Marketing nightmares to avoid

Let me bust some myths about marketing online and help you avoid some of the common pitfalls. Below are my tips for what not to do for different aspects of your online marketing.

GOOGLE ADWORDS

This is a powerful marketing platform but it does have its limitations should you fail to market effectively. Don't:

• Use abbreviations, acronyms and other devices that your target customer may not recognise.

However, if a target customer is familiar with them and they are relevant, use them - but ensure they are appropriate for the intended audience. You need to pay attention to grammar, spelling and punctuation.

• Copy a competitor's ads word for word - as it could make your ad appear insignificant. You want your ad to stand out.

• Fail to identify the unique aspects of your product or service. You need to be clear and unambiguous.

• Use enough keywords or targeted words. Your ad must cater to the user/buyer's wants, needs and/or expectations immediately, or else they will move onto the next vendor who actually does so.

• Send people to your homepage. Send them instead to a targeted landing page specifically focused on what your ad spoke about. You must send people to a convincing, specifically designed landing page (also called a capture page or registration page). The landing page and the ad must be directly related.

• Fail to try a range of different ad positioning to find out what works the best and save yourself money by dumping the duds.

• Cast your ad messaging too wide. ‘Everyone' is too broad to be your target market. You should include special wording or messages that weed out inappropriate prospects.

WEBSITE

Have a website built for your company which is the equivalent of a botoxed face - hard to change and move that lacks expression and interactivity. When creating and marketing your website don't:

• Have a site that you never update. New content gives people a reason to come back to your site, and updating frequently also improves your relevancy for Google when they are ranking sites in their search results.

• Have a site that doesn't provide valuable information to the reader. If your site is an information resource, people will visit and revisit in order to learn. Your site will be providing a service in and of itself. Provide ‘how to' information, tips, blog posts, fact sheets, white papers and so on to keep people interested.

• Forget to offer a free e-newsletter that people can subscribe to. A short, interesting e-newsletter helps to establish a relationship of trust with your potential clients and keeps you fresh in their minds.

• Fail to link to relevant sites. Link to good sites and ask them to link back to you. The more relevant sites that link to you, the more people will find you. Google also takes your links into consideration when ranking how relevant your website is. You will appear higher in the search results by adding quality links to your site.

New website creation technology will provide you with a full range of expressive potential, not a botoxed face of a site. Sites like squarespace.com are simple to use, create professional looking sites, and are easy to update. And I mean by you, not just your web guy. My final website tip would be not to hire a web designer to build you a site from scratch. Have a site built using an offer the shelf-type platform, and then maybe once you're happy with it, you could hire a designer to clean up the visuals a bit.

This will save you so much money in the actual time it takes to build the website, and also because you won't need to phone up the designer every time you want the site updated-you'll be able to update it yourself.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media, like Facebook and Twitter, is accessible to all brokers and quickly gaining traction however some brokers do get it wrong. Don't:

• Spread yourself too thin. Join twenty social media platforms, connect to eight people, not do anything else, then give up because you're not receiving any results. This is not how social media works. Concentrate on one network first. I recommend LinkedIn for business professionals, as this network currently has 70 million of these fellows signed up. Connect to people you know, and take the time to completely fill out your profile, join groups, and grow your network. You have to put the time in to make social networking a marketing win.

• Be stingy. The first rule of networking is that you have to find a reason to make people want you in their network. Give generously of your expertise online - not only will this encourage more people to connect to you because they see you're a giver, it will encourage reciprocation in return. You must give before you can receive. And it has the added bonus of demonstrating your expertise in your field. Great positioning!