5 Top Strategies Why Online Marketing Fails

In an effort to help you get the most out of your online marketing efforts, I would like to shed some light on mistakes that can derail successfully engaging your prospects.

This is a list of 5 all to common strategies that I have witnessed in many businesses:

The “Who Needs a Strategy” Strategy

• Not creating a content strategy BEFORE you develop content.
• Creating great content but lousy email messaging that fails to get prospects to click.
• Sending a great email message linked to lousy content.
• Not measuring response beyond opens and clicks so you have no clue which content is working, or why.

The “Technobabble and Widgetitis” Strategy

• Landing pages that bear no resemblance to the message in your email.
• Promising a deep conversation and delivering basic chit-chat
• Delivering great content without properly planned follow-up.
• Following up great content with a pushy sales offer.
• Paraphrasing someone elses content so your prospects have no clue whether or not YOU know what you’re talking about.
• Burying your content in a complex web navigation scheme where visitors have to WORK to find it.

The “Me Me Me” Strategy

• Customer success stories that are all about your company, not your customers.
• Hiring an expert to develop content and then revising it to insert all those “me, me, me” terms and phrases that are noticeably absent.
• Posting only about your content and company.
• Launching a blog to talk about your products.

The “Dogpile them with Content” Strategy

• Pummeling your prospects with too many messages, too often.
• Stopping prospects who want your content with lengthy forms that keep them from getting it – do you really need to know all that stuff right now?
• Disappointing your prospects with a great white paper offer because it’s outdated. Just because it was good 3 years ago doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be updated before it’s reused.
• Covering too much because you aren’t sure what’s relevant to your audience and want to make sure something sticks.
• Using pre-sales marketing content for your current customer base because you don’t have anything new to say.

The ‘Its All About Me Social Networking” Strategy

• Sending the same email with alarming frequency and repetition to train your prospects to ignore you because you obviously have nothing new to add to the conversation.
• Tweeting only about your content and company.
• Telling people what you do, rather than ask them how can you solve their problems
• Inviting everyone to your business events, rather than refer your prospects and clients to other business events
• Giving your clients an hour by hour description of your day, from the time you brush your teeth till you lay down on your pillow at night.

Bonus: “I tried it once but it didn’t work” Strategy

This strategy is a little more elusive, but probably the most common strategy among businesses. You try a particular promotion or event once, because you heard it would work, you go in un-prepared, get pour results, and then tell others that it didn’t work. Do any of these things ring a bell?

• Sending out one or to emails every now and then, expecting everyone to buy now, but nobody does and you wonder why.
• I joined that group, but everyone seems to only want to talk about themselves, so I didn’t really get anything out of it.
• I built a website, but nobody ever visits it.
• I got great search engine ranking, but still nobody buys from my website.
• I tried social media once, but nobody responded when I tried to sell to them.