It’s no secret that the internet has become an integral part of our everyday life. Socializing, communicating, or hanging out with friends just requires a stable internet connection in this age.
Regards to this, businesses are striving to digitize their marketing approach to reap the exposure and other benefits the internet has to offer, because only brands with the best strategies survive in the market sphere. This has also increased the competition in the digital market as over 71% of small businesses own a website, but companies still devise ways to use this competition to further bolster their business growth.
However, ignorance of ways to create a business website or of ways to use it to derive business benefits is noted to be one of the key reasons some small businesses still lack a website, and ones that do have still find it difficult to use it to their advantage.
Quite alright, this can be outsourced to experts in the field. Without at least understanding how it all works, however, you can end up wasting lots of business funds on the so-called experts and still not derive any significant result off of it.
Hence, below are the 4 most common mistakes businesses make while trying to digitalize their marketing approach, alongside ways to avert them.
1. Unwillingness to outsource
While the traditional, offline, marketing may require little to no special skills and level of expertise, the online marketing does. Different internet marketing strategies require different skills. For example, an internet marketer that specializes on content marketing may have quite a difficult time with social media marketing and vice versa.
However, some businesses are not aware of this. They believe there’s no much of a big deal in mastering the art of internet marketing, hence, they refuse to outsource, trying to do it all alone in order to pocket all the pennies within reach.
This will do you or your business no good. It’s important to want to derive good business profits, but going around it in this manner will only be a huge pain in your neck, and still not allow you get the most benefits the internet has got to offer.
To avoid this, draw a well-mapped out plan of the internet marketing approach you want to adopt. After this, list the all the skills required. Then, filter the not-so important skills in order to avoid unnecessary waste, and then look for as minimum experts as possible that will efficiently cover the required fields.
2. Working with self-acclaimed professionals
Businesses often make the common mistake of not doing proper background check on the internet marketers they employ. There are a lot of imposters and inexperienced personnels in the industry, and hence, a proper crosscheck on the individual you hand over your company’s internet marketing strategy to is important if you really want to get good results.
A practical example in this regard is the ongoing automation with AI, where different sectors especially that of vehicle transport is to experience a whole new revolution. Though companies like Apple and Google pioneered this revolution, they don’t necessarily take part in the ground work needed to make the revolution a reality; they simply employ experts in the required fields and inspect to ensure the plan is being implemented.
Most businesses don’t understand this much about outsourcing. They leave their business in the care of individuals who only proclaim themselves as professionals but have no experience in the field. This often results in poor services like duplicate contents, poor link building strategies like forum spamming and so many others that’ll subsequently drag your brand’s reputation through the mud.
To avoid this, always examine individuals who claim to be experienced at what they do — Ask for samples of their past work experience, their portfolio, links to their published works, their previous clients’ reviews or whatever you think will further prove their credibility in the field.
Also, when assigning work to new individuals, it’s important to begin with assigning little chunks of work to get a scope of what they can do. After then, you can move on to the bigger tasks if you deem them credible enough.
3. Failure to analyze results
Different internet marketing strategies yield different results. Keeping track of the tested marketing strategy and its results will help you to easily discover which works best for your business. Some businesses, however, don’t do this and this often results in unnecessary waste of business funds on different marketing strategies, including ones that don’t yield any results but just serve as an unnecessary financial loophole in the business.
Always analyze, or hire a professional to analyze and keep track of the growth of your business, with regards to which strategies aids the growth the most.
4. Failure to take path in the process
Some so-called internet marketing experts don’t really care about their client’s business. All they want, is the pay. Working with such persons often does more harm to the client’s business than good; they look for the easiest, fastest way to get the work done rather than the way that’ll benefit the client the most. They are often the types that instead of using original, exceptional contents to build backlink for clients, engage in forum spamming and other illegal link building acts that will in time make the client’s brand to be flagged out by Search Engines.
How do companies avoid this? By taking part in the process. Observing what contents contains your company’s links, and what publications the links are published on.
In most cases, it’s best for the company owner to decide such things as the link to be used, the anchor text and the publication. But in cases when you, the company owner, is ignorant of these, it’s best you don’t interfere in the process but stick around at all times to see what’s going on.
In Conclusion
Though internet marketing has the potential of helping business owners easily double up their exposure and sales, the effects can be entirely reversed if the webmaster does not go about it in the right way. And the best way to ensure webmasters do what’s right is by understanding what’s right yourself and guiding the webmaster through the process. Therefore, learn from the above tips and make the necessary changes in your marketing strategy to ensure you reap more business benefits and less harm.
