The Four Major League Mistakes NZ Businesses Make – Digital Marketing Edition

Numerous pitfalls await business owners – especially small business owners – when it comes to the success of their digital marketing endeavours. Today, our aim is to assist you in recognizing and then overcoming the four most common mistakes that we see small businesses often making when it comes to digital marketing.

Everyone knows that having a business plan is the best way to ensure your success in the long run, and most business owners go into their new endeavour with a well laid out financial, product, development, and even traditional marketing strategy – and yet don’t spend any time on digital marketing pans.

Small business owners must devise a comprehensive marketing plan to serve as a roadmap for their ongoing decisions. Having a written plan in place enables you to create targeted and effective campaigns, employing specific strategies that significantly enhance your chances of success.
Lacking a clear digital marketing strategy for your small business can lead to enacting a scattered and ineffective attempt – which does not lend itself to success. It is vital to establish your objectives early – identify your target audience and determine the channels through which you will reach them.

A part of this plan should be to always be on the lookout for government schemes and grants that can help you boost your business. For example, to support your successful development of a marketing strategy the New Zealand Government offers up to 50% subsidization for New Zealand business owners through the Regional Partner Network.

While business owners tend to understand that making wise investments is essential, but many make the arbitrary decision that they will not – under any circumstances – pay for online advertising.

Generally speaking, making and sticking to your business plan is commendable however you should look into the reasoning behind your decisions. Most people we talk to about their hesitancy regarding online advertising boils down to fear – fear of getting ripped off, fear of making a processing error and losing money, or fear or ineffectual copy that doesn’t convert.

These are all valid concerns – however, they are all combatable with sufficient planning and strategy.

Paid ads enable small business owners to attract a higher number of qualified and relevant leads by specifically targeting consumers who are likely to be interested in their brand. In traditional marketing speak – it’s much easier to sell a mattress to someone who has come into a mattress section looking to buy a mattress, than to someone looking at a new TV for their living room renovation. With well-crafted ad copy, comprehensive targeting, and timing you can make sure that the people who are seeing your ads are people who are already interested in the service or product you provide.

It’s also important to know that paid ads provide measurable results such as impressions, clicks, and conversions. This high-level ability to monitor the performance of each ad empowers you to make informed decisions and improve your outcomes over time. Speaking of analytics…

Small business owners and those new to digital marketing often overlook the importance of tracking the performance of their digital strategies which is somewhat ironic as measuring digital efficacy is much easier than traditional marketing.

Traditionally, you can track how many people come into your stores and how many widgets you’ve sold, but you have to guess or surmise where how they came to be there. With analytics, you can see what they searched for to find you, if they saw and clicked an ad (which ad, where it was displayed, and how competitive it was!), and how long they stayed around your site.

Neglecting to monitor metrics such as page traffic, paid ad results, leads, and conversions can result in resources wasted on ineffective versions, missed opportunities for learning and refining, and the inability to optimize strategies.

While ignoring the opportunity paid ads provide is a major error, ignoring organic traffic and Search Engine Optimisation is a critical mistake that can land you in the uncomfortable position of needing to pay for all your traffic.

Ad clicks are continually getting more expensive, and you do need to put real effort and resources into optimising the copy, graphic design, campaign design, and roll-out in order to not get stuck in the loop of paying more and more for average or sub-average results.

Paid ads can provide a great boost to your conversion when needed; maybe you’re just starting out, launching a new product or service, or a major event in your industry is coming up and you want to maximise your exposure.

SEO is the best way to generate consistent and reliable traffic to your site, and with the right optimisation and high-quality copy you can rank in search results and get more people than ever looking at your business – long term and not reliant on paying for them every single time.

We’ve talked about having a plan, being open to paid advertising, tracking progress and efficacy, and remembering to keep plugging away at long term strategies. The key message to take away today is that it’s important to keep your plan in balance – too much emphasis on paid ads, on SEO, or making it “perfect” is going to sabotage your success.

Engaging with knowledgeable and trustworthy partners, keeping balance in your strategies, and staying in it for the long run are the best ways to move your business forward with digital marketing.