If you are involved in online marketing, it is important to understand that some of the biggest online marketing mistakes are some of the easiest to avoid.
Successful digital marketing takes time, persistance, integrity and a great deal of research. Those factors alone however, do not always result in success.
See Also: Internet Marketing Statistics [Infographic]
You also need to make sure that you’re not doing certain things to avoid online marketing failure or stagnation.
An infographic (posted below) was recently published by Prestige Marketing that highlights some of the most common online marketing mistakes.
The infographic also contains some great suggestions on which techniques you should use instead of the highlighted negative marketing concepts.
Top 5 Online Marketing Mistakes:
- Relying on Sponsored Facebook Advertisements
The majority of Facebook users don’t click on sponsored ads and the ones that do, often times do it by mistake. Although Facebook advertising may help with brand awareness, if you’re trying to bring users to your website or sell them a product, this method is a waste of time and money.
Instead, focus on gaining organic social media activity. Hold contests and encourage your fans and friends to post updates about your brand, product or organization.
- Poorly Written Online Content
Just like in offline interactions, first impressions are also very important on the web. If your content features poor grammar, misspelled words and misleading information, users are likely to never visit your site again.
Content will always be king in any form of media and making sure that you provide value and quality to the user should always be your top priority.
- Marketing to a Demographic Instead of a Niche
This is probably the most common online marketing mistake. Demographics deal with certain characteristics of people – age, gender, location etc. A “niche” is a specific group of people that share a common interest, need or problem.
Instead of marketing to a demographic of people, market to a certain niche such as “people looking for technology help”.
To use AnsonAlex.com as an example, I don’t care what age, gender, race, religion, etc. that my users are. What I do care about though, is that they’re people looking for information and tutorials on the internet, social media and technology!
- Relying Too Heavily on SEO
Traditionally, there have been a lot of “sketchy” SEO techniques (link building for example) that online marketers have used to drive traffic to their websites.
Google and other search engines are heavily cracking down on these techniques and they should be avoided at all costs.
Even if a particular technique works right now, if it involves taking advantage of a loophole, there is a high chance that it will be fixed in the near future and all of your content that utilizes it will be penalized in the long run.
The best method for SEO is to always “do what is right“. If you are honest and truthful with your SEO techniques, there will never be a future search engine algorithm update that will hurt your rankings.
- Poor Email Marketing
If you’re not collecting the email addresses of your users, then you’re missing out on a big opportunity to gain repeat visits.
People who consciously provide you with their email address are much more likely to respond to your marketing efforts!
