Although effective digital marketing strategies are essential to building brand awareness for any enterprise, success in this area eludes many businesses. There are a variety of reasons for which digital marketing endeavors don’t pan out, and if your business’s forays into digital marketing have failed to bring success, the cause may be right under your nose. Fortunately, digital marketing missteps are much easier to identify and remedy than many of us realize.
Not Targeting Local Search Results
If your small business is focused on serving local clientele, there’s no sense in competing for a higher search ranking on a national level. This is a waste of time and resources that could be better-directed towards other areas of your enterprise. Furthermore, obtaining a favorable search ranking at a local level is much easier than doing the same nationally.
You can start by plugging locally-focused keywords into your website content. For example, text like “affordable consulting in Madison, WI” can have a significant impact on your local search ranking. You also stand to benefit from creating content that’s hyperlocal – provided, of course, it relates to your business in a meaningful way. Requesting that clients write online reviews for your enterprise and creating profiles for yourself on local business listings can be another effective way to step up your local search ranking.
Engaging in Keyword Stuffing
As previously stated, integrating relevant keywords into text-based content stands to garner positive attention from search engines. However, this doesn’t mean that all keyword integration is equally beneficial. For instance, while littering your content with keywords may seem like a good way to boost your search ranking, keyword stuffing ultimately stands to do more harm than good. First off, if search engines grow wise to what you’re doing, your site’s ranking is likely to take a plunge. Secondly, such practices may serve to draw new visitors to your site, but these individuals are unlikely to return if keyword-stuffed content is all that awaits them. In the interest of avoiding both of these scenarios, take care to use keywords sparingly and make sure they organically fit into the text.
Neglecting Social Media
Every small business owner would do well to recognize the importance of social media. It isn’t hard to see why the web’s most prominent social platforms have come to factor so heavily into the digital marketing efforts of so many enterprises. Even if your business currently has accounts on a number of platforms, failing to update them on a consistent basis is practically guaranteed to result in waning interest from your existing followers and a lack of new followers. The ideal number of daily posts varies from platform to platform, but each of your social media accounts will need to be updated at least once a day. In addition, you should seek to create posts that inform and encourage follower engagement.
Interacting with followers is also a big part of promoting your brand on social media. The more courteous and personable you are in your interactions, the more invested followers are likely to feel in the success of your brand. Additionally, you should never pass up an opportunity to thank your followers for their continued interest and let them know how much they’re appreciated.
Failing to Keep Patrons Informed
It’s in your best interest to keep both current and prospective patrons abreast of the latest developments within your business. As covered above, one way to do this is updating your various social media accounts on a regular basis. Still, since social media posts may not reach every member of the intended audience, you’d do well to branch out and explore additional options. This is where a service that enables you to send and receive SMS online is bound to prove useful.
There’s little wonder as to why some small businesses are more adept at digital marketing than others. Lack of experience, refusal to learn new things and reluctance to seek outside help are just a few of the reasons some business owners are never able to develop a firm grasp of digital marketing. So, if your enterprise’s digital marketing endeavors have proven consistently unsuccessful, it behooves you to reexamine your methods and put some serious effort into determining where you went wrong. You may even discover that the answers you seek are much closer than you think.
