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Top 5 Online Mistakes That Many Still Make.

Digital Marketing is now mainstream! If you have just woke up from a 15 year coma and wonder why people everywhere are getting run over and falling into ponds everyday mesmerized by a hand held device, welcome to the Digital landscape.

Not every business can pay 80k U.S.D. p/a for a digital Marketing Manager however as your business grows you will need one, that is a certainty, so startups and small business make do best they can as they grow, learn and manage their social media strategy by themselves.

In business and life, we should all know by now that failure only becomes tragic when we quit, whilst we are still fighting, failure is learning, however we can all still learn from one another and as a social media Influencer and consultant to business, here are my top five digital marketing errors we all make every day:

Not Being Personal

Yes you have to blog now to get anywhere online and I have taught my clients time and time again that your blogs are your online rapport, it is how you let your intended audience know you are a caring and conscientious person who is passionate about their industry, and more importantly how your knowledge benefits the readers, so that you become the ‘go to guy.’

Only at the very end is the money shot, the climax, ‘THE LINK’ where you send someone to buy the very thing you are ‘educating’ them about.

So many business people suffer from premature product ejaculation where they cannot help themselves, and like an Amway distributor is always thinking how to bring up the subject of what they sell into every conversational line, and then wonder why they do not get invited to weddings and parties anymore, you are always thinking of how to spew up your service at the wrong times. Stop with the selling and entertain and educate your audience and the sales, like Little Beau Peep’s sheep, will come home!

No Consistency

A lot of my clients tell me they are not writers and they will outsource their blogs to employees or freelancers. Fine as long as you read and approve the blogs and you are assured that all these blogs represent your companies brand strategy succinctly. I advise my clients that blogs must come from the top and it is a way for the CEO’s to demonstrate they and their company they represent, are a decent company to work for underneath the logo and slogans.

Better to write something from your own heart and write consistently at least once a week about why you do what you do. I visit many CEO’s and ask them why they are in business and the good ones lean forward and start with;

“I’ll tell you why I am in business Sonny…” and what follows is an impassioned tirade of the bad people in their industry and why he and his business provide a better and different package, which is what I tell them to put into words and do every single week without fail.

Alas so many give up after a month when they cannot demonstrate an ROI to the board, like anything 3 months is the minimum time to even expect people to start saying they read something you write. 2% seems to be the success margin in most realms of business so 98% are not consistent with writing about their brand message.

Not Understanding Branding

Every time I meet a new client I ask the top executives to tell me what is the difference between branding and advertising, about half really get it.

Branding is a non-tangible karmic feeling about what people think about your business. Advertising is letting people know where and how to buy what you sell.

Digital Marketing is 90% branding.

Every business from a guy in a shed with just an idea to a Blue Chip fortune 500 must have a brand budget, how is anyone going to feel anything about your business if you do not emit a brand message? No sale on the planet happened without a feeling, your brand is how people feel about you and your business. Yet smaller business require K.P.I.’s and value propositions they need to take to the board. I have been told:

“I cannot go to the meeting and tell the board members well we have been told our brand message is stronger, they will just look at me like I arrived off the banana boat, and Shareholders only want to see numbers with currency figures next to them”

If your business cannot understand that you need to spend money on branding your business without expecting a quantifiable return on cash investment within a specified time scale, then you need to go back to business school 101 and read about how the top most successful business people on Earth do not really care about money, they care about providing something that changes our world for the better, sure they are billionaires because of it, but the money was a side effect of building a brand worth buying.

Courting Robots

Search Engine Optimization makes Google cringe, yet there are still so many SEO gurus plaguing our inbox every day telling you that being top of a search engine will make you live longer, cure cancer and bring you a better sex life et al.

Anyone can be top of Google in one day if you pay enough, but what are people coming to see? Does your website convert visitors to buyers seamlessly? just having traffic sent to your site does not mean people are going to buy from you, real people have money not robots, and remember it is a robot that picks the top website to be seen first, hence the manipulation by many a so called guru of the robots.

I am often encouraged to write back to these sub-continent ‘Greetings of the day’ e-mailers and ask how many sales your SEO can get me? First off they would not have a clue, they do not care about your content you could be the owner of destroytheworldIamhades.com and these guys will do your SEO for you!

I run an online global business and lead generation directory called leads4biz and a fair few of the 30,000 plus people that have registered think we are managed by robots, I know they do not care or bother to read why our site is different and how we provide sales leads because they are just going for back link quantity over quality every time.

Let me get my robot money out and buy your product….NOT!

One industrious yet ill-informed guy added every single Marriott hotel in Thailand to our Thailand business directory, must have taken a good day or two, I checked them all over and sent an email to the guy that registered asking him to tell me how he is associated to the Marriott and guess what? No response, as it was a catch all email, so I deleted him got in touch with the marketing team from the Marriott and then ‘gifted’ them all the Marriot listings, they were very happy!

On leads4biz the email you use is the one you get your inquiries to, so if you do not answer the manager of the site, what chance have you got with your inquiries?

Stop with the manipulation, at the end of the day courting a robot is all well and good but only if your site is already converting a good ratio of visitors into buyers, and you have content enough to have a great brand message and feeling.

When you add your business to leads4biz FREE remember I am human and we are manually managed and you are wasting your time just trying to keep adding the same business hoping we will share every time to our 500k social media reach, free listings are shared only once they register and we do check to see if you are already listed, and trying a new account with a new email does not work either, we are on to you skinflints!

Manipulation just dumbs-down everyone’s digital experience, so like branding takes time, so does everything you do for your business online, above all; be human and try to provide a better services and your keywords, meta titles and snippets and eventually search engine rank will look after themselves!

Too Much Business

Last but not least my personal favorite online faux pas; ‘The social media robot,’ the guy whose profile is ‘Bob’s Burgers’ and hides behind a facade and all he ever posts is pictures of his products.

Social Media thinks of themselves as this: ‘Connecting the world to friends and family.’ Bob’s Burgers thinks it is his free sounding board to tell everyone about his products. Bob’s Burgers tells everyone social media is a fad and does not work and it is a waste of time.

Facebook has evolved so much now and as the world’s leading social media network. In my humble opinion they want to see more ads but they want to control the ads so they get paid more. Now they will not even show a free organic post on your official business page to even 1% of the pages followers and members anymore so you have to pay to get anywhere, so Bob’s Burgers should have well given up by now.

The chances of a onetime ‘Hail Mary’ post for a condo in Phuket for sale on Facebook resulting in a buyer must be the same odds as finding rocking hose poo on the moon!

I tell my clients to post blogs on their Facebook page at around a 10-1 ratio i.e.: ten links to well written, compelling, altruistic tips and tricks blogs to one product or service message direct. On their profile I advise a 50-1 ratio; only ever ‘share blogs’ and once in a blue moon share a product message on your personal profile.

Too much business and people will bore of you, do not become the Multi-Level Marketer at your sister’s wedding who everyone avoids because they just cannot help vomit their business over people in the first few sentences out of their mouth.