Online marketing is a trial by error process. It’s about mixing and matching tactics that work to help form your overall strategy that will ensure the success of your business.
Along the way, you will make mistakes in your planning, process, and implementation of the strategies you have developed, which is normal to all marketers. Through the errors you committed, you will learn how you can correct them by tracking and measuring campaigns so you can launch better and error-free campaigns in the future.
However, is there such a thing as unforgivable marketing mistakes?
While all mistakes committed by marketers have their respective resolutions, there are those that push your business two steps backward after taking a big leap forward. These mistakes won’t ruin your business altogether, but they will put you at a disadvantage against your competitors. This makes it much more difficult to not only start back from scratch, but also climb out of the hole you’ve inadvertently dug yourself into.
If you find yourself to have committed the mistakes listed below, then fear not! Below are the respective fixes to each of the grave marketing mistakes that you can ever commit. Keep in mind that you will have to do the legwork for your business to recover because there are no shortcuts to success.
Mistake #1: Not researching for your keywords
Keyword research is the foundation of successful websites optimized for search engines. They are able to create laser-focused content based on the target keywords they are optimizing for. Their research should also include long-term keywords that they must use for their off-page
Without conducting proper keyword research, your website won’t have a keyword phrase that it should be optimizing for. As a result, your site pages will wander aimlessly in search engines without a keyword to rank for.
Fix: Use Google Keyword Planner and search for your industry or site topic in the search bar. You can narrow down the search by geography or other filters. The results will show you the different keywords and their global/local monthly search volume (the number of times they’ve been searched using Google). To broaden your keyword search, use Ubersuggest to help you come up with more keywords to be included in your list.
You’d want to target keywords will relatively high search volume so you have better chance of being found by your audience. Also run a search on Google to see the kinds of pages that are ranking for your choice of keywords.
Once you have saved the list of keywords you intend to optimize for, assign the appropriate keywords for each page in your site. It is ideal to target just one keyword phrase for each page to maximum the
Mistake #2: Not defining your target audience
Your target audience is the group of people you want to appease with your site and blog. By having a profile of your audience broken down into their different demographics (age, gender, educational attainment, purchasing power, location, etc.), you will have a better idea on how you should produce your content, from its tone of voice down to the topics and concerns tackled in your blog.
If you haven’t refined your site’s target audience, you may be struggling to drive visitors to your site and increase your conversion rate. This is because your content is not focused towards a specific type of audience that it ends up appeasing no one.
Fix: Target audience is a part of your content strategy, which serves as your online business’ foundation regarding all things content. The strategy should cover your business goals, mission statement, core message, competitive analysis, the specific content types that will be published on your site, and others. This topic is covered in great depth by the first chapter of Quicksprout’s excellent Advanced Guide to Content Marketing. Once you have your content strategy in place, you need to correct the published pages of your site in accordance to your plan.
Mistake #3: Not building an email list
Building an email list is something that site owners and bloggers would not have thought of when building their site. In fact, lots of successful bloggers list down not building a list early on as one of their biggest mistakes. This tactic has found its way back to marketers thanks to the advent of mobile devices, which have encouraged users to open half their emails from their smartphones or tablets, a 500% increase since 2011.
There are lots of advantages when building an email list, one of those is the ability to send out newsletters and updates about your site or blog. By developing and implementing an email marketing campaign, you can make the most out of your subscribers and convert them into your customers or rabid followers.
Fix: You may have lost some subscribers along the way, but it’s never too late to develop an email list that you can monetize. If you have yet to try out an email marketing platform, try MailChimp – a free platform (but only up to 2,000 subscribers) that lets you collect emails and create campaigns to send out to them.
You can embed a sign-up form on your site using the MailChimp code, but it’s best to use opt-in widgets to make irresistible forms that pop out from your screen.
Optinmonster is one of the best ones out there than lets you create big and beautiful opt-in forms in a couple of minutes and ready for publishing. You can also use SumoMe and HelloBar so you can create a form that can be scroll-triggered (appears on the corner of your screen after scrolling down the page). You can also make it appear as an eye-catching bar on top of your screen.
Using the tools above in observing the best lead capture practices will help you drive more subscribers to your list. Once you have gathered enough subscribers, you can run persuasive email marketing campaigns to take your relationship to the next level!
Mistake #4: Not tracking your progress
As mentioned, the secret to successful marketing is the ability to track and measure the performance of your various campaigns using different tools and services. From here, you will gain insight on different metrics that affected your campaigns’ performances so you can replicate the ones that worked and avoid those that didn’t.
You cannot run into a marketing campaign blind and not have analytics tools at your disposal. This is true especially when you are using paid tools and wish to determine their effectiveness by tracking down your site’s ROI.
Fix: Installing Google Analytics to your website is of utmost importance. From here, you can find out how many visitors are going to your site, how long they have been staying on each page, which site pages are receiving the most traffic, and other metrics. For beginners, looking at the tool’s dashboard can be overwhelming. But this post at Moz drills down the basic metrics that you need to be aware of when starting out with this tool.
If you wish to gather more data, you can also sign up to Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmasters (if you wish to mine data from the Bing search result).
Of course, website analytics isn’t limited to these tools. There are a lot more tools that not only cover the performance of your campaigns in your websites, but also those in social media.
Mistake #5: Losing the drive
There will be marketers who have exhausted the best practices for developing their websites and running their campaigns, only to come up short in all their KPIs. While it is normal to feel discouraged and disappointed after not meeting their goals, the nail in the coffin is when their have gotten sick of doing something they once loved and just give up. This is not a matter of not being a good marketer, but it’s more about losing the inspiration to do marketing.
Fix: While nobody cannot be faulted for this kind of marketing mistake, giving up should be the last thing if your mind when you fail to meet your goals. It all starts with motivating yourself and giving yourself reasons to keep pushing and moving forward regardless of what happens. It’s also about developing a positive attitude on how you approach market with the help of inspirational quotes to keep shape your mindset. You can even print out these quotes and post them on your walls so you can keep your eye on the goal.
Final thoughts:
Learning how to solve the marketing mistakes by following the fixes listed above is part of the process. You need to experience failure in order to learn from your flubs and become a better and smarter marketer who can launch effective campaigns and a better website altogether.
Images: “Learn from mistakes concept/Shutterstock.com“
________________________________________________________________________________
Tweak Your Biz is a thought leader global publication and online business community. Today, it is part of the Small Biz Trends stable of websites and receives over 300,000 unique views per month. Would you like to write for us?
An outstanding title can increase tweets, Facebook Likes, and visitor traffic by 50% or more. Generate great titles for your articles and blog posts with the Tweak Your Biz Title Generator.
