Online Marketing: What Not To Do

Although it is very unlikely that any online marketing will seriously damage your ecommerce store or business, some marketing campaigns can be more successful than others.

The last thing you will want to do is spend a your time planning and implementing a marketing strategy, only for it to have little or no affect in raising the awareness of your brand. 

When carrying out your marketing strategy you should look to avoid the following mistakes:

• Marketing to a large demographic - Sending out your marketing promotions to anyone and everyone. Not only will this take a lot of time and potentially resources, you could be sending them out to people who have no interest whatsoever in your business. This is a waste of time to both you and them.
• What you should do - Focus your marketing promotions on a niche audience. These are people who you know will be interested in your product/service to some degree. This greatly increases the amount of traffic and awareness your business receives. 

• Basic, cheap looking website and promotions - While you may be looking to save as much money as possible, the look of your website and marketing promotions is very important. If you have a website that looks cheap and unprofessional, the likelihood is that it will put off any customers from visiting your store.

• What you should do - Assign a budget for your website and promotional material that is not too expensive but still allows you to create something that is professional and appealing to visitors. Remember, first impressions count, so make the right one with inviting promotions.

• Poorly written content - The home page for your online store is the first port of call for all potential customers. If you have a website that has a number of different spelling, punctuation or grammar mistakes, it is instantly going to make your business look unprofessional and unappealing.

• What you should do - Once you have completed your website content, ask a number of people who you trust to read through the content and see if they can see any mistakes you have made. This then allows you to make sure all of the content is spelt correctly before it is published.  

• Not monitoring website traffic - Knowing how many people are visiting your site, how many of them stay on it and how many are going to other pages on your site is vitally important. If many people are visiting your home page and then leaving straight away, it tells you that something about your home page is putting them off. If you don't monitor your website's traffic, you will struggle to truly maximise the potential traffic and business your site can achieve.

• What you should do - Use Google Analytics. This is a free service that you can link to your website. This then allows you to sign into the Google account and monitor all of the traffic on your store. 

• Not using social media - Believing that simply using emails, leaflets and other promotion material to advertise your business is only going to get you so far when creating a brand awareness. Within online marketing, social media is everything. With millions of people using social media every day, it is a form of marketing you cannot afford to ignore.

• What you should do - Create accounts for your business on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Create details about your store including what services you offer and how people can access your site. Generating followers across these social commerce platforms will result in your business gaining a large amount of public awareness in a very short space of time. 

There is a fine line between success and failure when carrying out marketing campaigns. Make sure you take the time to correctly plan your strategies to ensure the best possible results.

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