Online Marketing Mistakes
There are lots of reasons for a business to have a Web site, but marketing is probably the main one. Apart from anything else, the Web site has to pay for itself somehow! However, it’s important that you’re not shooting yourself in the foot with your online marketing. Here are the top 10 mistakes that all companies make, no matter how big they are.
1. This Web site is so flipping s-lo-w!
It’s happening all over the planet right now. An excited potential customer has seen an ad or read about a company’s product or service and jumped straight onto the company’s Web site to find out more.
They log onto the Web site all eager and then they wait … and wait … and wait while some amazingly flash intro loads and loads and loads. So they give up or persevere, even as their initial excitement ebbs away.
Of course your Web site should look good, but don’t let it get in the way of a sale. Keep it low-tech not high-tech. Don’t expect visitors to download the latest version of Flash or Internet Explorer, give them the option of plain HTML and text versions too.
2. Just the facts please Ma’am
Sometimes all that people want to know is how much something is and how much it costs to have it shipped. Don’t make them go all the way through the shopping basket and check out process.
3. Confusing marketing with market research
And never, ever make potential customers register first!
Don’t ask for lots of info, don’t confuse registering with market research. Of course you want to know all about your customers, but this is not the time to do it. As a rule of thumb, every question you ask a person other than their name and e-mail address will cause 10 to 15 per cent of them of them to drop out.
4. Not letting customers know that you’re a real person
…at the end of a real telephone line in a real building that real mail gets delivered to, maybe even a real showroom that they can visit.
Many people are wary of the net. They may not want to entrust their credit card details to cyber space. Or they just may want the reassurance of knowing that if anything goes wrong there’s a bricks and mortar building or a human being at the end of a landline that they can call.
5. Trusting to luck with search engines
Find out how to make sure your company turns up high in the rankings when people search for your company and its products. But don’t get caught up in all the tricks that search optimisation gurus claim will miraculously shoot you to the top of the rankings.
This is important, but making sure your Web site uses clean HTML coding is important too, so that it is friendly to the ‘web crawlers’ that search engines use.
6. Ignoring viral marketing
Viral marketing is a very good thing, it means making sure that people talk about you (in a good way!) and pass your details on to their friends and colleagues. Every Web site should have a ‘refer a friend’ button to make it easy for word of mouth to spread. But be careful not to do anything that could be interpreted as spamming, which can get you blacklisted by internet service providers.
7. Not being holistic
There’s a whole marketing world out there on the Web, so use it to sell your company and its products. There’s not just your Web site, there are also searches (both paid for, and when you come up high in a search engine’s rankings, known as ‘organic search’), newsletters, e-mail, blogs and Wikis (a Wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who access it to contribute or modify content).
8. Forgetting life beyond the Web
Not only should you not rely solely on Web marketing, you should make sure that the traditional marketing techniques complement and reinforce each other. The Web is just one part of your marketing process, even though it’s an important one.
9. Out of date
No customer is going to feel looked after if a company’s Web site is littered with old sales promotions, last year’s fashions and out-of-date price lists. Keep it fresh!
10. A local shop for local people
It just never occurs to some companies that it’s called the World Wide Web for a reason and that they could have lots of potential customers overseas.
The result is that their Web site has domestic shipping rates only. But even worse than these companies are the ones that only ship overseas at exorbitant courier rates or flatly refuse to send goods overseas. Sure, going down to the post office is time-consuming and fiddly, but it’s still worthwhile sending the office junior on a little outing.
1. This Web site is so flipping s-lo-w!
It’s happening all over the planet right now. An excited potential customer has seen an ad or read about a company’s product or service and jumped straight onto the company’s Web site to find out more.
They log onto the Web site all eager and then they wait … and wait … and wait while some amazingly flash intro loads and loads and loads. So they give up or persevere, even as their initial excitement ebbs away.
Of course your Web site should look good, but don’t let it get in the way of a sale. Keep it low-tech not high-tech. Don’t expect visitors to download the latest version of Flash or Internet Explorer, give them the option of plain HTML and text versions too.
2. Just the facts please Ma’am
Sometimes all that people want to know is how much something is and how much it costs to have it shipped. Don’t make them go all the way through the shopping basket and check out process.
3. Confusing marketing with market research
And never, ever make potential customers register first!
Don’t ask for lots of info, don’t confuse registering with market research. Of course you want to know all about your customers, but this is not the time to do it. As a rule of thumb, every question you ask a person other than their name and e-mail address will cause 10 to 15 per cent of them of them to drop out.
4. Not letting customers know that you’re a real person
…at the end of a real telephone line in a real building that real mail gets delivered to, maybe even a real showroom that they can visit.
Many people are wary of the net. They may not want to entrust their credit card details to cyber space. Or they just may want the reassurance of knowing that if anything goes wrong there’s a bricks and mortar building or a human being at the end of a landline that they can call.
5. Trusting to luck with search engines
Find out how to make sure your company turns up high in the rankings when people search for your company and its products. But don’t get caught up in all the tricks that search optimisation gurus claim will miraculously shoot you to the top of the rankings.
This is important, but making sure your Web site uses clean HTML coding is important too, so that it is friendly to the ‘web crawlers’ that search engines use.
6. Ignoring viral marketing
Viral marketing is a very good thing, it means making sure that people talk about you (in a good way!) and pass your details on to their friends and colleagues. Every Web site should have a ‘refer a friend’ button to make it easy for word of mouth to spread. But be careful not to do anything that could be interpreted as spamming, which can get you blacklisted by internet service providers.
7. Not being holistic
There’s a whole marketing world out there on the Web, so use it to sell your company and its products. There’s not just your Web site, there are also searches (both paid for, and when you come up high in a search engine’s rankings, known as ‘organic search’), newsletters, e-mail, blogs and Wikis (a Wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who access it to contribute or modify content).
8. Forgetting life beyond the Web
Not only should you not rely solely on Web marketing, you should make sure that the traditional marketing techniques complement and reinforce each other. The Web is just one part of your marketing process, even though it’s an important one.
9. Out of date
No customer is going to feel looked after if a company’s Web site is littered with old sales promotions, last year’s fashions and out-of-date price lists. Keep it fresh!
10. A local shop for local people
It just never occurs to some companies that it’s called the World Wide Web for a reason and that they could have lots of potential customers overseas.
The result is that their Web site has domestic shipping rates only. But even worse than these companies are the ones that only ship overseas at exorbitant courier rates or flatly refuse to send goods overseas. Sure, going down to the post office is time-consuming and fiddly, but it’s still worthwhile sending the office junior on a little outing.
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