How to Fix 8 Common Online Marketing Mistakes

There is no one perfect marketing method but there are thousands of effective tools and strategies. Online marketing, for instance, has raised the bar and has opened opportunities for originality, creativity, and interactivity. However, since it’s a fairly new medium, it’s prone to experimentation as well as mistakes. Although there are problems that cannot be solved, most online marketing mistakes can easily be fixed with the right approach.

Here are some of the common marketing mistakes and how to solve them:

1. No Marketing Plan

The marketing plan is supposedly the first step to do in any e-commerce business, but apparently, a lot of marketers make this big financial mistake. Failure to do this step means that you will be investing in different strategies without knowing if they will work or not. You are merely wasting your time and budget.

Fix: Create a comprehensive plan that will help you direct your strategies, measure successes, and ensure you get the most out of your investment. A good marketing plan includes short-term and long-term goals to help make the right decisions.

2. Lack of Website Marketing

A lot of businesspeople expect that when their website is live, there is nothing to do but wait for the visitors to come and make purchases. With millions of sites offering the same products or services, what makes your website stand out from the rest? Without proper marketing, your website will not have visitors and no sales.

Fix: Regardless of your website’s offerings, proper marketing is critical to your business’ success. Learn about the proper search engine optimization (SEO) techniques for your business website.

3. Vague Target Market

There are a lot of businesses that fail to focus on the best people to promote their products or services. If they see that they have plenty of visitors, they are happy and don’t care to analyze this traffic. What is more important than merely producing traffic is ensuring targeted traffic. You need to promote your services or products to the people needing them to convert these visits into sales.

Fix: Your marketing efforts should focus on your business’ target audience. Analyze the characteristics of your high-value customers to determine your targeted market and lead the right traffic.

4. Failure to Measure Returns on Marketing

Measuring results in marketing strategies will help you know whether these strategies are working or not. It is also one of the most common and worst mistakes that an online marketer can make. You may pour time, effort and money into different marketing strategies and as long as the traffic is there, you don’t care for anything else.

Fix: Take time to measure the returns of investment of your marketing strategies otherwise, you are only wasting money.

5. Setting Unrealistic Expectations

Online marketers tend to set unrealistic goals on marketing returns and their timings. This is primarily caused by the assumption that online marketing techniques produce instant results. It is important to know that startup businesses do not succeed overnight and you will need lots of hard work. There may be rare exceptional success stories, but it is best not to assume or look for shortcuts.

Fix: Set specific, realistic and achievable goals for your business’ website. Keep in mind that you will need to work out these best practices for some time with hard work and financial investment.

6. Using Shady Techniques

While some companies offer to give your website top rankings in just a week, do not be tempted with these tricks. These companies promise to provide instant results by using “black hat” techniques that may give you quick, but short-term gains, which may also cause your website to be banned or penalized from Google.

Fix: Employ legitimate “white hat” SEO promotion techniques that will give your website organic, long-term results. This technique will require more time and expenses, but you won’t fear being penalized in search engines.

7. Depending on Paid Advertising

Paid advertising such as paid ads on social media or pay-per-click (PPC) is reliable and expected to produce results. It is also one of the simplest ways to get targeted traffic to your e-commerce website. However, advertising is expensive and lack long-term benefits, making it wrong to rely solely on this technique.

Fix: Employ a combination of paid and inbound marketing strategies in promoting your e-commerce website. Don’t miss out on the positive and significant impacts of e-mail and social media marketing and using SEO techniques.

8. Not Choosing the Right Partner

Today’s online marketing strategies are so complicated that it is impossible to do it alone. If you are doing everything from providing content to SEO, social media and e-mail marketing, then you’re doing it wrong.

Fix: Find a competent marketing team to partner with significant experience and proven ability to bring results from previous clientele.

Final Thoughts

Every online marketer can make mistakes from which he can learn from. Knowing these mistakes is the first step in flipping them around and making them right. The proper marketing strategies will not only ensure the success of your business but also guarantees that your business reach and help your targeted audience.