Marketing Trends: Common Mistakes Companies Make With Their Digital Marketing Efforts

Do you want to make sure your potential customers and clients can find you easily? If so, you need to think about the internet. Because so many people use the internet when they are looking for products and services, this is where you need to focus your efforts.

That is why internet marketing has become so important during the past few years. Even though you probably have a functional website, digital marketing involves much more than that. You need to pay attention to a few common mistakes people make when they focus on digital marketing. What are a few examples?

Focusing Too Much on Keywords

One of the biggest mistakes people make is focusing too much on keywords. You do need to focus on keyword research regularly, but you do not want to overuse these terms in your writing. Otherwise, you could get punished by search engines for stuffing them. Instead, you should focus on density and the quality of your content overall. Then, as long as you use the right terms in the right place, it should take care of itself. 

Not Thinking About Technical SEO

When people think about search engine optimization, they usually think about on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Even though this is important, you also need to think about technical SEO. This refers to how easy it is for search engines to categorize the content you are publishing. If you did not think about technical SEO, it might be too hard for search engines to categorize your content. Therefore, this could impact your overall ranking. Make sure you think about technical search engine optimization. This matters for digital marketing as well. 

Losing Sight of the Forest in the Trees

Finally, a lot of people lose sight of the forest when they are focusing on the trees. What this means is that you focus too much on an individual piece of content instead of thinking about your overall strategy. You need to focus on your overall strategy, targeting your strength while also covering up your weaknesses. Remember that every piece of content you publish is a small cog in the marketing wheel. Make sure these individual pieces work well together to create a comprehensive, cohesive digital marketing strategy. A professional team can help you do that. 

Work With a Professional Company

These are just a few examples of common mistakes that companies make when they are trying to capitalize on their digital marketing efforts. Even though you need to think carefully about your digital marketing presence, you probably have other things you need to think about as well. That is why you should take this off of your plate by partnering with a professional company that can help you.

Professionals understand the current trends in digital marketing, and they can help you stay one step ahead of your competitors. Reach out to a professional company today to learn more about how you can get the most out of your online marketing. 

Hone Your Online Presence To Maximize Profits

Digital marketing is more important than ever before for a new business. If you’re launching a new startup, be sure to develop an online marketing strategy to help make your launch a success. Continue reading to learn the best ways to build your online presence quickly and cost-efficiently.

In the digital age, starting a business is more complex than ever before, despite the low barriers to entry for many industries. The twenty-first century has seen a wealth of technological advancements emerge, with social media, cloud storage, digital magazines, and SEO taking prominence for any new startup. Taking your idea of a money-making venture and turning it into a fully-fledged business takes time, commitment, and effort. While you may be honing your business and marketing plans, you may be focused on funding, cash flow, and your financial forecasting. The idea of digital marketing and your online presence may take a back seat. However, it shouldn’t. Creating and launching a digital marketing strategy should be at the forefront of your new business.

Your online presence will end up being the face of your brand and will be the first thing that the millennial and Gen Z markets will see of your business. It’s vital that you pay attention to your website, your social media channels, and your online analytical prowess. You need to understand your niche market through the way you communicate with them, including where they hang out online. With the Internet being a vital medium through which to communicate, search for businesses, and receive news, it makes sense that you hone your online presence and digital marketing strategy for maximum profits. Here are our top digital marketing tips to help grow your business the right way from the start.

Ensuring Your Social Media Channels are Active

As a new business, you should have a Twitter feed, an Instagram page, a Pinterest account, and a Facebook account at the very least. These are the channels through which your potential customers will find and contact you. It’s vital that you update your feeds regularly and post relevant and meaningful content that can be shared and enhance your level of followers. The more shares your posts and images receive, the greater exposure for your brand and a more positive impact it will have search engine rankings. This is vital if you are to compete with your already well-established industry rivals.

As a new startup, you need to hone your branding, your market positioning, and your company voice. The best way to do this is via your social media channels. The millennial and Gen Z markets no longer want a stuffy corporate tone to greet them when making the first contact with a startup. They appreciate a more human, chatty voice to communicate with. This human level allows you to connect with your customer more and provide a better customer experience.

If a potential customer tweets you a query or sends a DM on Instagram, don’t ignore it. All conversations that you have with customers are in the public domain, so you need to consider your social media interaction as a public relations activity. The more professional, attentive, and respectful you appear, the more likely traffic will flock to your site. The key is to engage with your followers to build that conversation and trust while developing a community around your company.

Social media content and its quality can also dictate how many hits you can receive to your website. Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram are great at referring potential new customers to your shop and services pages. Treat them as a form of free digital marketing and never neglect the potential impact on your profits. These channels are ultimately great to start conversations with your audiences.

Conducting Relevant Online Analyses to Refine Your Digital Marketing Strategy to Reach More Targeted Customers 

As a new business owner, it’s crucial that you understand your niche market. Don’t think that you can have a stunning website alongside active social media channels, and then expect the sales to roll in. You need a more nuanced approach to your online presence that’s targeted and resonates with your audience.

By developing a native ads network, you can source traffic revenues for your brand and optimize your algorithms for online targeting of your audience. Alongside Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, you can develop a clearer picture of how long your potential customers stay on your site, the top referrers to your site, and the demographic of your developing niche. You will also be able to see where visitors are bouncing off your site—which is critical to building a loyal following. This data can help you adapt your digital marketing strategy to harness more of the market and convert hits into sales more readily. 

Designing a Website that Resonates with Your Audience

The website that your business utilizes is your little patch of the Internet. This is the face of your brand and should emulate your ethos and values. The design should be on-brand and make people want to click through to other pages. No longer can you get away with a simple and static Geocities style web page that looks like it was designed in 1997. Your website must be aesthetically pleasing to the eye, easy to navigate, and fully search engine optimized.

There is no point in having such a stunning website if no one can find it if they search. Organic hits are few and far between and you want to find new customers through alternative referrals. Good SEO means using Google’s Keyword Planner to find the right keywords and PPC techniques to enhance your website’s standing in the Google rankings. With enhanced SEO, you can be sure of leapfrogging the competition to ensure that your website is higher up on the first page of search results. You will just want to ensure your website’s SEO strategy adheres to Google, Bing, and Yahoo’s webmaster guidelines to prevent it from being penalized.

 When you have the hit—better known as a unique visitor”, it’s vital that you can keep the user on your site rather than deviating elsewhere. This is why you need fast upload speeds, increased bandwidth, and a top-performing web host. WordPress is the host that most websites utilize in the twenty-first century. It’s fully customizable, easy to use, you can create a really professional looking website even as a novice, and there are plenty of widgets to explore. However, we like to use Squarespace due to its beautiful templates that can be fully customized without writing a line of code. In fact, it’s the perfect option for visual web designers without coding experience.

With a website that is informative, interesting, and beautiful, you will portray a professional image and showcase your credibility. Bad grammar, dodgy spelling, and fuzzy or pixelated images do not set the tone for your startup and will drive your traffic away. You want your website to make the best possible impression when someone lands on it.

 Acquiring Feedback from the Right Customer Segment and Stakeholder Groups Online

Online feedback will make or break your business. If your customer service levels are high and you respond to queries effectively and speedily, the chances are that you can foster a bank of positive reviews. People are often reluctant to part with their cash on a newbie company. The reviews you generate will encourage people to take a punt on you. Price your product or service reasonably and go the extra mile to provide your customers with the best possible experience.

Add a free gift, offer free delivery, or give a discount on the next order if the customer follows you and leaves a review on Facebook, Google, or Yelp. If you do receive negative feedback, address it immediately, and respond to defuse the situation. Explain the issue, how you solved it, and the impact it has had on your future transactions. Showing that you have learned from a poor experience will help your customers come to their own conclusions when it comes to your reputation.

In the twenty-first century, it can seem more challenging than ever to make a success of your business both online and offline. However, if you can harness the marketing and sales potential of your online presence, you can future proof your venture and it will thrive. It’s all about creating a product or service and offering a customized and personalized customer experience that will have them coming back consistently.

Digital Marketing: A Guide for Start-ups and Small Businesses

Digital marketing doesn’t have to be difficult when you know where to spend your time, energy, and resources. Use the guide below to drive your digital marketing efforts to maximize your audience reach.

Stepping into the continually changing world of digital marketing is confusing for every businessperson at first. There are lots of different paths to consider when planning a marketing strategy for a start-up, but what makes it more complicated is that each of those digital paths changes regularly with technology advancements, algorithm updates, and more. Your big priority should be ensuring that your options should be cost-effective and deliver a return on your investment right away, but it can difficult to determine that.

Where should you start when trying to launch a business with no previous digital marketing experience? This guide will introduce the best digital marketing strategies for start-ups and small businesses to help you find your starting point.

Designing the website for great user experience and optimizing for sales

Your business website is your shop and your home and should contain everything a customer would need to know about you, your services, and your products. It is essential that it makes a strong first impression and engages people who visit the site and keeps bringing them back.

Even if all other aspects of your digital marketing strategy are effective at sending visitors to your website if your website is poorly designed with slow-loading pages and confusing copy, they will not stay long, will lose trust in the brand, and probably will not make a purchase. A clear navigation bar with relevant calls to action should be the first item you consider. When you design a mockup of your website, think about how the consumer will navigate and click through. Insert relevant copy to engage readers and educate/inform/entertain them so they stay onsite longer and search through each page or item on the page.

You could also think about hiring a professional website designer or reputable branding agency to ensure your website is a valuable asset to your business. You want to make the best possible impression to all potential customers.

Search engine optimization (SEO) efforts for startups

Now you have a fantastic website that’s clean and easy to navigate, you need to ensure that your target customers can find it. A search engine like Google can interpret what a user is searching for, analyze all the website pages on the internet, and rank them in order from most relevant and useful to least relevant.

As the majority of users do not look past the first one or two pages of results, the objective of SEO is to increase the likelihood that Google will rank your website’s content on the first page (or a featured snippet) for specific keywords and keyword phrases. There are lots of elements involved in successful SEO from researching the right keywords, ensuring the proper URL structure, fast page load times, and making sure all pages are indexed properly on Google. Still, at the most basic level, it is identifying the keywords you want to rank for and creating original content around those keywords. Find out more about keyword research.

Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) can be effective for startups and small businesses with larger budgets

Where content marketing is creating content for it to rank in search results organically, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is paying to place adverts in search engine results based on target keywords. In the case of Google AdWords, you choose the keywords you want to rank for and bid against competitors for them.

If you are one of the highest bidders, your advert will appear above organic search results in Google. You only pay for the advert if a user clicks on it to visit your website but keep in mind that each click can cost upwards of $100.00 without even having that visitor convert to an email subscriber or customer. There are lots of PPC management agencies like Made by Factory, which specialize in helping businesses to make the most of PPC advertising campaigns. Such an agency can help you craft the perfect SEO strategy that is within your budget.

Social media marketing can be a huge help in building an online brand

Social media platforms like Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook offer businesses the opportunity to reach different customer segments in several ways. You can create engaging content and interact with customers as well as placing cost-per-click advertisements that are targeted to your relevant demographic. Pinterest, by far, has the most affordable social media advertising options and is one of the best ways to grow an audience organically.

Content marketing to drive online growth and customer acquisition

Content marketing is the creation of content to inform, entertain, help, and engage with your customers. There are lots of different formats available, but the most commonly used are short and long blog posts, articles, infographics, case studies, interviews, and videos. Your content should be original, engaging, and should showcase your expertise in your industry. For short blog posts, they should be around 500 to 600 words, while long-form blog posts should be 2,000 words or longer. We strive to publish longer content to educate and engage with our audience.

Ideally, users will share it with others on social media, which will increase your visibility, and it will rank for target keywords. Posting regularly (at least once a week to begin) is best to ensure that you draw in new website traffic, build an email list, and maintain a line of communication with your customers.

Email marketing for business growth

Email marketing is one of the originals in terms of digital marketing dating back more than 20 years, but it can still be very effective when done the right way. You need a list of email addresses that have given explicit permission to receive those marketing communications from you. These emails are deployed via email marketing service providers such as Constant Contact or Active Campaign. Again, then you can send them information about products, newsletters, and promotions. Personalizing emails and targeting segments of the list with different campaigns can be a great way to ensure your customers feel valued.

Building an email list takes time and patience but it’s easier to do so when you have opt-in boxes placed strategically throughout your website. We encourage our clients to have a delayed pop-up on every page, one in the header and then footer, and then one in the sidebar. We emphasize how important it is to have an email list to send out regular newsletters and promotions.

Digital Marketing: The Pros and Cons

Digital marketing efforts can be more effective than traditional marketing initiatives when campaigns are tested, measured, and optimized.

You’ve probably heard of the term ‘digital marketing,’ as it is one of the buzziest newer business terms, more than once by now. But what is it, precisely? How can businesses benefit from learning about how to execute them?

If you guessed marketing campaigns implemented online, you’re not that far off. The more standard definition would be marketing strategies that use online-based media (think phones, laptops, and tablets) to market a product, software program, or service. After everything that’s happened this year, there’s never been a better time to try digital marketing. But how can you be sure it’s the right move for you?

Today, we’re going to talk about some of the pros and cons of transitioning into a digital marketing career or executing your own campaigns for your business.

How can digital marketing improve your business? Why should you consider implementing such a campaign? What are some of the primary benefits?

You Marketing People understand the pains that come part-and-parcel with traditional marketing campaigns: exorbitant costs, less accurate response methods, fewer audiences reached, longer execution time, and, most importantly, decreasing interest in traditional marketing methods. This waning interest, in tandem with the lightning-quick evolution of online technology, has produced a prime environment for digital marketing campaigns to flourish.

For starters, digital marketing campaigns cost a fraction of their traditional counterparts to run and evaluate. Social media marketing paid campaigns provide an excellent example of this. For just under $3, you can reach over 1000 people through a social media campaign. Compare this to direct mail campaigns, which can reach the same amount of people for a whopping $57. That means direct mail campaigns are nearly 20 times as expensive as social media marketing campaigns. Running an advertising campaign on Pinterest or Instagram could be even less than that.

The last promoted Pin campaign we ran here at FemFounder.co to launch our latest PR course, we only spent .55 per qualified lead, and the last Facebook ad campaign we ran, we only spent $1.00 to acquire each new customer. And according to WebFX, driving web traffic from Pinterest is generally .10 to $1.50 per engagement with the minimum bid starting at .10. Additionally, Wordstream.com reports that Facebook ads cost approximately $1.72 per click across all industries.

Digital marketing campaigns also let you zero in on your target audience at a granular level. Unlike traditional marketing campaigns, you can choose the precise consumer who will see your ads through filters by location, interests, age, annual income, ethnicity, gender, interests, and family size, for example. You can also test and measure the effectiveness of any campaign you run with free online tools. Digital marketing is a great way to reach targeted consumers at a reasonable price.

What are some digital marketing cons? What should you be aware of before developing and executing a digital marketing initiative? How can a digital marketing campaign hurt your brand if you’re not prepared to monitor the web and social media?

Of course, not all that glitters in online ads is gold and effective. The same goes for digital marketing, too. Unlike traditional marketing campaigns, digital marketing campaigns tend to make less of a visual impact on their viewers and, therefore, are likely to be less memorable. The internet is a pretty crowded place as it is, so you’ll have to work harder to make your campaign stand out.

Moreover, any negative reviews that your campaign garners can exacerbate an already bad situation. People can see just about everything that happens online. They’ll probably know the fallout of a bad digital marketing campaign as well, which could translate to lost revenue and a chunk of time dedicated to damage control. In other words, your brand’s reputation is more at stake online, so you’ll have to execute your campaigns more delicately than you would via traditional marketing methods.

Lastly, your online digital campaigns are more likely to get overlooked by consumers. In the era of the unmonitored spam folder, thousands of smart email marketing campaigns go unnoticed every day, leaving digital marketers scratching their heads. So ensuring that your emails are deliverable and only distributed to people who signed up for your email list will help increase deliverability. Some sophisticated strategizing may help you overcome this obstacle, but it will require the help of someone who knows what they’re doing.

As you can see, digital marketing is not the foolproof marketing industry that many tech entrepreneurs and aspiring digital marketers might make out to be. However, that doesn’t mean that digital marketing hasn’t come about in a dazzlingly opportunistic age for it to grow, evolve, and thrive. Only time will show how digital marketers and savvy entrepreneurs fine-tune their skills in response to the increasing diversity of online commerce.