The 5 Critical Mistakes You’re Making In Digital Marketing

Venks: Hey guys, it’s Venks again, and I’m joined by Harshad and welcome to episode two of What’s Happening In Digital!. In the previous episode, we spoke quite a bit about BroadWeb digital, what we do, who we are, but this is more about digital marketing in general. As we promised. it’s not all about us.

It’s all about, how you can benefit from digital. So what we are gonna discuss here today is the five critical mistakes you’re making in digital marketing.

Venks: We’ll start with the first one, which is people don’t take digital marketing seriously. So if you are a business owner and you are not thinking about digital because you are doing well, the revenue is coming in. Why fix something that’s not broken. But that might be actually a problem down the track because if you are not online, your competitors are, and it’s only a matter of time before markets start actually going online to do what they have been doing traditionally offline. So that is something you need to consider because if you’re not doing that, probably stop right here and start thinking about digital

Harshad, what are your thoughts on this particular point?

Harshad: Yeah, absolutely. No matter since when you are doing business, no matter if you have a steady flow of leads or sales or customers coming in once you start investing a bit into digital marketing, you will see that difference in your business. Actually I do have an example.

If I may share that during COVID I had a friend and. So he’s a, he is a friend, but we are quite close, but we never talk business and stuff, and during COVID he said he, he owns a cafe and he said that he is thinking about closing that cafe, closing, the business, and asked him why , and he said because the lockdowns are happening quite frequently.

He doesn’t know what the future is and he is not making any profits. I asked him. What is he doing on home delivery and things like that? Like takeaways and stuff. And he was like, yeah, that’s there. It’s only like 10% of his total business. And I quickly jumped onto his Google business profile and he said he does have one.

But he never looked at it. He knew people are leaving reviews. He had a good close to five star reviews and above hundred reviews. And I took access for his Google business profile with his permission, of course, and I started working on optimizing it. So basic things like, there were a lot of cafes which were close to him and that were closed.

And just informing Google on these cafes. And, Google started showing them as permanently closed that helped his rankings go up. And six months down the line, he calls me and says that 70% of his business is now online business. Like people are calling him, people are ordering online and a lot of takeaways as well.

And he’s in the process of starting another cafe. So . Sorry to interrupt. So for people who are listening what is Google business profile, ? So how is that different from Google search results? So Google business profile is a different thing altogether. So you don’t need a website to have a Google business profile.

All you have to do is register with Google and what it does, what Google does is Google sends you a postcard to your address because obviously they need to know that you are the real business owner at that specific location. Once you verify your address with Google, your listing goes online. And the best thing about Google business profile, which I feel is that if you search for something, for example, let’s say if I search for best coffee, near me, the Google business profiles show above the search results. A lot of people, they don’t even scroll at the search results. So for example, if I need to do something in my house, if I need a carpenter in my house, now I would just search for, or if I need a plumber, for example, I would search plumber near me and it’ll show me the results of plumbers, who are close to me.

And if their profile is optimized. It gives them that edge to rank higher and you don’t need a website, so that’s good. You don’t need to have a five grand website for this. It’s free, but it just need to be optimized. That’s it.

Venks: I remembered when you said plumber, and that reminded me people have actually started gaming Google that way as well by actually naming their business “Electrician near me”. And also having the domain very similar to that as well. So when people search for it, they also get the benefit of SEO. So really Google business profiles are nothing, but, those results that you see next to a map, and they typically show on the top of the search results page.

And would you say it’s more suitable for businesses that have a location, particular location?

Harshad: Of course. So for example, if I need to go somewhere, I’m going to search it up. And so for example, if I need to buy something, okay, let’s say I wanna buy a new what I was buying yesterday hot water dispenser, right?

So I was just searching for shops near me. And then I was reading all the reviews and all that stuff. So it helps me to take that decision. So I, I might pay 20 bucks extra for that hot water dispenser, but if it’s close to me and if it has good reviews, then why not?

Venks: Yeah. And that’s the thing. I think people have become a lot smarter online, so just because they know what they wanna buy, they just don’t go to the website and buy.

They wanna do a bit of comparison. See if that’s the best price they’re getting it. Because if a competitor has a better price, then that’s where people are gonna go. They’re also gonna look at reviews and say, if people have given good reviews about the place they’re buying from, especially if they haven’t bought from them before.

And I think that’s where Google business profile helps because you can actually get people to leave reviews for your business. And that gives you a rating. And when people are rating and say, okay, fine, 10 people have rated this business four or five. . They must be good. And all of this happens online.

Taking digital marketing seriously is definitely number one. Correct. Sounds good. All right.

Venks: So we go to the next one. What do we have not using a CRM? So do you wanna start off what this means?

Harshad: Yes. In my career, I have met a lot of business owners and one, one biggest mistake.

Doesn’t really matter if you have an online business, you might even have a website, but if you are not collecting leads, or if you don’t have a system where you have a list of your prospects or your existing customers, then you are losing lot of money. For example if you are selling a product let’s say if you’re selling beauty products, and if you have a list of your existing customers, one single email in a month to these customers can do, a lot good for you.

So the other thing, what I’ve seen quite common is, when you have a website, okay. Usually a lot of people nowadays use WordPress. Now the default setup. You have a contact us form. And that’s the reason why business owners have websites is that people can find them online and then fill up the contact us form and request something.

Now this form, usually the default set up, it goes to the email address. Now, once you start getting all these emails from your prospects, it’s quite possible that you lose track. And sometimes these emails might end up in your spam box as well. And this can easily be like a few thousand dollars.

Worth of business lost. And the best thing is because you need to treat these leads as gold, right? Because this is where you will be making a lot of money from. Have a CRM. So I’ll give you one small example. Like when someone fills in your contact us form, send that info to your CRM, don’t just send it to your email address and send it to your CRM so that you have a proper list where you can see everything. And most importantly, where that lead has come from, is it come from Google ads? Has it come from SEO? Has it come from Facebook? So that’s really important.

Venks: . Great. Excellent. A CRM, which is nothing but a customer relationship management tool doesn’t really have to be daunting. It doesn’t have to be this full blown software as well.

It could just be a Google sheet where, there are a lot of plugins out there for WordPress say, which actually allow you to connect your form to a Google sheet. So when someone actually. Fills the form out. It not, it can send you an email as well. So you just have a notification that, someone’s filled the form out, but it also goes to the Google sheet.

So that way you basically have one place, you have a track of all your records, all the people who have filled the form out inquiring about your business or inquiring about their needs and whether you’re a business meets them. And then you can actually add notes in a separate column as well. So it’s just a good way to just keep a track of what’s coming in.

You might wanna follow up a week later. You can maybe put a note to serve as a reminder for yourself to follow up a week later, get on a call within a week later. What’s the outcome of that call? So it’s just a good practice, I think, to just maintain a CRM where you can track your leads and see where they are in the journey.

You’re spending so much time and money in getting a lead. You might as well have a CRM to maximize your chance of converting that lead to a sale to a customer. So that makes a lot of sense.

Harshad: Venks, do you wanna share a couple of CRMs that you think are, I think there are free ones as well. Any ones, any favorites that you have?

Venks: I personally like HubSpot quite a long. Again, HubSpot is probably a bit on the mid to high range as well. I’m a big fan of simplicity. So really, if we don’t have a CRM, I would say start with Google sheet. Yeah. Because it’s a spreadsheet and it works really well. It’s free as well. There’s quite a few there’s pipe drive.

There’s a lot more, but there are yeah. It all depends on your business needs. Exactly.

Venks: So moving on to number three not measuring their website, traffic and ROI by channel. So the biggest takeaway from this particular point is if you can’t measure something, you can’t improve it, right? If you wanna make more sales as a business, you wanna start with seeing how much traffic is coming to your website right now, before you.

Take on any marketing campaigns, because if you are getting, say a thousand visits a month, you put a marketing campaign in place, and that goes up to thousand 500, your improvement is by 500 visits a month. And how do you do that? There are different analytics software that allow you to do that.

Google analytics is the most popular, which free as well. So I’ll definitely recommend start with that. But again, it’s just not measuring traffic. You also wanna see what your traffic is doing, where they’re coming from, where they’re landing. Are they actually getting to where you want them to go?

So if they land on a particular page, , are they actually clicking through to find out more about you? Are they clicking on contact us and getting there? Cause if they’re not, maybe you don’t have the right call to actions on that particular page, right? You’re not encouraging them to contact you and looking at your analytics will actually tell you, that’s what you need to do.

Any other thoughts on this particular point? I.

Harshad: Yeah. Again, this reminds me of business owners when I talk to them and I ask them , where are you investing when it comes to digital marketing and then a lot of them tell me, oh, we are doing Facebook ads. We are doing Google ads.

We are doing search engine optimization. Some people do LinkedIn ads as well. And then I ask them, what is your ROI or return on investment on each of these channels? And they’re like, oh I might not have an answer for that, but it’s working for me. So I really don’t look into all that. But that’s a problem, because I’ll give you one example.

Let’s say if you are running Google ads and SEO. Okay. Or a better example would be if you are paying an SEO company for managing your Google My Business listing, and then you are paying another company for running Google ads. And you are getting traffic, your phone is ringing as a business owner.

You’re getting a lot of leads but you need to understand where these leads are coming from. . So for example, if you are spending, let’s say about $5,000 on Google ads, right? And then that is where. 99% of your leads are coming from then you might as well stop doing Google My Business listing. .

And increase putting that budget into your Google ads and try and double the number of leads you’re getting from Google ads. And this will, this can also tell you that the issue company that is doing your Google business profile or Google my business optimization. You’re not getting anything out of it.

So when you are investing in these multiple channels, no matter like how many companies, how many agencies you’re working with always measure , where you’re getting the most from. So wherever you’re getting it from, try and, invest more in those channels so that you can get, more leads or sales out of that channel.

Venks: Makes sense. So basically measure break down your traffic by channel and measure the ROI per channel to decide which one’s doing well, put more budget towards that. Maybe reduce the budget for the other channels. That’s really the takeaway. Yeah. Makes sense.

Venks: Do you wanna start off with this one?

Harshad: Yeah, I think this is your area. Sometimes I feel very basic and there are so many tools available and your website is a part of your business. And If your website is down and I would speak more from an SEO perspective and Google doesn’t find you, your rankings are gone, right?

Because Google doesn’t like websites, which are not up or not fast. And of course your website has to be up because, and even now I can see if I click, I don’t like clicking Google Ads. But sometimes when I do, and I see a 4 0 4 page or a page cannot be found, I’m like, oh my God, this business owner or the agency is wasting so much money over here, .

Have you seen anything like this? I’m pretty sure you have seen such things happening

Venks: yeah, that’s right. And it’s really, 1 0 1, which is you wanna start with putting some sort of uptime monitoring for your site. So that, when the site goes down and people would be surprised, sites go down pretty regularly and hosts, obviously don’t notify people when that happens.

Maybe there is an unscheduled outage that has led to the customer’s sites going down. And you as a customer should always do that , you should be monitoring your own website and not rely on the host to let you know there’s a lot of free services out there that allow you to do that. . Uptime robot is one of them.

Uptime, robot.com. They allow up to 50 sites in their free plan, right? So there’s no real reason not to be monitoring your site. Besides uptime monitoring. What it also does is it tells you a rough response time, right? How quickly your site loads as well. And it gives you a nice graph. So you can actually see if , performance begins to suffer.

That is also another thing you can look at as well, because that’s got a big impact on conversions, too. Your site performance. So definitely something we should do from day one. It’s something we do for all of our clients. Because we wanna be notified before our clients pick up the phone and tell us, Hey, my site is down.

So it really it’s a no brainer. Yeah.

Venks: So if there’s nothing else to add to this one, we’ll go onto the last one, which is not focusing on CRO right? Yeah. Conversion rate optimization. So I’ll probably start off with this one. You spend a lot of effort into getting the right ad, the right creative Spending money on PPC, getting people to click on your ads for them to land on your landing page.

But if your landing page is not CRO optimized or optimized for conversions, that traffic is not gonna go anywhere. It’s not gonna convert into leads or sales. So what does that mean? It basically means are you actually fulfilling? What the objective that you have set, right? The customer comes to the particular landing page with a particular goal.

They’ve searched for something and they’ve come to the page. Does it actually meet their needs?

Right.

Venks: So you’re promising something in the ad. They come to the page. Does it actually fulfill that objective? And it’s not only what your product or service does, but how do they even trust you? So if your site actually looks professional your branding is on point that actually adds to the level of trust.

And there are other different elements as well, that can go into the landing page. Things like social proof, people like to buy when they know that other people have bought from you as well. And they’re happy. Absolutely has to be genuine as well. So it’s not just putting a name and testimonial, but also maybe adding a photo behind it or a title, who they are, if it’s a B2B business things like that. So you definitely need to focus on CRO to make sure you’re actually maximizing the ROI for your ad campaigns. Anything to add to that.

Harshad: No, you have covered a lot. I just wanted to add that at broad web, we do a lot of AB testing. So what we do is we test out different versions of pages.

We also do single variable testing where we change, single stuff on the website and then see how that’s performing on a page. I’m sorry. And yes and CRO initially when you start off with CRO, it may not be rocket science because. There needs to be a lot of testing that has to be done, but all this testing has been done by a lot of other companies.

For example you look at Amazon, their buttons are always orange and yellow and why not? You should have that button as orange because they have done all that research. They have spent so much money to see what people really click on. And yeah, so it’s orange and yellow, so having pink buttons or yellow, yellow is good, having green buttons, it might work for you, but try having orange or yellow buttons, because if it’s working for Amazon, it’ll always work for you.

Another thing it’s a tip like always have your CTAs or your banners or whatever on the right inside of your page. It really feels when I see , some people having their CTAs on the left hand side. It’s because no, one’s gonna click there. A lot of people on this planet are right-handed.

You have a mouse, obviously this is about desktops. And when you have a mouse, you generally click on the right end side of the page, rather than on the left side of the page. So have your CTAs, your buy now buttons, add to cart buttons on the right side of the page. And with the colors you can, yes. Do a lot of AB testing.

You can experiment if you don’t have the budget. If you want to try it out yourself, go with orange or yellow, I’m pretty sure your sales or leads will increase with these colors and the positioning.

Venks: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. So we covered a bit more than we intended to with CRO and there’s a number of points we covered, but I think there’s a lot more to talk about these points as well.

So we might do another session and go into a bit more detail.

Harshad: Yeah, like we can make individual episodes of all these points as well.

Venks: Makes sense. All right. So that brings us to the end of our episode two. I hope that that you took something out of this particular episode.

Again, if there’s anything you like to add to that, because these are the top five critical mistakes that we think you’re making, but there might be others as well, that businesses I’m making, that you are aware of do let us know in the comments. Did you wanna close it up Harshad?

Yeah. So

Harshad: venks is in a bit of hurry because he’s heading off to Bali.

When are you going?? yeah yep. I hope you will have a nice time and it’s Friday you’re in Melbourne. Hopefully we should get this video and this episode uploaded today itself and yep. Hope everyone whoever’s listening to this or watching it on YouTube.

Just let us know how we are going this is our second episode leave comments, like it or subscribe and just let us know what you want. If you have any questions, if you have a website that you want us to have a look at and we can definitely help you with that.

Yeah. Yeah. So as you mentioned, I’m off tomorrow and I’m really happy that we got this out of the way. Yeah, can’t wait to have a bit of a break and then we’ll be back soon with the third episode. Thanks guys. Thanks guys.