No one said marketing online is easy. It’s a highly competitive and specialized area that few companies succeed in without help. If you are a small business or a company that is new to the whole idea of digital marketing, you must particularly watch out for several common mistakes that can cripple an online promotional campaign before it even begins. Read ahead find out what these amateur mistakes are, and how to avoid them:
1. Keyword Stuffing
Keywords are essential for optimizing your online content for search engines, and to target an audience for your ad campaign. However, many newbies make the mistake of stuffing advertisements and promotional content with too many keywords. Keywords only work if they are kept relevant and used moderately. Beware that too many keywords will garner the exact opposite of the results you are hoping for.
2. Having a Horrible Company Website
Ad campaigns ultimately lead back to a landing page on your official company website. If your site is outdated, looks ugly or is difficult to browse, your potential customers will flee to your competitors. Therefore, you must invest in creating a fast loading and appealing site that will retain customers. Invest in professional designers, preferably located locally to save costs. For example, if you are located in the UAE, search for “web designing Dubai,” instead of in general.
3. Publishing Irrelevant Content
All the content in your advertisements and promotional material, which includes blog posts and Facebook posts, must be timely and relevant to the topic at hand. If you are a gardening supplier, do not publish content about Kim Kardashian just because the name is trending. Consumers simply overlook such content and your Google rankings could potentially suffer. On the other hand, if Kim Kardashian is using a sprinkler sold by your company, by all means promote the fact, because it’s relevant.
4. Posting Outdated Content
All content on your website should be up to date. Reposting something published years ago, unless absolutely necessary, will not increase traffic or interest potential consumers. Keep your site and social media profiles constantly updated to remain relevant and not to sink down to the bottom of Google page rankings.
5. Prioritizing Quantity Over Quality
If your ad campaign involves publishing articles about your products in other people’s blogs, you must make sure all such content is prepared professionally. Search engines and consumers prefer high quality content rather than high volumes of content. The blogs you publish in should have a good number of followers and should generate high volumes of traffic. Publishing a large number of bad articles on a bunch of blogs no one reads indicates a disastrous ad campaign.
6. Not Optimizing Content for Mobile Devices
Most consumers nowadays browse the internet, check posts and get tweets on mobile devices like smartphones and iPads. Overlooking such devices is a huge mistake. Your online ads and content should be equally accessible on a mobile device. You should also have separate mobile-specific content, like an app, for an exclusively mobile user audience.
7. Focusing Too Much on Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is only part of a successful ad campaign. You can pay Google to show your page above search results as sponsored content, but this is not enough. Your site should ultimately show up on top of organic search results. Similarly, pay for likes and shares on social media sites like Facebook only with the goal of translating the paid ones into organic likes and shares.
So how many of the above mistakes did you find in your online marketing campaign? It’s not too late to fix them.