1. Not knowing your audience
Stop making it all about you and start speaking directly to your audience. Tap into what matters most to them and they will immediately feel a connection. This is an easy fix that you can do quickly, start by counting those pronouns and everywhere you see an “I” or a “We”, change it to “you” and rephrase your statement.
2. Living out of this world
These days, most people go online and narrow down their choices and then visit the company armed with research and a known direction. Your buyer is no different, but to be researched by potential clients/candidates you have to be found. URL structure is key; keep it clean, easy and specific to the initial page. They are designed to help give you maximum exposure to search engines from where the majority of the population search from.
3. Measuring social media success by ‘likes’
While it feels nice to have lots of followers and fans, the reality is that these measurements no longer mean much. Who cares if people see your Facebook updates if it doesn’t result in you getting some business? At the end of the day, that’s why businesses get on social media. If customer acquisition or sales is your goal, then you need to begin measuring your social media success in those terms. How can you do that? You’ve got to drive people back to your website or give them a reason to call you. Great ways to get your social media followers to come back to your site and convert into leads is to give something back to them; fill out a sign up form on your website, a discount, or an invitation to a webinar, special event, or meeting.
4. Too much, too fast
People have short attention spans. We live in the age of Twitter (which limits you to 140 characters), Vine (videos that last less than 6 seconds), and Snapchat (photo texts that auto-destruct in a matter of seconds). Websites are no different. There is plenty of research to suggest that you have about 3 seconds to grab a visitor’s attention before they move on or leave your site. This means that the FIRST image on your site is the one that counts as visuals are processed 60000x faster in the brain than any text. The importance of a single, static image inclusive of pixel quality is becoming vastly imperative.
5. Quantity over quality
Everyone loves to see the needle move in the right direction, but growth in these areas doesn’t always mean you will see results in terms of revenue. To put it another way, not every lead is a good lead. There are couple of ways to measure whether the leads you’re getting are good ones. Start by developing detailed buyer personas for your ideal client. Be clear about who qualifies as a “lead,” which could vary depending on your type of business. Answering that question will help you figure out who you want to attract.
6. Being all talk
The key to social media content is to show, not tell. Audiences prefer engaging with visual content over text any day; did you know that tweets with image links get an engagement rate 200% higher than those with just 140 characters? Flooding your feeds with line after line of text could cause you to miss out on a huge opportunity to connect with your buyers.
7. Assuming your social strategy works
It’s easy to tally likes and retweets to get an idea of how engaged your audience is on social media, but those numbers don’t tell the whole story. Measuring social media isn’t about the total number of eyeballs that view your content, it’s about the actions people take following this. Your twitter should shadow a landing page, it has a single objective – to increase conversion rates. Landing pages tend to work well because they’re simple, concise and purposeful.
