5 Critical Digital Marketing Issues that can ruin your Website

As the old proverb says, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

This is often the case with eCommerce business. Good intention in our case is the creation of a marketing strategy that includes, for example definition of customer target group, customer behavior analysis, or website creation. It is the misinterpretation of the data (incorrect data management) that can bring the online business to hell, as well as several marketing issues that may not seem serious at first glance, but have devastating consequences.

These digital marketing problems significantly affect not only overall traffic, but also have a negative impact on customer behavior on the website as such.

1. Choosing a bad platform for a website

One of the most significant marketing issues is the incorrect selection of the platform on which your site is to be built. Once you start investing resources (and your time) into your website, it will not be possible to exchange it for a different one once you find out it doesn’t meet your requirements.

An inappropriate platform can cause a lot of (non)technical issues. Frequent outage or too slow page loading will make the visitors to leave and not to come back. Also, some platforms do not allow plugin installation, which could help you with SEO or make the data management easier.

Therefore, when choosing a suitable platform, you should consider all the options and functionalities the platform can offer.

Total exchange of website platform means to invest a lot of extra money to transfer content, but also to reinstall plugins you have had before.

Because if you have purchased and installed plugins in your previous platform, there is a huge chance that you will be not allowed to install them into your new website for free. Also beware that not every plugin is suitable for any website platform you will choose.

Apart from the customized solutions, there are also existing platforms that you can choose from.

One of the popular platforms is WordPress, thanks to its variability in creation of any type of website — simple presentation websites, e-shops, eCommerce solutions and directory & listings portals. Because of the availability and rich offer of WordPress Themes, you can choose a template that can be a perfect match to your business.

Some WordPress Themes developers even offer extended functionalities, that can help with setting pricing strategies, featured products, payment gateways… and many other useful features to achieve the best marketing strategy.

To speed up every day work with the content, it is a good idea to choose a platform that will allow you to easily add new content — to gather Google’s attention (Google likes when new content is added to the website regularly).

2. Poor SEO

Another frequent marketing issue is insufficient attention to SEO, which can be directly related to low traffic. The concerns regarding low traffic and the need to generate traffic were the biggest challenges for the companies last year according to the Hubspot survey of marketing problems.

Building SEO should be a systematic process over the long term; unfortunately, nowadays it is not enough to have just titles marked as h1, h2, h3.

It is common that entrepreneurs make unnecessary errors within SEO — for example, they leave unoptimized links on the website, they forget about renaming images, do not research the right keywords, do not include focus keyword in meta description or in permalinks, they lack quality content on their webpage and so on.

Many of these marketing problems can be resolved by various SEO plugins such as Yoast, which can be installed directly into WordPress, and can warn the user on the various SEO deficiencies.

Of course, no plugin can replace complex optimization by applying on-page and off-page SEO techniques, but it can at least help with the number of basic settings and make the page more SEO friendly.

And especially — it will prevent you from forgetting something important.

3. Outdated content

One of the major marketing issues, which is often not considered to be important enough, is an outdated content. The lack of up-to-date content is not only bad from the SEO point of view, causing stagnation or drop in traffic, but it can also greatly affect the customer behavior — customers stop returning to your website as nothing changes on it and no new content is added.

The result is the reduction in conversion rate and a drop in sales for eCommerce sites.

In order to be able to add content regularly and comfortably, user friendly administration interface is a must. In this regards the WordPress-based websites have advantage of providing an easy-to-use CMS and most of the times a very user-friendly UI, because most WordPress theme developers have own extensions build on top of standard admin interface. This makes content management even easier.

4. Non-use of the latest trends

Another critical marketing problem is non-updating of the website and its preservation — maintaining the status quo.

Today, technological trends are changing extremely fast, new innovations, plugins, elements and tools are emerging. It is therefore necessary to track all the various changes on the market and regularly implement innovations in order to be able to run successful business eCommerce.

Here are some current trends:

• Multi language plugins

Multi language plugins assist with the creation of a multilingual website and the expansion of online business to other foreign markets. The advantage is also that the content itself can be adapted to individual target groups according to their country of origin and at the same time based on the specific customer behavior.

• Mobile First Design

There is an increasing number of users who visit websites primarily from their smartphones. This phenomenon has begun to greatly influence website building, so much so that responsiveness has become a must-have. Especially when Google publicly stated that it’s going to prefer the responsive websites in the search results and the others are going to be penalized.

Today, the demand for responsive websites or mobile versions of websites has increased so much that so called Mobile First Design came to the fore.

What does it mean?

That in the very first step the design for mobile devices and tablets is developed, and only then the design for the desktop itself (in the past, it was the desktop version of the website which was designed first).

• AMP implementation

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is an open source initiative that accelerates website loading on mobile devices. Simply explained, AMP creates a mobile-friendly version of the website with content being available pretty much instantly and user does not have to wait for the page to load item-by-item, including images or videos.

There is even an AMP plugin that can be installed directly into Wordpress.

5. Data is not measured and evaluated

The list of critical marketing issues concludes the absence of data mining and data management.

For the commercial success of the website, it is crucial to collect user data which is then used for customer behavior analysis. According to the results of this analysis, it is then possible to alter not only the marketing strategy, but also the website itself.

For example, if Funnel Reports shows that customers are leaving because of the lengthy shopping process or poorly arranged shopping cart, it will be necessary to simplify the purchase process directly via the change of website structure.

You need the right tool in order to gain control over customer data, increase the conversion rate, or perhaps to be able to calculate the ROI more effectively.

There are many marketing tools which provide you a complete overview of where your customers come from and what their steps on the site are. These tools can display a dashboard with real-time analytics and offer many other useful analytics features too.

Thanks them you will get to perfectly know your customers and gain the valuable data necessary for the further development of your business.

The most known tool for tracking traffic and for data measurement is Google Analytics (of course :)), which is available for everyone and it is completely free. You can also use one of paid tools, e.g. Kissmetrics, SEMRush or Hotjar.

In case you are not sure if these paid tools meet your criteria, you can still use a trial first. Thanks to free trial you are able to find out, which tool is most useful for your website data measurement and which one is worth-money.

There are a lot of marketing issues that you can unintentionally make in the marketing strategy process. Some of them do not significantly affect business performance, but others can definitely ruin your website. Like these 5 most critical errors on my list that you should certainly avoid.

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