4 Common Digital Marketing Mistakes By Zimbabwean Entrepreneurs

 Have you wasted money on a website that is not performing ? It is a frustrating thing experiencing poor sales results when you have made relevant investments in website development and digital marketing. In this blog post however, Iam going to share 4 common mistakes you might also have made which could probably be the reason behind your website not performing. Continue reading to learn more !  

 

There is no doubt that digital marketing is important because it helps you increase sales by giving cost-effective access to a vast market on social media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Whatsapp. Facebook alone has more than 2.7 billion active users. Whatsapp is considered the second largest social network with more than 1 billion active users across the globe. By setting up a digital presence you did the right thing because not doing so is as good as giving your rivals a competitive advantage. So what are these 4 common digital marketing mistakes Zimbabwean entrepreneurs make ?

Before I do that let me introduce myself first. Iam Cain Ndhlovu the founder of Sunrise Digital Marketing Agency in Harare, creator of a free online training titled From Concept To Profit: A New Product Digital Marketing Blueprint, a blogger and I help startups and entrepreneurs launch new products online so that they stimulate sales, become successful and be able to live the life of their dreams.

I enjoy teaching about digital marketing because its something I learnt on my own through experience. They say life is the best teacher. You know how I got started it was after experiencing poor sales results as an estate agent. I moved from one agency to another hoping to find a change of fortune but thinks appeared like they were getting worse. I tried this, I tried that but nothing worked until a friend introduced me to a blog.

 A turning point  …

The year 2014 was a turning point because I managed to attract a client who would later pay me USD 1 000.00 commission after she read a blog article titled;

 “ Financial consequences of purchasing property from a seriously-ill seller and other purchases to avoid ”.

This article resonated with the lady because she had purchased a Harare house in Msasa from a seriously ill seller. There was an outstanding balance. She decided to clear the balance by selling a piece of land in Madokero.

I was very excited about this. I continued to build my knowledge of specifically a blog and generally digital marketing. I got better and better until I begun getting clients who would want me do digital marketing on their behalf.

In my years of digital marketing doing it for myself and doing it for my clients  I learnt that digital marketing has its own rules. Because of the digital divide many Zimbabweans are still new to the proper use of digital media in business. So many people make mistakes that lead to poor results. I talked about some of these rules in my other blog posts here is a summary of some of them;

 

(1) Relevancy (know your audience)

In my previous posts I taught that relevancy is key. Relevancy is all about knowing who your ideal customer is and creating content (e-books, videos, infographics etc ) that resonate with them. A lot of effort should be on creating what is known as a buyer person. This is a representation of your ideal customer. You must describe your ideal customer in terms of geography, demography, age, gender etc.

 (2) Consistency

When sharing content on social media and an e-mailing list this content should be of high quality and should be done consistently. High quality demonstrate that you are not a second-rate outfit and consistency builds expectancy. People should build the habit to look forward to your content. Not every piece of content you share will resonate with a customer but he may find one that resonate in the future if you consistently share content.

(3) Timeliness

There are times when people are offline like mid night. If share content during such hours it will find no takers. So timing its important.

 

So these are some of the rules shared in detail in other blog posts but in this particular one we will focus on the mistakes. So what are these mistakes ?

 

1. Not marketing your website or blog

Many believe that once a site is live it will market itself and visitors will flock to it in their millions. This is fallacious. Without real efforts to distribute your site’s content especially on social media and  search engines your site is wasted resource. There are over 1 billion websites on the internet today so what are the chances of someone stumbling upon yours?

Social media marketing tips

If you want to promote a website through Facebook one technic to use is making posts with big images that fill up the feed. A picture attract more than plain text.

Search engine marketing tips

To appear on top of Google search results the cardinal rule is that you must do search engine optimization. SEO manly involves key words search and building online text with these key words. Over time these keywords will help you hit the top because they are what people type when they search on search engines.

2. Having unrealistic expectations

Sometimes this is caused by the assumption that online initiatives have overnight results. Yes there are cases of exceptional success but these are rare at best. If you are wise you don’t base strategy on exception but on the rule and the rule is that online success is built upon hard work not shortcuts.

3. Engaging in shady practices

Some technics for trying to improve your search engine results ranking like link baiting are banned by Google. The are what Google deem SEO Spam and Google has invested millions of dollars developing algorithms like Google Penguin meant to combat SEO Spam. Being penalized by Google is something difficult to fix. You may experience a short term gain but eventually you will loose.

 

4. Marketing to everyone

Many companies erroneously measure a website’s success by the quantity not quality of visitors. As noted earlier relevancy of content matters. A site require the right visitors because at the end you need visitors who will convert to customers.

 

In order to be successful in this area you need to create a buyer persona so that your digital marketing target your ideal customer. However, justice has been done for this issue in this post and other blog posts here so I will not continue focusing on it. What I would like to focus on is an excellent outsourced digital marketing service you can engage if you lack the skill or time to do digital marketing by yourself.

 

Another reason why outsourced digital marketing is important is that an expert will help you short circuit your path to success instead of taking years of struggle by yourself trying to make it happen.  To learn more about this service please simply click LEARN MORE.