Digital marketing is a skill and many local business owners choose to try and handle it themselves because they might have a limited budget, or they want full control.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but in most cases, they end up making mistakes that an experienced agency like ourselves wouldn’t make. In the majority of cases, it’s best for the business owner to focus on what they’re amazing at and leave the other tasks to people who are better at it than they are.
Not Setting Clear Goals
It’s crucial that you know where you’re heading. Digital marketing is such a broad field, and there are thousands of different tactics that you can use to reach your goals, but if you don’t know what your goals are then, it’s hard to choose the best tactics.
The first thing that you should do when you start a digital marketing campaign is to plan out your journey, working backward from your goals. This allows the digital marketer to get an idea of where you want to end up and then to choose the right steps to take you there.
Lack of Effort
One mistake that is extremely common is that the local business doesn’t put in the effort they need to. Often this is because the company is ignorant to the difficulty of digital marketing or has been told by a guru in the past how simple it is.
Unfortunately, digital marketing can be tough, and that’s why so many of our clients came to us because we can do what most people can’t.
Digital marketing can be extremely time consuming and often requires you to put in an enormous amount of hours, which is something most local business owners don’t have time for.
Ignoring Email
With the advent of SEO, social media platforms and YouTube, there are plenty of more attractive marketing channels. However, email might not be the sexiest, but it’s still one of the most robust methods.
When we check our emails, we are in an entirely different mindset to when we are scrolling through social media, and we are often more willing to make purchases.
Not only that but there is a level of intimacy to an email inbox, and this makes it particularly compelling. In general, your email list is going to be one of your most powerful online marketing channels and you should care for it rather than spamming it to oblivion.
Not Testing Enough
Digital marketing is all about testing. Whether you’re running an SEO campaign, PPC ads or leaking traffic from forums, you should always be striving to improve.
Use A/B tests to split test your landing pages and ads to maximize your ROI.
Not Being Patient Enough
SEO in particular but also PPC and other digital marketing efforts can take an enormous amount of time to get right. Not only that but even once you’ve found the correct path to success it can take months to see the results.
In this industry, you have to push the snowball for many months before it gains momentum and rolls away, but when it does, it can become massive and have a huge impact.
Many business owners are not prepared to wait long enough to see the results that they want and often give up too soon or resort to shortcuts. In SEO this is likely to include PBNs and spam links that can rank you but are also extremely risky and can cause a Google penalty.
Being Too Patient
On the other hand, we find that many local businesses are too patient and aren’t getting out there and attacking the field like they need to. If your competitors are moving faster than you then it’s irrelevant what you do, they’ll always outrank you.
Not only that but you can’t rely solely on SEO, it’s important to drive traffic and sales today so that you can generate revenue to continue to fuel your long-term SEO efforts.
Failing to Track Important Metrics
When you’re testing different landing pages and methods of traffic generation, you need to ensure that you’re tracking all of the data that you need to make smart decisions. Many businesses fail even to install Google Analytics and to monitor it regularly.
If you want to make smarter decisions about your digital marketing strategy, then you need to crunch the data from your past campaigns.
Being Impersonal
Finally, many brands can appear too corporate over social media and fail to show a human side. This is particularly important for local businesses because many of your customers will choose to shop local because they want to support real people rather than corporations.
Don’t be afraid to put yourself in front of the camera and to become the face of your brand.
Conclusion
Digital marketing can often be complicated but the results speak for themselves, thousands of local businesses have used digital marketing to skyrocket their revenues.
If you’d like to learn more about how we can pursue a revenue focused digital marketing campaign, get in touch with us today!