So you’ve tried to take on all the tricks of the trade – PPC, mass advertising, search engine optimization. But unfortunately, your website still isn’t jump starting the way you expected. Or perhaps it got off to a strong start, but eventually began to plateau and possibly even take a nosedive in terms of customer visits. While there are lots of ways to make your website impressive, it needs a strong foundation to continue to be noticed by the common eye at a growing rate.
5 COMMON MISTAKES MADE
Regardless of whether you’re just beginning your company or you’re a seasoned pro, these 5 universal problems need to be tackled as soon as possible if you want your company to do more than just stay afloat.
1. You Don’t Have a Target Audience
The most critical step of developing a brand is knowing what your brand really is. After all, marketing without a target audience is similar to just throwing material out into the world and hoping someone will buy it. If you know what kind of product or service you deliver and what type of individuals it will appeal to, you’ve already completed the first step. Once you know your audience, all of your marketing choices should be targeting that specific niche; after all, they’re the ones most likely to buy what you’re offering.
Define your target audience. Figure out who they are, what they want and what makes them interested.
2. You Lack a Strategic Plan
Many business beginners are quick to jump out the gate with guns ablazing and ready to take over the world. However, all the social media accounts and promotional techniques out there won’t be able to accomplish much if you don’t have a proper campaign in mind. A solid planner and schedule should be created at the very start to mark future steps taken and all goals reached for your company. This way, it allows you to tackle small problems that may eventually arise and also know exactly in what direction you’re headed marketing-wise (and where to go from any point in the future).
Think about your client / customer journey. It might be easier to work backwards from your end goal (whatever you are selling) and reverse engineer your content paths.
3. You Plan But Don’t Take Action
We just talked about overdoing before planning out your thoughts. In this case, however, the problem is planning out your thoughts without doing anything at all. Although you can research and plan for months, a lack of action and promotion will cause you to fail before you even manage to get started. Be sure to follow along with your pre-created schedule to make sure there is some type of advertisement on a weekly, if not daily basis. Those that plan well are sometimes afraid to take the first step towards really bringing their plans to life – be sure to avoid this pitfall!
Set aside time each week specifically for marketing activities. Do whatever you need to do to make sure you’re dedicating time to making posts, tweets, photos, etc..
4. Your Marketing Tactics Lack Consistency
One of the most important aspects to marketing is sticking with it all the way through. Companies sometimes tend to focus more on their products and perfecting other parts of their organization, which may cause them to forget about keeping up with their online presence. The only way to be sure that your marketing will lead somewhere is to continuously keep up the amount of campaigning on a regular basis. If you forget about your online marketing, your business movement will be much more likely to lose steam and fall behind completely.
Struggling to keep up? Try scheduling posts ahead of time and using automated programs if you need some assistance with management.
5. You Aren’t Paying Attention to Analytics
How do you know if your marketing methods are really drawing in customers to your website? The only tangible way is to track your website’s behavior and numbers, whether it be through analytic websites/programs or logs; trust us, you’ll be glad you did. By checking up on your website’s performance every so often, you’ll have a much clearer idea of 1) how your website is performing and 2) what aspects may need tweaking to bring in a larger crowd.
As said by Peter Drucker, “You can’t improve what you can’t measure”.
Use the available tools to track your marketing activities. Your marketing tools deserve the checkup!
We hoped that these simple, but major changes to your marketing skill set were helpful! If you need more assistance on marketing strategies or want to get your organization started strong, reach out to us at iCatch for a consultation!