Your dream to become your own boss has tempted you to launch your own business. Starting a business isn’t tough, but making it grow is where the real task lies. Nearly 300 million people try to start about 150 million businesses every year. However, only one-third of these startups—or 50 million new firms—are launched every year. Do all these startups survive? No.
Starting a business is easy, but it is difficult to survive in the competitive landscape. Embracing digital marketing can help your brand survive as well as thrive in the cutthroat competition. However, the efforts of business owners go down the drain because of certain mistakes they make.
Here, we’ll discuss some common digital marketing mistakes that you must avoid as a growing business.
#1 Overlooking Website Design
Your website design might not appear important to you, but it is to your visitors. Zippia, in its recent research, found that 94% of users will quit a website due to its poor design. An estimated 88% of them won’t return to a website after having a poor experience with its design.
Your website is the first point of contact between your brand and your customers. It makes sense to improve the website design. Your brand’s website must be user-friendly, or your visitors will leave it within seconds of visiting it.
Optimize your website’s page speed. Visitors will be frustrated if your web pages take too long to load. This will increase your site’s bounce rate. Compressing all images before you load them onto your website can dramatically improve the speed of your web pages. Hence, do that.
Use eye-catching call-to-action buttons so that users can easily navigate your site and find exactly what they have been searching for. Also, don’t forget to optimize your website for mobile phones, so you don’t lose visitors because they have a hard time finding content that speaks to them.
#2 Click-Through-Rate Manipulation
Many website owners use deceptive methods to boost engagement metrics and organic volume. This is known as click-through-rate manipulation.
When website owners inflate the click-through rate, their websites look more popular than they really are. This might increase traffic to the website, lead to higher ranking in the SERPs, as well as lead to higher revenue from ads. But you mustn’t do that. This can lead to legal consequences since the search engine usage policies are violated.
Return On Now explains that search engines penalize websites that scam the system by lowering their rankings or even de-indexing them completely.
Moreover, it will only lead to an increased click-through rate in the short term; the long-term effects will be negative. When a link or ad misleads users, they are less likely to trust the site again. Your brand’s credibility and reputation will be damaged in the long run.
Instead of this black hat SEO technique, you can do several other things to improve your organic click-through rate. You can improve titles, use descriptive URLs, and optimize meta descriptions. Improving load times can also help boost your click-through rate.
#3 Missing Out on Blogging
When you’re a growing brand, you focus on creating and selling stellar products or experiences. It’s easy to miss out on blogging in the process. But it’s one of the gravest mistakes you can make.
As a growing business owner, you might not know blogging is the best way to build brand authority and identity. Many businesses neglect it because they feel it isn’t working for them. However, they are totally wrong. What they don’t know is that blogging can help drive traffic to their website, improve their site’s SEO and ranking, as well as establish themselves as an authority in the field.
Start a blog right away if you don’t want to miss out on all the benefits blogging offers to help your business grow online. Curate high-quality content and post it regularly. It will help you expand your reach as well as drive more traffic to your website. Also, keep interacting with your audience in the comments section of the blog to engage with them.
#4 Focusing Only on Paid Ads
Paid advertisements can increase brand awareness and boost visibility and website traffic. They also allow businesses to target only those who might be interested in their products or services. Paid ads are effective, but don’t rely on them solely to grow your business. That is because the success of these ads depends on external factors like keyword research and competitor’s strategy.
You won’t be able to enjoy the benefits of organic reach if you invest in paid advertising only. Also, it might lead to unsustainable marketing costs.
Develop a marketing strategy that combines paid ads with organic strategies like content marketing, SEO, and social media engagement. This will diversify your marketing efforts and help build a more sustainable foundation for growth.
To sum things up, as someone who’s dipped their toes into the waters of entrepreneurship only recently, it’s easy to commit mistakes when devising your marketing strategy. These are the most common ones that growing entrepreneurs make, so avoid them. This will help your business maximize growth, and you’ll be well on your way to a thriving online presence that will fuel your growing business.