Small businesses in Northamptonshire, Kettering, Wellingborough, and surrounding areas have many digital marketing challenges to tackle. Limited to no digital marketing leaves potential clients in the dark and costs businesses new customers and revenue.
Missing The Mark with The Basics
What is the most common mistake small businesses seem to be making? A brand new website goes live, and that is the end of the online marketing, thinking online marketing is complete. Customers may hopefully find the website. That has almost never been the case.
Websites do not build themselves. There is a multitude of elements to activate in order to get people to your website. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media marketing, and even advertising can be good ways to get traffic to your new site. If you aren’t marketing your website people will not find it.
Many website problems come from businesses believing that websites will fix themselves. Most problems with websites come from a lack of visibility. A good website may fix problems with a business, but only if the business is marketed correctly.
Marketing Expecations That are Unrealistic
People get disappointed with the results of their online marketing because they expect it to take no time. People will usually stop trying to do online marketing because they are investing time and money. People get disappointed because they will stop marketing due to not seeing results. Online marketing has to be performed for a long time before it begins seeing results.
Results of online marketing can not be be achieved in a reasonable time. It is difficult to compete with online businesses that are well-established. Websites that just upgraded their website are going to compete with websites that are well-established for a long time.
Instant results should be the expectation only if a person has a good established online marketing system. If someone goes to their social media pages, they should expect nothing. If someone has a good established online marketing system, it should provide to their audience, and be consistent. If someone does not have a good established online marketing system, it will be a long time before they see good results.
Ignoring Mobile Issues
A large number of businesses in Northamptonshire still have websites that are not mobile-friendly. This presents a number of issues that businesses are losing customers because people more often are using mobile phones to browse websites.
You should check your websites mobile version right now. Is your mobile website easy to navigate? Is your text readable without constantly zooming in? Is your contact form easy to fill out? If these issues are present then it should be a priority to fix your website. It makes no sense to pay for advertising driving traffic to a website that does not function properly on mobile.
Its obvious, yet overlooked all the time. Businesses worry how their website looks on the computer but seem to forget how it looks on mobile. Mobile users are extremely important because they can easily switch to your competitors if your site is hard to use.
Trying To Do Everything
Small businesses often spread themselves thin in an attempt to post everywhere online at once. They want to post on every social media platform, do Google marketing, and email marketing at the same time. This leads to almost every task being done poorly, rather than multiple tasks being done really well.
Small businesses need to direct their marketing efforts toward a single, or at most two, social media channels, and do it really well. For instance, if your customers are on Facebook, focus on Facebook. If your customers do Google searches to find businesses like yours, focus on Google and ensure you are higher up on the search results. Doing things like Facebook marketing and neglecting Google marketing will lead you to waste money on things that are not working and neglect the opportunities that exist in your marketing.
Not Tracking Anything
Small businesses do not typically track their online marketing campaigns, often leading to businesses having no clue which channels bring in customers. This ends up clouding their ability to recognize effective channels, leading to money being wasted on ineffective strategies.
You have to monitor where your inquiries originate. Set up Google Analytics for your site. Inquire with new clients about how they discovered your company. This type of data tells you what’s successful and what businesses are simply guessing and hoping for the best. This hope-and-see approach isn’t an effective marketing strategy.
Knowing that Facebook generates for you three customers a month and Google brings you ten allows you to allocate your resources properly. Not tracking anything means working without a guide. Without tracking your business’s growth, you are working blind. That’s poor marketing strategy, using your time and resources without knowing if it’s effective.