Marketing is your key tool to make sure that customers want to buy your products or use your service. Actually, it’s not so much a tool as it is a full toolkit, filled with a variety of different possibilities. You can focus on SEO, run an offline campaign or take any approach you want. There’s no hard, rule set in stone that dictates how you should market a company. It will depend on your budget, your business model and the goals of your company or what you want to achieve.
However, while there are certainly different paths you can take here there are also severe and dangerous pitfalls that you must avoid. Making these mistakes will cripple the chances your company has on the market and so they must be avoided at all costs. Let’s look at a few of the biggest errors here and why they are so dangerous for you and your business.
Wearing Black Hats
Have you heard of Blackhat SEO? If you haven’t, blackhat SEO is basically any lazy, poor form of optimization that you can think of. Tactics include:
- Keyword stuffing
- Overloading a site with links
- Repeating content
- Faking success
Any of these tactics are sure to be classed as blackhat solutions by Google. When you get caught wearing a blackhat, you will be hit with a Google penalty. While it is possible to recover from this it’s a long road back. You will find that your brand is almost irreparably damaged while your ranking will suffer a massive blow. It’s also likely that you will need to spend a fortune fixing the issues on your site and this is going to cut into your marketing budget that should really be used elsewhere.
So, there’s a lot of issues here to contend with. To avoid it, you instead need to make sure that you are using the best SEO options. For instance, you should be spending time adding fresh, valuable, high-quality content to your site that your customers are going to love. Google will reward you if you do this.
Negative SEO
People often confuse blackhat SEO with negative SEO. However, these are two completely unique concepts. Whereas one is about the tools you use to impact your own campaign, the other is about using the same types of tools to hurt another. The classic example of this would be negative reviews.
So, you might pay a content writer to create a negative review of your competitor. This negative review will then hurt their campaign and potentially even cause their ranking to fall, allowing you to take the top spot. While this might sound like a fantastic idea, there’s no way to remain completely anonymous while doing this. Companies that provide this solution are often caught and any business found to have associated with them will typically be punished as well. It can also lead to an incredible hostile market place where every business owner becomes far more cutthroat. This isn’t beneficial to anyone trying to operate successfully.
Falling Behind
It might surprise you to learn that the marketing world is not stagnant. It is constantly changing, evolving, growing and developing in new directions. This depends on a variety of factors including technology. One example of this would be voice commands.
Think back twenty years ago and voice control technology was barely even considered. Sure, basic concepts were floating around but nothing like we can access on the market today. No Google Home, no Siri, and no Alexa. That’s changed now and with this change, the way we interact with searches online has evolved. In the past, it was more common for users to search for a couple of words like ‘car for sale’ or ‘best microwave.’ Today, it’s common for individuals to use search engines by asking a full question such as:
What are the best selling microwave ovens?
By knowing this, you can then change your SEO campaign accordingly. You can make sure that the content you are creating reflects this new type of interaction. That’s why a lot of content you see these days is based entirely around answering real questions that customers have.
Using New Tech
The question for agencies is how can you keep track of everything that is going on in the SEO world. Would you be surprised to hear that voice control can provide the answer you need? There’s a new Amazon Alexa skill called SEO agency. It’s for anyone looking to stay on top of news in the world of search engine optimization, regardless of the skill level or role. Though, as the name suggests, it’s particularly useful for anyone involved in a search agency.
Only Using One Channel
Remember when we said that marketing wasn’t a tool but a toolbox? Well, a lot of people still make the mistake of using the screwdriver again and again. Yes, screwdrivers are useful but depending on the project, you might need a hammer, a spanner, a different size screwdriver or even a drill. This is always going to be the most effective way to complete a complex project and marketing a business is complex.
That’s why you should be using all the tools at your disposal. So, rather than focusing on one aspect of promotion you should be using multiple choices. For instance, you should be building a blog and sharing the content that you create here across social media while also continuing to invest in SEO. It’s all useful, it can all benefit your overall business model.
Failing With Omnichannel Marketing
What you should really be aiming for is an omnichannel marketing campaign. Here, you don’t just use more than one channel to market your business. Instead, each channel meshes together to form a complete and more powerful campaign.
So, you can rent billboards near the location of your business, use these to live broadcast trends related to a product on Twitter and then set up an in-store promotion as well. We didn’t just pull this from nowhere either. It’s a real campaign strategy that was used to a tremendous level of success.
DIY
You might be wondering whether you can DIY marketing for your business and run everything yourself. You can do this, but it’s often a mistake for a few reasons. First, it’s going to take up a lot of time and if it’s not taking up a lot of time, then you won’t be putting nearly enough effort into it to succeed. So, this is essentially a catch 22 situation. Secondly, you have to be prepared for the fact that your competition won’t be screwing around with DIY marketing. Instead, they’ll be hiring the best teams possible to make sure that they get to the top of the market. If you don’t do this, then you are going to struggle to compete with some of the bigger players who will all be competing for the same customers as you.
One And Done
Another mistake you can easily make is assuming or believing that marketing can be something that you can do once and then forget about completely. That’s just not possible and instead, you should be fitting marketing into your long term budget. It’s going to be a cost that you need to pay monthly or even weekly rather than annually.
You might find businesses on the market that are offering marketing as a one-stop solution. Be aware that they are probably providing a cookie cutter service. So, if you use a web designer like this, then there’s a strong possibility that your website is going to look like all the others. This is going to make it far more difficult for you to stand out and get the attention that your business needs or may even deserve.
The Wrong Solution
We’ve touched on this briefly but it’s important that you do not hiring the wrong company to complete marketing for you. This will damage your reputation in the industry rather than theirs. Be aware of false promises. The classic example of this would be guaranteeing that they can get you to spot on page one. Even Google, the search engine giant, cannot guarantee this when you use their service. So, it’s quite unlikely that SEOR’US will be able to live up to this promise.
No Research
Do make sure that you know who you are marketing to, what makes them tick and how they react or interact online. It’s crucial that you do your research here and don’t jump the gun. There’s no point marketing before you have a firm grasp of the type of audience you are trying to connect with. If you do this, then there’s a strong possibility that you’ll miss the mark completely.
You can start with Google analytics and then build up your campaign from there. Potentially, you’ll reach a stage where you have fine-tuned your marketing to the point where you know exactly what your audience wants from your business.
We hope this helps you avoid the massive errors that people can make when marketing their company.
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Originally Published on Unbound Northwest
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