Story provided by Website Designs – 

You’re busy running your business, you understand that you have to engage people and generate sales and you’re likely extremely good at what you do and how you generate sales offline. However it’s all too easy to get distracted and side-tracked when it comes to online marketing. There are a million and one things that can easily distract you, and cause you to waste your time, and let’s face it who actually really understands this online marketing stuff anyway.

However it’s a proven fact that online marketing is extremely effective if you know what you’re doing, you do it consistently and then measure the results you generate, understand them and adapt to make improvements.

To make sure your online marketing is as good as you can make it, let’s share some of the most common online marketing mistakes that you’ll want to avoid.

Not Building a Consistent Brand across All Online Marketing Channels

When you build your business it’s important that you take the time to build a brand that speaks to who you are as a business, who your target audience is, and what you can do for them. This will be displayed in your words, colors, products, services and even actions across all marketing channels. Marketing used in channels such as social media marketing, your website, and even offline marketing should all quickly be recognizable, this means someone seeing you on Facebook should know who you are on Twitter and also when meeting you and being given a business card or brochure… the same consistent brand is used across all channels.

Not Watching Your Competitors Closely

No matter how small or large your business is, researching your competitors can be very informative and extremely lucrative. You can find out how your competitors engage your audience, what people like about them and don’t like about them, and how they deliver their products and services, including feedback on the quality of these products and services. All of this information can be used to help you become better and better.

Focusing on the Wrong Goals or Not Having Any Goals

When starting any form of marketing it’s important to understand what your goals are before you start. Not just general goals, you must be specific about your goals. If the goals you set are not measurable or even attainable in the first place, then you’re setting yourself up for failure by setting unrealistic goals. Instead spell out every result you hope to obtain from every action that your online marketing takes.

Using Free Websites and Email Addresses

This one actually amazes me, especially in this day and age. If you want to be taken seriously as a business in the online marketing arena you need to have your own domain name, your own self hosted website and @your_domain email address… You can still use free email addresses to sign up for mailing lists, and even use them in marketing. But, when it comes to communication between you and your customers, you should have a professional email address that people are positive comes from your business and your business only.

Not Creating Sales Pages That Convert

So many businesses have wonderful products and services, but they forget, can’t be bothered or think they can skip the whole process of setting up a sales page, it’s as if they know better than every successful online marketing professional. Let me be blunt, sales pages help target the right information to the right audience to let them know about the benefits of your products and services to them. It allows you to explain that you know your audiences pain points, and you know how to fix them. You can let them know how you’ll solve their problems and ask for the sale.

Registering Your Domain for Only a Year

When you choose a domain name for your business, the longer you register it for, the more legitimate your business will appear to the search engines. When you do it only a year at a time, it can create a problem of trust. Plus, you also get a discount for registering or renewing it for longer periods longer anyway. This is because, people are going to be more trusting of domains that are registered for longer periods of time.

Avoiding List Building

Email marketing is essential to the success of any business online, especially to the success of any online marketing endeavor that you embark on. Build your list, built one for each product or service if you can whilst also building a general business list as well.

Not Measuring Performance or Not Knowing Your Numbers

No matter how experienced you are or how great your plans are, if you don’t know whether what you’re doing is working or not, you’re just guessing. Check every single action you take to be sure that you get an agreeable return on investment. Use the tools that are inherent in each channel such as Facebook analytics, Google Analytics and so forth, to help you determine if the actions you’re taking are generating the results you desire… for example are your social media followers growing, are they growing at a rate that is acceptable, are people leaving social media to visit your website and make purchases.

Common online marketing mistakes can cost you not just a few dollars here and there, but they can cost you your entire business, because with the popularity of the Internet if you’re not reaping the rewards, chances are that one of your competitors is.