7 Things Online Marketers Are Doing Wrong

Do you spent a decent amount of time creating a fantastic social media post but end up with no likes, tweets or repins? You are not alone rather majority of people who start with Social Media publishing without learning about it go through the same phase. I am going to highlight some of the biggest mistakes you may be making in the online world resulting in lower success rate for your online marketing efforts.

1. Doing Stuff That Doesn’t Works For You

One of the biggest challenges faced by the online marketers is not getting results even after following a good marketing strategy and investing their time and money. The reason in most cases is not analyzing the business properly or following an irrelevant strategy. Let’s discuss these in detail:

Competitions And Asking For Fan Opinions
If you search for what you should do on Social Media to drive more engagement, you may get answers like run competitions on Facebook page, ask opinions from Instagram followers or ask your followers to retweet something for you. While these are all great strategies for established brands with a strong fan base, it probably will lead to no engagement for you. So, always focus on increasing your fan following first before you try to engage them.

Not Focusing On Your Niche
Now I cannot stress this enough that you should not blindly follow online marketing strategies that worked for some other business. You came to know about the success of online marketing campaign of XYZ business and you try it out for your business as well. You waste your time and resources to get disappointing results in the end. Now, using an already successful strategy is a good thing to do but make sure that it complies with what you have to offer. One business may benefit from Google Adwords more while other can from Facebook Ads. Similarly, a business can do good on Pinterest while other is more suitable for Twitter. So, my advice here is to spend some time in analyzing your business and see what options are available for your niche and then start your marketing campaign.

2. Not Utilizing Or Over Using Hashtags On Social Media

If reaching more people is your motive for using hashtags on social media then never use random hashtags in your tweets or updates on other social profiles. Learn about what is trending or what is commonly used when people talk about the topic you are sharing. Using popular or trending hashtags will help you reach people beyond your followers. hashtagify.me is a great tool to learn about the popular hashtags around your niche on Twitter.

3. Sticking With One Paid Platform

An online marketer running a successful campaign on Google Adwords may never try using Bing Ads or Social platform ads at all. This is the primary reason why online marketers fail. While its great to have a successful source of lead generation, other online platforms should not be completely ignored. Run multiple campaigns and experiment with different platforms. After calculating ROI from a number of sources, check which platform to keep and which one to discard.

4. Not Willing To Spend On Social Platforms

The phrase “Social media is free to use” makes most of the marketers ignore one of the largest marketing platforms available online i.e. social media ads. Facebook has limited the organic reach of posts made by a page and is on a rage for making its ads look and perform better. Facebook ads are on the rise and are actually helping marketers to a great extent. The demographics availability is deepening everyday making Facebook Ads a platform you cannot ignore for your business. So, investing in paid promotions could be worth it. While talking about spending on social platforms, let me remind you of not buying fake likes/followers as they provide no engagement and lead to poor performance of your social media activity.

5. Email Marketing Missing From The Marketing Plan

Email marketing is a consistent performer when it comes to generating leads, increasing traffic, getting more social followers and much more. While social media and search engines play their games and give you more or less over time, email remains a trustworthy element of your online marketing strategy. So, start building a mailing list if you haven’t already.

6. Every Post Is A Promotional Post

I have seen countless businesses posting about their blogs/promotions every time they are sharing on social media profiles. This makes their fans angry and can lead to unfollows. Avoid this mistake by using the 80-20 rule which states that you should share general posts 80% of the time and promotional posts the rest 20%. This means only 1 out of 5 posts you share promotes your brand/product. While this is no golden rule, this definitely is better than not able to balance between general content and self promotions. If you find it hard to implement, just make sure that majority of your posts are non promotional.

7. Not Responding To Fans

This is a big mistake many brands make online. First of all, make sure you know all the places where your customers hangout. Depending on your business, you can find them posting tweets, reviewing you on Facebook or other websites where you can check-in and review a business. Get your official profiles ready and respond to every important comment. Thank people for positive reviews and for negative ones, ask people what went wrong and what can you do to make the necessary amendments.