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How to Market Your Small Business Online
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Article 7: Online Marketing Blunders to Avoid
Keep these common mistakes in mind before jumping into Web marketing.
- -Buying lists of e-mail addresses. “One of the worst ways you can start an e-mail marketing program is to buy a list,” says Jeanne Jennings, an e-mail marketing consultant in Washington, D.C., and author of “The Email Marketing Kit” (SitePoint, 2007). “Typically they’re junk, they’re going to get you blacklisted [because of spam complaints]. It’s much better to start out with an ‘opt-in’ so that everyone you’re sending to wants to hear from you.”
- -Assuming an e-mail newsletter makes sense for any company. Newsletters just wouldn’t work for Tim Higgins, owner of San Diego-based Plant Pros. Homeowners and businesses hire his company to provide and maintain interior plants. “Our clients pay to have their plants looking nice,” says Higgins, who runs the business from his home and has five part-time employees. “They don’t want to know anything else other than that. Most of our clients are not really concerned with how to take care of plants.”
- -Going with “some guy” who says he can develop and maintain your site. “You have to get a good Web person,” says Higgins. “You have to have someone who will be there in the long run to take care of you . . . You need to know where your Web site actually is and how to make sure it will always stay up.”
- -Not maintaining good customer service on your Web site. “You need to check your e-mail,” says Holly Berkley, a San Diego-based new-media consultant and author of “Low-Budget Online Marketing for Small Business” (Self-Counsel Press, 2005). “You need to make sure [the site] is updated. If you have a special from three months ago [still posted], it’s going to make it look like you don’t have good customer service.”
- -Expecting the masses, quickly. “Starting a Web site and publishing it today doesn’t mean you’re going to have thousands of new visitors and tons of new sales tomorrow,” says Bruce C. Brown, a Web developer in Land O’ Lakes, Fla., and author of “How to Use the Internet to Advertise, Promote and Market Your Business or Web Site With Little or No Money” (Atlantic Publishing Company, 2006). “Be realistic with your expectations and be patient.”
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