Digital Marketing | Where Most Small Business Owners Go Wrong
As a small business owner, you are used to jumping in and doing things yourself. While this is an effective way to manage your daily operations, when it comes to digital marketing, there are a few common DIY mistakes that almost everyone makes. Below, I cover these mistakes, and the way to turn things in the right direction.
Product-Centric Content
While the goal of your offline ads, brochures, and collateral is sure to be focused on your products, prices, and promotions—marketing your business online is a whole other ballgame. Most business owners curate content that is centered solely around their products and services. For example, a blog that highlights 4 or 5 of your products, and why you believe your products and services are superior. But, how is this working for you? Truthfully, it’s probably not.
Consider the last time you read a product-centric article (not your own) all the way through to the end, or the last time you shared such an article. Odds are, you haven’t ever—or only on rare a occasion. For your content to be engaging and effective, and to generate quality traffic and conversions, it must add value. If a client wants to know what you sell, they will just go to your website, so curate content designed to meet a need, solve a problem, or connect and engage with your consumers.
A Lack of a True Marketing Strategy
Just because you created a blog and added a few blog posts each week, it doesn’t mean you are “marketing” your business online. Yes, blogging can be an effective method of your digital marketing plan of action, but it is just one small part of a cohesive strategy. For your plan to work, you must look beyond your business—to current online and mobile search trends, and how you can capitalize on them through social media, blog posts, infographics, videos, email marketing, and more. Just like the DIY articles you might read, there are always several tactics mentioned. You can’t pick just one, and everything you do must support one another—or be targeted to specific niches.
ROI is not being Measured
One of the most exciting things about true digital strategies is that you can accurately measure your ROI. This goes beyond getting excited about the 30 people who spent 2 minutes reading your latest post, then “bounced” elsewhere on the web. Yes, this new traffic is great, but it is counting pennies when you should be counting measurable return on investment, capturing leads, and gathering powerful new consumer insights.
By leveraging tools like Google Analytics, social media’s built-in analytics, and your preferred analytic software you can collect data, analyze trends, test strategies and campaigns, and generate new consumer insights that help you to better market to your consumers. And yes, you can calculate an accurate cost per acquisition. This is something you simply can’t do with your offline marketing.
You Don't Know Your Target Audience
As a business owner whose training and skillset is not in that of online or offline marketing, it is easy to create content and strategies based on your goals. However, to be successful your content and strategies must be based on your client’s needs. This means that you need to do more than identify your primary and secondary niches; but really dig in so that you can hyper-target your strategies to your 3 to 5 primary archetypes. Once identified, you can create individual marketing funnels for each, and as mentioned above—measure the success of everything you do online. For example, don’t just run a Facebook ad to drive traffic to your website, but run an ad that leads to a targeted landing page. Provide an opt-in offer, and build targeted email lists that allow you to engage with your new leads from here on out.
Conclusion
Digital marketing can be a DIY in-house position, but with the ability to hyper-target and create strategies that are far more measurable than offline marketing—it is worth identifying a skilled marketer. In fact, you will probably invest less in time and energy by hiring a contract-based or digital marketing firm.
Just keep in mind that unlike offline marketing, your commitment to online marketing must be consistent to be effective.
Thanks for reading! Let me know if you thought this was helpful
Until next time…
I am getting libertyprofessionals.com built now. The back end of the business, my PI registration, and my PI business license are all done. Bank accounts are open, etc. I'm already in business, but I have not been pursuing it. My main objectives are to offer private investigation and residential security consulting.
This post was very informative, thanks! It highlights why I would rather hire an expert such as your self than try to do it all myself. It's a lot to think about and implement. I'm not sure how quickly I want the business to grow too since it is service related, and I'll only have so much time.
You may want to check out grow-pro and hilarski too. They both have similar skill sets. I did not tag them because some people say tagging is a nuisance. They are friends of mine though, and I believe you should connect with them for the benefit of you all.
P.S. That's all the rep I can give for one day. My voting power is below 80%, and I like to leave it there to make sure it gets to 100% by the next day. :)
Hey Finnian!
Thanks man. I’m glad you found it informative. I hope you use the tips in your business. Whether you go it alone or hire in help, it’s important to have a grasp on the basics.
Check back again later this week. I’m going to post a simple 3 step bare bones minimum marketing plan :)
I definitely check them out! Thanks.
Btw, what is rep and how do you see voting power? 🤦♂️😱😆
The steemd site will give you your voting power. I check that every day before I start using Steemit and check back over and over to make sure I do not drop too far below 80%. That will allow it to recover to 100% by the next day.
Reputation determines how your reply is listed in other people's posts. The higher the reputation, the higher your post will appear. Then the more upvotes it has, the higher it goes. People with low reputation will have their replies automatically hidden. They are often ignored or muted too.
Reputation is received most quickly by people with high reputation upvoting the replies of people with lower reputation. I was able to give you a couple reputation from a few 100% upvotes. Someone with 70+ rep could have raised you into the 50's though. Their vote is very powerful.
It makes sense too because people of high rep will typically know when a new person is going to deserve a high reputation or not. People can downvote (flag) you too, so there's a way to lower an account's reputation as well.
Thanks Finnian! That helps a lot :) have a nice day buddy!
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Noe this a really good tip. Being someone who is working in marketing a few small businesses I really found value in this. I am now only learning the strategy behind marketing and why it it so important. What are your tips on getting to know your clients?
Hi Rudi and Alicia! Here are a couple tips for getting to know your clients..
The best way to get to know them is by talking to them. It should be a priority for you to always find out where your clients found you, and what they think of your services.
So depending on how many clients you have, and how much time you can put into it, a great way to get this info is by sending them a personal email, or even calling just to check in.
Hopefully you have some analytics tools in place, because that can help with identifying the acquisition channel for each new client.
If you have too many clients and not enough time, then mail platforms like MailChimp or GetDrip are great for keeping in touch with prospects and customers! Don't be afraid to ask them what they think, all feedback can be used to better your products and services :)
Good luck!!!