5 Core Digital Business Mistakes: And How To Avoid Them
Navigating the online space is a must-have skill for today’s entrepreneurs. Long story short, the world has gone digital and so has business. If you have found your way onto digital platforms, congratulations on taking a step into the future of business.
However, online entrepreneurs make some grave mistakes while trying to market themselves online. To find out the critical mistakes that you might be making in your online business and how to avoid them, keep reading.
Why Do Business People Make Mistakes Online?
Business as we know it has been revolutionized. And the truth is, you along with other business people may find it hard to keep pace with the changes. A mindset shift is arguably one of the most difficult steps for business people.
To make matters worse, as a small business owner you are most likely the all-in-one; head of production, finance, and marketing. It’s easy to fall into the trap of poor practices to save time. Unfortunately, poor promotion in the digital space will be your businesses undoing,
Not only that, but Google is also constantly changing its algorithm. What worked 3 months ago might not work today.
Having said that, you can still develop strategies to make sure your business gets a good spot on google. And also connect better with your customers.
Digital Business Mistakes to Avoid
Unclear targeting and marketing strategy
The only way you can develop a working marketing strategy is to know who you want to reach. The mistake you might be making is jumping into marketing strategy before you frame your audience.
The first step to promoting your business successfully is to step back right at the beginning and decide who your business is targeting. Unfortunately, most business owners jump right into creating content (and lots of it) and randomly spray it all over social media.
This won’t work because unless you know who you are talking to, you don’t know how to talk to them.
To avoid this key mistake, start by defining your buyer persona. This simply means you must spell out your intended buyers and their pain points.
Think of it this way, if you don’t understand your partner’s love language, you are bound to make mistakes and that relationship is doomed to fail. Similarly, if you don’t know who your audience is, you can’t give them what they want.
It’s also important to come up with clear goals in your marketing campaign. You have to set SMART goals, otherwise, how are you going to know if you’ve achieved them? An example of a good goal would be: Increase website traffic by 50% over the next 12 months by posting 10 good-quality, E-A-T blog posts per month.
Not only are you specific with what you want to achieve but you can also measure your attainment.
Waddling through and randomly posting stuff on your website is not the wisest of things. So the bottom line is: know who you are selling to and decide how to do it before you start.
Low authority content
The goal of google is to serve its customers best. For that reason, it focuses on giving customers the highest quality content. If your content is poor quality, unauthoritative, and does not display any expert knowledge of anything, chances are you won’t be in the top picks for search engine page results.
Why is this important? Well, research has shown that a place in the top three results on the google page is the goal you must strive to. This is simply because most traffic(75%) goes to the first three results on the search engine results page.
It goes without saying that your business will fare better if it can appear in those top three positions. However, the major mistake you might have been making is using shoddy, unreliable information that neither your customers nor Google can trust.
Before you publish any content, do a thorough fact check, and never use unverified information. If you establish trust and authority with your audience, Google will pick up on this and rank you higher.
You have probably heard of the term search engine optimization. Nowadays, this isn’t only about giving Google’s bots keywords to eat up, and thank you for it by ranking you higher. On the contrary, google bots wised up years ago, now they will only take expert, authoritative, and trustworthy content ( EAT). In fact, they will punish you for trying to fool them.
So what does this mean for your business? Create good content and provide value for your customers. Verify any information you put out as if your life depends on it (your business certainly does).
Focusing on your business instead of the customer
The only way to promote your business is to give the customers what they want, not what you want. The mistake you might be making is pushing your business agenda over the customer experience.
What do I mean? Well, let me tell you; small business owners tend to create content that expounds their values and their business. Basically telling customers about themselves and trying to imprint their names in the customer’s minds.
While this might have worked years ago, in the present day, customers just don’t have the time or energy for that. Let’s face it, the digital world has opened up so many options to customers. They can get whatever they want at the click of a button. Why should they choose you if all you focus on is telling them about yourself?
So what should you do? It’s simple, create content that tells the customers what’s in it for them and how they will benefit from choosing you. If you must tell them your values, let it be about how they will benefit from it.
Make your website content and social media promotion about the customer’s benefit and improving user experience.
Email marketing gone wrong
They say the money is in the list, but bombarding the customers with unwanted poor quality emails won’t get you anywhere. The mistake you might be making is randomly creating emails that don’t speak to your audience or overdoing it.
Imagine if you had to eat ice cream all day, every day? It doesn’t matter how good it is, it would make you sick. In the same vein, a successful email marketing campaign is well structured, ordered, and timely.
Focusing on action over results
Forgetting to measure the results of your promotions is a grave mistake that many entrepreneurs make. If you don’t measure the results, how else will you know if it’s working?
The key takeaway here is to use tools to measure the results of your marketing campaign. Google Analytics is a good place to start. Rather than keeping busy putting out content all the time, check to see what’s working.
Final thought
A good marketing campaign will make the difference between your success or failure in the world of business. By acknowledging these mistakes and taking steps to rectify them, you are bound to see the fruits of your efforts.
