benefits of using online marketing to attract and engage customers are countless. You can use SEO, social media marketing, and email marketing to see your web traffic grow. However, having an online presence doesn’t mean everything will be perfect. There are a few common pitfalls that you may encounter, which if you don’t learn from, could damage your business.
You Aren’t Seeing the Best Online Reviews
Even though online reviews play an important role in an online marketer’s success, you should always look at the reviews carefully and determine whether or not they’re good. If you’re looking for customer feedback, you should go for reputable sites that have an established audience. Trying to find reviews on obscure blogs will likely result in you getting lots of irrelevant or outdated information.
You Aren’t Profiting From All The Free Marketing Opportunities
A big pitfall in online marketing is not making the most of all the free opportunities that are available to you. When you have a limited budget, you shouldn’t be wasting precious resources on expensive ads when there are so many free options that could help you generate more leads and sales.
For example, let’s say you’re using Google Adwords to promote your product. You set your budget to $100 per day, and you’ve only got 500 impressions per day. You’ll naturally want to put more money into the higher performing keywords to get the best possible returns. However, there are hundreds of other keywords with equal or lower cost-per-click that you could be potentially taking advantage of.
If your daily budget is only $100, it would be a waste of valuable money to spend $400 on a single ad. It’s always a good idea to look for the free stuff first, and only then move on to the premium services that you can afford.
You Aren’t Monetizing Your Website Properly
Let’s say you’ve built a nice blog on your website devoted to reviewing products. You put a lot of work into writing comprehensive reviews and getting the images just right. You even bought a video testimonial to showcase the quality of your work.
However, you haven’t done anything to actually make money from the blog. You wrote the reviews just to fulfill your obligation as an online marketer. At this point, you have two options:
- You can either keep the blog up and running for the sake of it.
- Or, you can add some monetization methods to the blog, such as affiliate marketing, product reviews, and viral content.
Which one you choose will depend on your goals. Do you just want to keep the blog alive for the sake of it, or do you want to turn it into a moneymaker? If your main goal is just to have a blog, then going with the second option is the way to go. You can use the money you’re making to reinvest in more content or to pay for additional services that will further grow your business.
You Aren’t Measuring The Right Things
If you’re looking to grow your online marketing efforts, it’s important to keep measuring the results of your campaigns to determine whether or not they were successful. You should track the number of leads and the amount of sales you generate from each channel, and then compare those results against the amount of investment you put in the channel to see how much return you got for your efforts.
For example, if you ran an ad campaign on Facebook for a product, and you saw a 200% return on investment, that would be great! You’d know exactly what worked and you could replicate it.
You Aren’t Monitoring Your Performance
If you want to grow your business, you must be willing to put in the time and effort to monitor your performance and determine areas for improvement. It’s easy to get distracted by shiny objects and lose sight of the big picture. However, if you want to grow your business, you must be willing to put in the time and effort to monitor your performance and determine areas for improvement. Without careful monitoring, you could easily waste a lot of time and resources and end up sabotaging your efforts.
You Aren’t Determining The Best Mix Of Free And Paid Services
There are plenty of instances where you may want to utilize both free and paid services to grow your business (think about Google Adwords and Facebook Ads). However, you must be careful to determine which ones are delivering the best ROI and which ones you should drop. For example, you may want to run a free giveaway on your blog to promote your product, but maybe try out a paid ads campaign for the same keywords to further drive traffic to your site. Or, you could use the free services to get the ball rolling and then switch over to paid ads later on when you’re seeing the results you want.
You should always be thinking about how you can best utilize both free and paid services to grow your business. Just remember: sometimes you have to pay to play and you shouldn’t be afraid to do so.
With Google Adwords, for example, you can choose to pay only for the clicks that come from the organic search results or you can pay for each click individually. It’s always a good idea to think about the potential benefits of each option and the best mix of free and paid services for your own unique situation.
You Aren’t Optimizing Your Blog Posts For The Perfectly Crafted Click-through
When a visitor comes to your blog, the first thing they’ll see is your blog post. As an online marketer, you have the power to craft the perfect blog post that could possibly persuade the reader to take a specific action, such as purchasing a product or signing up for a service. When you craft a well-written blog post with a perfect call to action, your chances of converting that reader into a lead or a sale are greatly increased.
However, if a reader doesn’t take the action you want them to, you’re not doomed to failure. You can adjust and improve your blog post as many times as necessary until you get the perfect version that drives sales.
For example, let’s say you’re selling nutritional supplements and you’ve got a blog post about the benefits of these products. You may want to add a little incentive for the reader to click through to your blog post. The easiest way to do this is by using a call to action, such as inviting the reader to visit your website for more information or to buy the product. At the end of your blog post, you could add a line like this: “For more information, visit blah.com/supplement or click here to buy the product.”
The reason why this is a great example is because it’s very easy for the reader to understand what the call to action is. They’re not reading a blog post about nutrition supplements for fun – they came specifically to learn about the benefits of this product. So, in this case, the perfect call to action would be inviting the reader to visit a specific page on your website – the page where you display the product or service you’re promoting.
You Aren’t Utilizing All The Digital Marketing Platforms
Even though we’ve discussed several potential pitfalls that you might encounter as an online marketer, your situation may be a little different – you could be missing out on a number of digital marketing platforms. If you want to grow your business, it’s important to utilize all the digital marketing platforms that are available to you. Just remember: not every platform is made equal. Some are more suitable for certain tasks than others are. For example, HubSpot is a great option for inbound marketing and creating engaging content – but if you’re looking to drive sales, you may want to try something else.
You Aren’t Determining The Best Pricing Strategy For Your Product
When you have a product to sell, there are many different pricing strategies that you could use to maximize the amount of revenue you make. However, no matter how you choose to price your product, there will always be a demand for it. If you underestimate the value your product brings, you could end up losing a large amount of money. For example, if you’re selling nutritional supplements and you price your product too low, you may lose a large amount of market share to competitors who offer the same product for less money. Not only that, but if the demand for your product decreases, you could find yourself struggling to maintain profitability.
On the other hand, if you price your product too high, you may lose a lot of market share to competitors who offer similar products for cheaper. Also, the more expensive the product, the more luxurious it will seem, which usually leads to greater consumer appeal and higher sales.