Is online marketing hard? Well, yes and no… We recently asked about what the greatest frustrations were that people are facing with online marketing and think the solutions they came up with will help you as well.
What it all seems to boil down to is being able to drive traffic to your website – do these things bother you as well?
Here are some of the responses, including what people have done to overcome obstacles…
1. Content
Danny is a marketing professional from New York who spends his days in a very hands-on role for a well-known online brand. Here is what he had to say:
“One of my biggest frustrations with online marketing is how much great content there is out there, and how difficult it is to rise above all of the clutter. This is a great problem for a reader to have — too much great stuff to get through after picking out what you want to read and potentially share. But for the company, it makes the job of connecting with the consumer that much harder.
It may sound trite, but the best way to overcome this obstacle is to develop a plan and execute on it. You may not strike gold the first time out, but that shouldn’t be an indicator of anything other than one attempt. Don’t stray from your strategy, and be sure to stay true to and consistent with your vision for your marketing efforts. When the public does discover your great content, they will reward you, and then some.”
This is a great point! It is very easy to get discouraged by not seeing massive early results, but if you quit too soon you will be unlikely to see any results at all. With regard to content, we always say consistency is the key, so make sure you do stick to that strategy! If you feel that you are not getting as much reach as you would like, consider checking your social profiles for completeness and looking into guest blogging opportunities.
2. Follow-up
Jon, an online business owner for the last few years had this to say:
“Recently we had a huge drop in traffic due to Google changing their algorithms. Our website dropped a lot of places for many search terms we were ranking at number one. We solved this by collecting customers email addresses (with permission of course). This allows us to regularly communicate with our customers about freebies, new products, and exclusive offers. We can now stand on our own two feet and gain traffic without relying on unpredictable search engines.”
Having a system in place for follow-up is one of the must-haves if you are serious about succeeding with online marketing. It is generally much easier to build a relationship with customers and generate repeat business if you have a means of communication with them! Don’t let possible customers or followers slip through your fingers by not having a sign-up of some kind. It is not easy to generate site traffic so you want to be looking after the traffic you do get!
3. Keyword Phrases For Pay Per Click
Ian is the President and Co-Founder of a Government Auctions website. He has been online for a number of years and here is his response:
“One of the biggest frustrations that I’ve come across when it comes to online marketing is the sheer amount of competition that’s out there for pay per click search engines. When we first started advertising on Google Adwords over 10 years ago, we had only 1 or 2 direct competitors. However, now there are a lot of companies that don’t even directly compete with us who are nevertheless advertising under our main keywords, which makes buying those keywords more expensive for us. This tends to make some keywords not even worth the ROI. What we did, and we’re continuing to do to overcome this is we’re using software like Wordtracker to find many more long tail key phrases that don’t have a lot of competition, and so far this strategy has worked out really well, albeit is very time consuming.”
This raises a very good point – what to do when the market for your keyword phrases becomes saturated? If you want to stay on top of the online marketing game, you need to be monitoring those keyword phrases and know when it’s time to look into new ones. (hint: if you’re not ranking well for the phrases you’ve targeted and they are overly expensive for pay-per-click, it’s time to get new ones).