4 Mistakes Small Business Owners Make with Digital Marketing

At some point in time, usually in the early stages of launching marketing initiatives, almost
every business will make one or all of these mistakes and learn the hard way. The cool thing about digital marketing is that you can quickly and easily make changes and adjustments to correct any mistakes made.

Multiple or “unofficial” social profiles.

One of the biggest mistakes business make as it pertains to digital marketing is not securing their digital assets. Facebook pages, Twitter handles, and domain names are among that list. Whether you think using social media is important or not, if you do not secure your business name and business page someone else will. There are competitors of yours out there that will, just to spite you, take your twitter handle or domain name, we’ve seen it happen.

If you haven’t already, do a search on Facebook for your business, you may be very surprised as to what shows up. There may be multiple Places pages or Business Pages (yes, their different) that you were completely unaware of. There is a little bit of a process to go through to remove these “duplicate” pages, but it can and should be done.

Auto-publish the same message to all media outlets. 

In today’s world, there are a number of reasons when automation plays a vital role. There are other times that automation is used only because of laziness and misconceptions. A pet-peeve of mine is when organizations and even agencies post the same message across their blog, Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. Each medium has a different purpose. Even though your friend puts #YOLO in every Facebook post, the Hashtag has no merit.  Adding a primary keyword to you Google+ post is essential. Putting that same keyword into your Linkedin post is important but not critical.

Tools like Sprout Social allow you to schedule a Facebook message, Twitter and Linkedin. You can then go in and tailor each individual message to fit the appropriate platform. We use Sprout Social to stage content and schedule for the time we know our audience and our client’s audience is online.

A shortened link is also a great way to make your message not only visually appealing but saves on character limit, which is important for Twitter when you only have 140 characters to create a message and provide a link.

Publish content but don’t actively share it.

You did all the work to create and conceptualize a blog article into a masterpiece, now all you have to do is share it. Unfortunately, a number of folks stop after creating the content; they don’t actively promote or share their content.

With the rise of social media and blog sites like Reddit, sharing blog articles and web content has never been so simple. Most blogs have plug-ins that can integrate with social media, making it even easier to share with a simple click. When sharing your content, make sure to remember how each message should be constructed and disseminated so it reaches the largest possible audience.  

Offer check-in deals or promotions but no Internet or mobile phone-friendly access.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when brick and mortar locations use Foursquare or Facebook Check-in to promote a special, but don’t even have Internet or mobile phone access in their building. This is a great example of no marketing strategy. If you don’t have access for mobile devices and you’re asking people to check-in to win, you’re the one that’s loses.

Before trying to launch a check-in special, make sure your fans and followers can access the deal. Having Internet or WIFI access onsite can not only allow people to access your promo, but depending on the type of business or service you provide, you may actually get people engaging with you tweets, giving you a review on Yelp or Google Reviews, or just in a better mood. Give the people what they want; they are sure to thank you in one form or fashion.