4 mistakes 99% small businesses do in digital marketing

Helping business owners to succeed in their small business digital marketing efforts is perhaps one of the most rewarding and fulfilling work areas I have been involved with. That’s because 90% of business owners, especially the Small and Medium Business segment owners fail in their small business marketing efforts because of lack of knowledge.

Lack of digital marketing knowledge hits small business owners twice as hard-

1) They end up making mistakes that could easily have been avoided and/or

2) They often allow themselves to be taken for a ride by digital marketing practitioners whether freelancers, agency personnel or even their own internal staff who take advantage of their lack of knowledge.

Ever since I began coaching and training on small business digital marketing I have been discovering several common areas that significantly contribute to reasons why the small businesses have not been able to get their 100% return from their digital investments. And every single reason was directly attributable to the fact that the small business owners simply did not know. And as a result never asked his freelancer or agency.

Here are 4 of the most common mistakes small business digital marketing mistakes owners do.

Slow Website Loading Speed:

Take the most common small business digital marketing mistake that I found in 99% of the cases I studied – Slow Website loading speed. Almost everyone had extremely slow website loading speed on mobile devices. In an age where the internet is increasingly being accessed via smartphone devices, having a website with a slow speed is simply killing your potential prospects from visiting you! It’s like setting up a great looking retail outlet in the busiest of streets but leaving the shutters half way down! Do you seriously expect your potential customers to crawl their way into your shop?

Website Responsiveness

Another very common small business digital marketing mistake most businesses make is not make their website responsive. Responsive websites automatically scale to provide the best view depending on the size of your device screen. So if you’re using a smartphone, you get to see it as beautifully as you would if you were using a desktop. The problem? Website developers dont usually tell this to their clients – and the result is that the client sees a great looking site on their desktop and gives a thumbs up to their development team. Unfortunately it looks like a piece of crap on the mobile!

If you want to beat competition, my recommendation would be to make your website responsive!

Lack of on-page SEO

The third common small business digital marketing mistake area is  SEO- especially on-page SEO. Most business owners have little clue on how SEO actually works and freelancers and agencies tend not to divulge the workings of how good SEO works. I have noticed basic things missing in almost 100% of the websites of business owners I have coached and trained. Things like missing Tittle Tags, Meta descriptions, Site Maps and other common on-page SEO requirements are completely missing. The result- very little organic search traffic comes to the client’s website resulting him or her spending thousands on paid advertising to get more traffic.

Keywords

Another grave area of digital marketing mistakes committed due to lack of knowledge is the complete lack of a keyword strategy to the website. One common element I have noticed in most small business owner websites is the focus on it ‘ looking good’ rather than on the site ‘ speaking good’. Speaking good is all about having a customer focus on the content of your website where your site engages with the customer rather than says “Hey look how sexy I am”. Sexy is good, but who wants to do business with a sexy bimbo? I would rather do business with someone who talks my language!

In my coaching session, one of the fundamental things I keep harping upon is that doing great digital marketing is not about using a ton of money but on having a strong customer focus. You dont need a lot of money to do good digital marketing. What you need is understanding what can be done, how it can be done and then going about hiring the right skill person to do it for you. If you dont know what’s to be done, you’re likely to hire the wrong person or find yourself paying through your nose for something that costs less than half to do!

In my last coaching session, I had an eclectic mix of business owners ranging from one who ran a serviced apartment business to another who was in the technology space. Despite their varied business domains, the singularity of mistakes they were making was the same.

How do you correct your small business digital marketing mistakes?

If you’re serious about digital marketing for your business, you need to spend time on it…not money. That’s fundamental. Knowledge will propel you to explore new ways to promote your business, help you find more prospects and more conversion tools. Knowledge will help you know how to create a site that automatically works as your 24×7 unpaid salesman. Knowledge will help you know how to use social media, email , WhatsApp and half a dozen other channels to grow your business no matter.

Not money.

Not hiring more people whether they be freelancers or agencies or internal staff.

And the way to do this is actually quite easy. I did it without any technical knowledge about coding or programming. In fact, you dont need to know coding or programming to use digital marketing for your business. I dont. I have people who do that stuff in my office. I simply tell them what’s to be done and they do it.

Here’s 3 things that you could do to get more better at small business digital marketing

1. Read as much as you can about digital marketing. Or watch videos– There are a ton of them on the internet. And its free!!
2. You dont like reading? No problem- Join a digital marketing coaching program like the one I run. It will cost you money, but it will be money well spent.
3. If you dont want to read or watch or spend the money, you can ask the people you work with on your digital marketing to tell you. Some of them do actually help educate their clients. Perhaps yours will.