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Top 10 Mistakes Businesses Make Online: Content [Part 3]

Content Marketing Mistakes

Content marketing is among the best digital marketing techniques with some of the highest ROIs in the industry.

We live in a really fast-paced digital world and every business online is a Google search away. Word of mouth and local reputation are a great start, but they are not a reliable way for clients to find and then choose you.

It’s your online presence that makes you stand out from the competition.

There are two major concepts in salestraditional (or cold calling) and inbound.

Cold Calling

Cold Calling Definition

Cold calling is a method we’ve all done or experienced at some point. It’s where a salesperson contacts you with no prior connection and offers you services and/or products that might be of interest to you.

Marketers have mixed opinions on cold calling.

Clients are fed up with people offering them stuff. Be it ads, commercials, leaflets, phone calls, emails that they never signed up for. Unsolicited commercials are everywhere and people are annoyed.

It still works great for some, but with cold calling, ROI can drop below zero. Though there are other key indicators for successful marketing as well, return on investment is among the most important ones.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing definition

DevriX started the inbound marketing journey 6 years ago. We know it is a solid way for a business partnership to start using mutual trust and respect.

Inbound marketing is a part of a new large movement in business. The inbound methodology is composed of three stages: attract, engage, and delight.

Inbound businesses build trust, credibility, and partnerships. It’s all about adding value to your service or product and keeping people happy on both ends of the business relationship.

So How Does Inbound Work?

inbound marketing methodology

Image source: HubSpot

Most of our clients reach out to us through our website or are redirected to our website from online videos, guest post articles, podcasts or other media mentions. Our website is positioned very well in the search engines results under the terms that are relative to us. And the golden key – producing relative and helpful content.

Here are 5 key benefits of inbound marketing that work great for us at DevriX:

1. Stress-free

People are happy to do inbound. Cold calling is very stressful. Picking up the phone and calling a complete stranger in the middle of the workday often makes you deal with rejection and even rude attitudes at times. The targets are depressingly low to start with. In fact, cold calling can be so hard, it was named to be among the top 11 most stressful jobs along with being a doctor or a firefighter.

Meanwhile, inbound makes the sales and marketing teams work together. It eliminates the miscommunication between the departments and makes the workplace happier. Sales calls are completely different with a warm lead and the actual possibility of landing every call with a deal results in highly motivated salespeople.

2. Strong business partnerships

Creating the right content brings customers to you. All clients have questions and quite often do their research before reaching out. Educating them on the benefits of working with you and giving value for their time spent on your website is a great start. When clients reach out to you first and sign a deal, they want to be certain it was the right choice. This makes potential partnerships trustworthy and lasting.

3. High ROI

Inbound marketing is a multi-channel venture. Some of the inbound ROI basics are keeping track of the right indicators such as lead generation, customer lifetime value, traffic, and sales revenue. The return on investment of inbound marketing is actually visible and makes financial reports easy and comprehensive.

4. Long-lasting impact

All content experiences decay over time. While revamping older pieces is a must, the overall impact of inbound lasts longer. For example, an ad will bring awareness and generate interest as long as it’s on and you must pay infinitely for clicks. That’s good as long as you see a positive ROI.

But investment in long term strategy like inbound is more profitable in the long run. Once published, a content piece will stay on your website forever. If your marketing strategy is well executed, the attention your content draws can increase exponentially with time.

5. Quality leads and fast sales

Inbound works fast. Sudden overnight success is rare. But inbound marketing gives quick results when it comes to negotiations and closing deals. By educating your clients, you can skip most of the traditional sales processes and directly skip to an offer presentation and discuss terms and conditions.

Just being “First in SERPs results” doesn’t work anymore

Аt the office, we have a favorite anecdote that is based on the true events and experience of a former SEO guru.

A long time ago, at the dawn of SEO, we had a friend that was one of the first and best in this field.

A retail owner with multiple shops around the country came to him and it was clear he needed to be first in Google search results, no matter what.

“OK” – asked our friend – “First under what terms?”

“FIRST. IN. GOOGLE. SEARCH. RESULTS.” – said the angered client – “And if you don’t have the expertise to do it, I’ll go somewhere else!”

That’s the story of how a retailer became first under the term “Colorado potato bug” in less than a week.

Traffic is among the most important things in online marketing, but not any kind of traffic works.

There are a few types of traffic, some of them being PPC (paid) traffic, organic traffic, email and social media traffic, and referral traffic.

Unless you’re in the online publishing business or profit on ad revenue like Business Insider, for example, you will soon learn that not all traffic is good traffic.

“Good” website traffic is the web traffic that generates the most revenue per visitor.

The retail owner would have mainly people looking for the Colorado potato bug click on his website. But those visitors are not potential clients and their revenue would be low if any.

A good part of the SEO strategy consists of brainstorming, business analysis, research on the correct keywords, and planning.

This ensures the content produced would bring the “good” traffic and will reach potential customers.

There are other great search engines as well but Google holds 92% of the market shares as of February 2019.

There are two ways of getting on top of the Google search results page.

You Can Pay for Ads or Create a Long Term Marketing Strategy for Organic Reach

Google Ads is a smart way to start. It’s the largest PPC (pay per click) service by far and gives great results instantly. It’s easy to use and guarantees visitors.

Although paid does not directly affect organic search results, there are some indirect ways that it could.

For example, seeing an ad again and again increases brand awareness and makes some users more likely to click on the same organic search result afterwards. It’s an expensive strategy, but a lot of companies are bidding on their name or product.

Semrush Google search results

Visitors guarantee a jump for your website in the organic search section results as they are one of the key indicators that your website provides value.

Some of the biggest and the best in the industry are using Google Ads. The service is very user-friendly and its capabilities are only limited by the client’s budget.

There are no contracts, no long term subscriptions, no minimum fees, and no tiny print. You bid for the term you’re interested in, you enter the budget you have, and your Google Ads campaign is set to go in no time.

There are downsides to be considered as well:

  • Even though the average PPC term costs around $2.00, there are terms that cost as much as $100.00 for a single click. The competition is always at your back and this means that if they have a bigger marketing budget, they can outbid you on your terms and steal your traffic.
  • As soon as you stop your AdWords campaign, the daily clicks and visitors on your website will drop.
  • The proper GoogleAds usage and targeting take a lot of time, skill and money to master and analyze. For best results, you will most likely need to hire a full-time marketing manager or use the services of a marketing agency.
  • It can get really really expensive to maintain steady traffic from AdWords. At first, it seems like a budget-friendly alternative to SEO, but it adds up and sums can skyrocket in the blink of an eye. As soon as your competition discovers your keywords, things can get pretty ugly. Not to mention all of the fake clicks that can be easily generated to make Google Ads campaigns fail.
  • People are suspicious when it comes to ads. No matter what your business is, your client has already received hundreds of unsolicited phone calls, ads, emails, and recommendations. Compared to the organic results click, your website starts at a disadvantage as you first reach out to the client.

Google Ads advertising can be of benefit to every business if done correctly but it’s not a replacement for inbound marketing and great content. This is a fairly common mistake business owners make and usually an expensive one.

Though paid search clicks do affect organic search results to some extent, Google would never favor a company over its Ads campaign and rank it higher.

Organic versus Paid search is not a battle although we marketers often make it sound like it is. The truth is, whatever you choose, will work great if you have a fabulous marketing team (like ours 😉 )

Paid ads vs organic search result

Paid advertising and content creation are not in any way mutually exclusive. But if your business is brand new and just starting, it’s worth taking the time and carefully discussing the right marketing strategy for you with a specialist before jumping in and wasting a ton of resources randomly.

Some of our clients in the publishing business make most of their revenue on ads. It works out great for them with a sky-high ROI of up to 150%. The popular media publishing sector is often heavily reliant on advertising.

Most traditional SEO practices, as keyword targeting and narrowing down topics, do not work very well when it comes to online media. The daily publishing of hundreds of articles on different subjects can make topic buckets useless.

But when your business is selling a product or a service, your main goal is to help your client and educate them on the benefits of working with you.

Content can be different for every business. For us, videos, white papers, and educational blog post articles work great.

We also have an email course you can check out here. The right content for your website might be images, tests, white papers, surveys, quizzes, e-books, interviews or a combination of all of those.

Customer-First Marketing Is the Future

One of my favorite examples of a masterfully executed marketing strategy is what Crew did with Unsplash.

Crew started as a freelancer marketplace. While searching for a home page image, they decided to hire a photographer and were left with tons of “leftover” images after choosing the ones they would use.

Every marketer knows what happens with the leftover images – you keep them in a folder on your drive until the end of time and you never repurpose them.

Crew made a difference.

They started a series of blog posts – 10 royalty free images every 10 days. They thought that even if a few hundred people found it useful, that’d be a win.

One of the Biggest Open Source Image Sharing Platforms – Unsplash – Was Born

Today Unsplash has more than 110,000 contributors, over 810,000 free images and 9 billion photo impressions per month. This resulted in $40 million in projects for Crew, supporting artists and creators from 32 countries before the CEO Mikael Cho sold it to Dribble in 2017.

Here are some key marketing takeouts from this inspiring and brilliant strategy.

  1. Customer-first marketing always wins. People are sick of advertisements and drowning in useless commercial info. Give them something helpful that they need. Give them value for the time spent on your website.
  2. Open Source is the future. We at DevriX are open source evangelists and contribute in various ways. We have developed dozens of free WordPress themes and plugins. And devoted thousands of hours of dev work to help strengthen and improve the WordPress core. We have 9 WordPress core contributors as of WordPress 5.1 “Betty”.
  3. Know your customers. Personality tests might be great, but are they really interesting for small and medium business owners and CEOs? Would your clients spend work time on something totally unrelated to their industry? Know your clients and serve them well.
  4. Give to receive. Put some time into understanding the problems your client is facing. Find possible solutions that are both cost-effective and of high quality.
  5. Don’t miss out on the bigger picture. Always think about upgrading and expanding. ROI is a key indicator of success but this doesn’t mean that everything you do has a direct value or a price tag. Sometimes “free” has the highest return on investment.

There are a number of ways to start your online business and become successful fast. One of the best and most reliable ones is creating great and carefully planned content. A well-executed marketing strategy can take you from being just another business fighting with the competition to the business everyone thinks of when it comes to your industry.

Is your business concept still foggy? Website running slow? Not sure where to start? Hit us up and make an inquiry. We have some of the best digital specialists out there. Our experience covers every industry from high tech and SaaS platforms to huge media publishing and aircraft.