Digital Marketing | Where Most Small Business Owners Go Wrong

As a small business owner, you are used to jumping in and doing things yourself. While this is an effective way to manage your daily operations, when it comes to digital marketing, there are a few common DIY mistakes that almost everyone makes. Below, I cover these mistakes, and the way to turn things in the right direction.

Product-Centric Content

While the goal of your offline ads, brochures, and collateral is sure to be focused on your products, prices, and promotions—marketing your business online is a whole other ballgame. Most business owners curate content that is centered solely around their products and services. For example, a blog that highlights 4 or 5 of your products, and why you believe your products and services are superior. But, how is this working for you? Truthfully, it’s probably not.

Consider the last time you read a product-centric article (not your own) all the way through to the end, or the last time you shared such an article. Odds are, you haven’t ever—or only on rare a occasion. For your content to be engaging and effective, and to generate quality traffic and conversions, it must add value. If a client wants to know what you sell, they will just go to your website, so curate content designed to meet a need, solve a problem, or connect and engage with your consumers.

A Lack of a True Marketing Strategy

Just because you created a blog and added a few blog posts each week, it doesn’t mean you are “marketing” your business online. Yes, blogging can be an effective method of your digital marketing plan of action, but it is just one small part of a cohesive strategy. For your plan to work, you must look beyond your business—to current online and mobile search trends, and how you can capitalize on them through social media, blog posts, infographics, videos, email marketing, and more. Just like the DIY articles you might read, there are always several tactics mentioned. You can’t pick just one, and everything you do must support one another—or be targeted to specific niches.

ROI is not being Measured

One of the most exciting things about true digital strategies is that you can accurately measure your ROI. This goes beyond getting excited about the 30 people who spent 2 minutes reading your latest post, then “bounced” elsewhere on the web. Yes, this new traffic is great, but it is counting pennies when you should be counting measurable return on investment, capturing leads, and gathering powerful new consumer insights.

By leveraging tools like Google Analytics, social media’s built-in analytics, and your preferred analytic software you can collect data, analyze trends, test strategies and campaigns, and generate new consumer insights that help you to better market to your consumers. And yes, you can calculate an accurate cost per acquisition. This is something you simply can’t do with your offline marketing.

You Don't Know Your Target Audience

As a business owner whose training and skillset is not in that of online or offline marketing, it is easy to create content and strategies based on your goals. However, to be successful your content and strategies must be based on your client’s needs. This means that you need to do more than identify your primary and secondary niches; but really dig in so that you can hyper-target your strategies to your 3 to 5 primary archetypes. Once identified, you can create individual marketing funnels for each, and as mentioned above—measure the success of everything you do online. For example, don’t just run a Facebook ad to drive traffic to your website, but run an ad that leads to a targeted landing page. Provide an opt-in offer, and build targeted email lists that allow you to engage with your new leads from here on out.

Conclusion

Digital marketing can be a DIY in-house position, but with the ability to hyper-target and create strategies that are far more measurable than offline marketing—it is worth identifying a skilled marketer. In fact, you will probably invest less in time and energy by hiring a contract-based or digital marketing firm.
Just keep in mind that unlike offline marketing, your commitment to online marketing must be consistent to be effective.

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Until next time…