As a marketing agency for small businesses, we witness the same mistakes made online time and time again. This is natural; as a business owner your expertise lie in other areas, it’s ours that lie in online marketing for small businesses.

Unfortunately, many small business owners have had bad experiences with marketing agencies in the past which leave them disillusioned and reluctant to invest again into digital marketing and as a consequence attempting to do it themselves. Since digital marketing is a role in itself, just as you couldn’t be an accountant for your restaurant at the same time as managing the business, attempting to take on the role of marketing specialist is going to go in much the same way, leaving you overwhelmed with the workload and unsatisfied with the results.

Remember, every business should be following a tailored marketing plan for a small business in order to gain the best return on their investment.

To save you from learning the hard way, we’ve listed the 5 most common mistakes we see made online that prove to be the most costly for small business owners:

1. Your business has no website

It goes without saying that with no website it’s going to be impossible to build any kind of online presence for your business, which means missing out on all the potential customers who are using the internet every day to search for products or services like yours. When you think of all the people (aka thousands of potential customers) holding a device in their hands throughout the day, having no website for your business is a costly mistake. 

Your website should be a space where you can showcase your business’ products and services, be easy to navigate and present the important information people are searching for in a clear manner. It should make an impactful first impression to draw every visitor in and deliver a seamless user experience to keep them around to find out more.

2. You have a website but it’s not optimised for SEO

When it comes to online marketing for small businesses, the second worst thing to having no website is having a website with no SEO. No SEO means your website cannot be found. A website that no one can find is not going to find you any new customers, therefore isn’t going to make you any more money in which case it might as well not exist. 

To be successful, a website must be first found and then chosen. This comes down to good SEO and good design.

Check out the fresh new website with an integrated online store we designed and developed for Moyo, a sustainable hair salon who came to us wanting a website that properly represented their salon’s values and aesthetic. Moyo experienced an increase in bookings and product sales through their website in a matter of months of working with us.

Are you looking for someone to optimised your website for SEO? Get in touch and we’ll send you a human-made SEO report of your website, totally free of charge.

3. You don’t have good quality photos/content on your website

When doing online marketing for small businesses, poor quality content on a business’ website suggests poor quality content of their products or services. This is not good for business. Your website’s visitors will be hopping off your website and straight on to the next until they find one they like the look of (based on the quality of design and content on that website). 

4. Your website delivers a poor user experience

Let’s say you have really good quality content on your website; a clear design and a smooth user experience) but your beautiful images aren’t properly compressed for web and take ages to load. You can count that as another customer lost; people don’t have time to wait for web pages to load. On to the next. Your website’s user experience should be flawless from start to finish.

Seeking more tips for small business marketing? Head to our blog!

5. Your website isn’t optimised for mobile

The previous point applies across all devices. Your user’s experience should be as seamless on mobile as it is on a laptop, especially since over 60% of people will discover your website on their mobile phone. That’s a lot of customers to miss out on due to something as simple as not optimising your website for all devices.

To make things worse, Google will actually penalise your website for not being optimised for mobile (remember, Google wants a good user experience for their users too) by relegating your website further down the rankings. So it’s definitely worth doing.

6. You’re not active on social media

Social media is where your clients are presented with your brand voice, vibe and aesthetic. It’s your business’ space to showcase your best work, announce news and updates, advertise your products or services and share some bits from behind the scenes. All these aspects make social media a great space to build trust with your customers, before they’ve even made a purchase. 

Spotted one or two mistakes that you recognise from your own business’ online presence? Don’t fear…Mamma’s here! 

Get in touch to schedule a free consultation where we’ll check out your business’ current online presence and what we’d suggest doing moving forward. It’s what we do!