Top Ten Mistakes You Should Avoid In Internet Marketing
internet marketing, ten mistakes in internet marketing
The popularity of digital marketing continues to grow because it has precise targeting and a wide variety of tools. It is effective, and also, the number of Internet users is increasing every day. Now users are increasingly spending their money on the Internet with pleasure. Therefore, this is where you need to look for your future customers. The time of ordinary advertising has passed, people are tired of it and no longer trust it, and internet marketing provides new ways to tell the world about your product.
Internet marketing is an action aimed at promoting goods and services on the Internet. The main goal of internet marketing is to turn website visitors into buyers and increase profits. Everyone knows that the profitability of any enterprise depends on how well the services or products offer toed meet the needs of the buyer. This can be clarified through marketing research. But as in any field, specialists can stumble.
Many customers understand that marketers are guided by human instincts, and they can make mistakes in one way or another. We will talk about the main mistakes in Internet marketing. So, here are ten mistakes in internet marketing you should avoid;
- Your advertising campaign is based on only one traffic source.
The easiest way to start is by posting your business offers on AdWords and Yandex, on Facebook and Vkontakte, and on other automated ad networks using PPC (pay per click) and CPA (pay per action) schemes. Thanks to the well-designed “self-service system” used on AdWords, Yandex, Vkontakte, and Facebook resources, you can easily set up your advertising campaign yourself and “target” your ads in search or on the content network by keywords, and in social networks – to a target group with common interests and similar demographic indicators.
If your advertising budget starts with, say, $ 100 per month, placing ads in AdWords, Yandex or Facebook seems to be the most reasonable solution. In order for your 100 dollars to be enough for the maximum period, here is a little trick:
Use keywords only of [exact] and “phrasal” matches, and on social networks “target” narrowly targeted user segments. When choosing ad inventory for PPC and CPA schemes, try several platforms and give preference to those that will provide you with more conversions on your ad for a lower price.
As you know, in social networks, the cost of a click/impression (CPC / CPM) is an order of magnitude lower than in search engines.
- You never test or optimize your advertising campaign for a combination of three factors: targeting, creative, and price.
Yandex and AdWords PPC platforms are deceptively easy to use but do not forget that companies pursue their goal. They want you to spend as much money on advertising as possible.
Yes, they will help you find your target audience, but they do not want you to be able to do it inexpensively. They want you to spend as much money as possible, while your interests are reduced to spending as little as possible and getting the maximum possible return on advertising (ROI).
This idea applies equally to contextual advertising agencies that like to operate with such a concept as clickthrough rate (CTR) and evaluate work efficiency by the amount of traffic and cost per click. But the most important thing for a business is sales.
However, you can significantly reduce your advertising campaign costs if you take the time to test and optimize.
There are three elements of any campaign that you, as an advertiser, can directly manage – targeting, creative, and the price component. Here are three “levers” that you can use to change the direction of your campaign.
By fine-tuning targeting, you will change the target audience, which will display your ad/banner;
Changing the “creative part” of your ad (content and design), you can increase the impact on your “target group” (target group) of potential customers;
By manipulating the price (BID), you choose which Internet advertising channel for how long your ad will be displayed.
Check all three of these elements together to find the audience you need at the lowest possible price that is most interested in your ad.
- targeting – act on the principle “the narrower, the better”: no common keywords, no common demographic indicators, always a strictly defined segment of the target audience;
- creative – apply split testing of advertisements or banners to achieve the exact occurrence of headings according to the scheme: keyword – ad – landing page;
- price – always start with a higher bid (BID) for the keyword than your competitors, with an increase in CTR, gradually lower the proposed price (BID) first, and then the advertising budget.
- Not tracking your ROI
Unfortunately, many business owners do not use such an important criterion as return on investment (ROI, Return on Investment) when analyzing the effectiveness of an advertising campaign. Calculating your ROI is the first thing you should do when evaluating the effectiveness of your web marketing strategy.
Suppose you are optimizing your PPC ad, and you are able to increase its click-through rate (CTR). At first glance, this indicates a change for the better. However, it may happen that increasing the CTR does not lead to a conversion on the landing page/site, “all clicks are wasted,” and if there is no conversion, there are no sales.
You can find out the exact objective picture of what is happening by calculating the ROI as the ratio of all profits earned during the campaign period to the number of costs for the campaign itself.
- Having a poorly designed page
It is possible that you do not have the ability to do graphic design. However, this fact does not justify the fact that your banners, landing pages, and websites look as if they were drawn by a first-grader in the infamous Microsoft Paint program.
In practice, it has been repeatedly proved that it is impossible to generate high-quality leads by luring visitors to a landing page with a poor design. Therefore, this is one of the major mistakes many marketers are making, which is affecting them drastically.
- You do not scale successful advertising campaigns.
Here are two more reasons to test and optimize your campaign. The first argument is that after testing, you can refuse the traffic channels that cause losses. The second argument is that the money saved in this way can be “thrown” for investment in the traffic channel that is beneficial, i.e., Scale or increase ads.
And do not stop there: suppose your campaign after optimization has reached your desired ROI level, for example, now the payback ratio is 1.25. You spend $ 100 a month, which brings you $ 125, and you think that is a good return for you. However, the net profit is only $ 25. Why don’t you try to “feed” your campaign $ 500 a month? With existing profitability, you can get $ 625 per month, which is $ 125 in net profit. Try to increase your investment in an effective advertising campaign – most likely, this will lead to a proportional increase in income.
- You are not using a landing page.
The worst thing you can do with a user who is interested in your ad is sending it to the home page of your site. There, your customer is likely to be “lost” among the navigation elements and links to other pages of the site and will go away without completing the action proposed by the advertisement. Landing pages can only do one thing, but they do it in the best way.
Landing pages do the conversion, turning the visitor into a buyer, email subscriber, or registered user of your service. Is this the idea you had in mind when starting your advertising campaign? If yes, then it is the main mistake of internet marketing you might be committing without knowing.
- Your landing pages are not good enough, and you have never optimized them
Building and optimizing landing pages is as important as optimizing an ad. Say you’ve created the perfect ad to attract the attention of many visitors following a link to your landing page. However, your landing page is not capable of conversion. Therefore, you do not close the planned deal, which means that all the efforts you made turned out to be meaningless.
Now you should be able to understand the need for landing page optimization. Another advantage associated with the use of landing pages is an increase in your AdWords Quality Score. As a reminder, this criterion for evaluating your pages is one of the most important factors used by AdWords in deciding whether to show your ad (and how much it will cost).
- You do not buy advertising directly.
When building a strategy for promoting your product or service, you, of course, immediately think about platforms such as Google AdWords, Yandex Direct, Vkontakte, Begun, or Facebook Ads, giving preference to the most popular advertising networks.
These are the giants of the market, whose names are always well-known, with great opportunities to deliver your advertising information to many users. However, if you want to connect an additional effective channel to your campaign, you should go directly to webmasters whose sites can attract your target audience and potential buyers.
- You do not use email marketing.
If you are not using email marketing yet, be aware that you are missing out on a great way to attract the attention of each potential customer and make even more sales. In an email, you directly contact a specific person, and this is the best way to achieve someone’s trust. One important tip: try to create in your letter the “presence effect” of a living human person, a potential partner in a mutually beneficial way, and not just a faceless electron beam that has moved from one virtual box to another.
Newsletters are perhaps the most highly convertible source of traffic. However, email marketing is a science. If you don’t know how to make mailings as a useful sales tool, it is advisable for you to turn to professionals.
- You haven’t tried using remarketing yet!
The new progressive technology of remarketing literally won the hearts of many advertisers overnight. There are several reasons for this: it does not require large campaign costs, easy settings, the highest efficiency, and conversion.
Let’s briefly recall how remarketing works. A user visits your landing page/site on which the mechanism for launching a remarketing campaign is pre-configured. After visiting the visitor’s computer, a harmless cookie is saved, allowing the Google Display Network robots to identify the user as “the person who visited your landing page using the link from your ad promoting a specific product.”
Now when a user visits sites on the Google Display Network, a helpful robot will show him your advertisements. You just have to wait for your visitor’s return visit. The main advantage of remarketing is that the technology works according to a very advanced behavioral targeting scheme and shows your advertising offers to potential buyers who visited a particular page of your site (or landing page) but didn’t take the desired action.
Look for your ways in Internet marketing, but do not repeat the mistakes of others. Show customers why your service/product is special! And finally, three simple tips to help you not waste your advertising budget:
- Test, optimize, and then test again. You should always make sure that all of your “advertising mechanics” are tuned in the best possible way.
- Do not forget to try various promotion channels: Facebook, AdWords, Yandex, Vkontakte, email marketing.
- Always be aware of what your return on investment (ROI) is – this is the most impartial and accurate indicator of the success/failure of your advertising campaign.
Benefits of internet marketing
Internet marketing has numerous benefits, and as a marketer, you should be conversant with those benefits. They are as follows;
- Global coverage. According to Statistics, 4.3 billion people use the Internet, accounting for 56% of the world’s population. Internet marketing allows you to find the target audience through different channels in different countries and adjust the reach of advertising in accordance with the tasks. For example, you can target ads on Google or Facebook by the location of users, choosing a country, city, and even area.
- In addition to location targeting, you can target campaigns based on gender, age, habits, and user behavior. Powerful internet marketing technologies help advertise products to the right people in the right place and at the time when they are most likely to buy them.
- Internet marketing is significantly cheaper than traditional marketing because it does not require the use of physical resources. High accuracy makes it cost-effective due to the fact that you pay for attracting interested people. In the case of traditional advertising, one can only guess how many people find it relevant. And assumptions and conjectures take a lot of time and finances.
- Positive user experience. Internet marketing helps provide an audience with a personalized shopping experience. For example, you can send emails based on the data that users share with you. Facebook ads, in turn, rely on user preferences and their favorite groups and pages.
- Processes such as lead generation, lead cultivation, and customer retention can be set up once, and then they will work independently. For example, automated conversations are a great way to offload the marketing team and support team. Automation allows you to send the necessary information to customers on time, which helps them to go the way of the buyer.
Sales growth of internet marketing is based on attracting visitors, improving website performance, and returning customers. But it is not enough to attract visitors; you need to make your current customers out of them because it is they who give your business a profit. All these points should be taken into account by your online strategy.
Internet marketing is one of the most effective marketing tools. It allows you to attract new customers and increase sales. Internet marketing is very popular today. This is not surprising because the digital world is literally absorbing us. So, in order to effectively promote goods/services in this reality, companies need to use the appropriate tools.
At its core, Internet marketing is the integrated use of the principles of traditional marketing, only on a worldwide network. Its main goal is to obtain the maximum desired effect from the potential audience of the site.
Many customers are well aware that it is necessary to promote themselves on the network but do not know how to do this, do not have an idea about the main tools, their tasks, and rules of use.
Internet marketing is the promotion of goods and services through online services. Depending on the size of the business and the niche occupied, entrepreneurs use different channels, ranging from PPC to blogging, where they share useful content. Unlike traditional advertising in newspapers, on television, radio, banners, billboards, posters, Internet marketing operates online.
It provides effective tools for lead generation, and building communication to interact with the audience, measure the level of engagement and brand loyalty. Among the popular channels of Internet marketing are email marketing, PPC, SMM, instant messengers, chatbots, web push notifications, and search engine optimization. Today, the development of Internet marketing skills is a must for every entrepreneur.