Setting up a business used to be a cumbersome process, requiring a commercial lease, sometimes even before the first customer comes in the door. Now setting up a business online can be done in less than a day, and more brick and mortar businesses are turning to the web to find customers.
The numbers are growing. 64% of small businesses now have a website, which is up from 46% in 2016. What’s more, the majority of small businesses without websites plan on building one.
Despite this positive trend, there are still a few common mistakes that small businesses are making in their online marketing efforts – ones that can be voided.
Taking the DIY Approach
Any pro will tell you that the key to productivity is delegating. Yet, for some reason, many small businesses still try to tackle digital marketing entirely by themselves.
Forbes reports that upwards of 70.8% of small businesses do ALL their marketing in-house. Only about 4.4% of small businesses are outsourcing to a third party, agency, or contractor.
Yet it’s the small businesses who outsource who are happiest with the results for both increasing sales and bringing in new customers.
Yes, finding an affordable graphic design service and reliable SEO company can be tricky – but spending time getting up to speed on marketing, if you haven’t done it before, takes away time from your primary business. Getting help will almost certainly beat taking the DIY approach.
Not Utilizing Google My Business
Sometimes businesses think they can get away with a local listing on Google, but the opposite is also true. Sometimes businesses invest purely on a fancy website and forget to optimize the local business listing.
Trends show that consumers aren’t following local searches with website visits as frequently as in the past. Instead, they are relying on the plethora of information given right in the SERPs as part of Google My Business Listings.
Google My Business (which is a hub that replaced Google Places) provides opening hours, phone numbers, addresses and directions, and reviews of local businesses. It can even provide wait times for restaurants.
With all this information given right in the SERPs, there’s less need for consumers to bother with a website visit.
A Bright Local study found that, after a local business search:
- 17% of consumers are visiting the business directly after reading positive reviews (up from 7% in 2016)
- 10% of consumers contact the business directly from the search results (up from 3% in 2016)
- 37% visit the business’s website as the next step (whereas 56% did in 2016!)
With Google My Business replacing local websites, why are so few local businesses using it? Bill Hartzer reports on a review of over 9,000 local businesses. It found that:
- Only 68% of local businesses claimed their GMB listing
- Fewer than 0.1% have a virtual tour
- Nearly 12% of claimed listings don’t have a website
- Just 1.4% of businesses on GMB respond to reviews
It doesn’t take a lot of time or effort to optimize a Google My Business listing. So, there is really no reason for local businesses to be missing out on this marketing opportunity.
Not Claiming Other Listings
Google My Business isn’t the only platform replacing websites. There are many online directories and review sites where consumers go to find local businesses. Yet, many businesses missing these opportunities.
Bite Size Media reports that only 33% of local businesses have a Yelp listing, 21% have a Yahoo listing, and just 19% have a Yellow Pages listing.
Not Securing the Website
Hacking isn’t just happening in the political sphere with elections. The MIT Technology Review warns that cyber threats are something website owners need to worry about in 2018. The threats that small businesses should worry about include:
- Data breaches
- Ransomware attacks
- AI weaponization
According to Inside Small Business, hackers love small businesses because they have fewer security measures in place. Research shows that anywhere from 43% to 61% of breaches are targeted at small businesses.
Despite the risk, 51% of small businesses aren’t allocating any budget to reduce the risk.
Cyber attacks cost businesses revenue – 38% of those attacked lost more than 20% of their revenue. The attacks also have other costs, such as losing reputation and customer loyalty.
Small businesses should look at investing in better security can be viewed as insurance against potentially devastating losses.
No HTTPS Certificate
This goes along with the “not securing website” mistake. As Google writes, an HTTPS certificate is an internet communication protocol. It allows data to be sent through three layers of protection.
Google announced that, as of July 2018, all websites without HTTPS encryption will be marked as “not secure.”
According to EuroDNS, fewer than 30% of websites are using an HTTPS-encrypted SSL certificate. These websites face many risks, including:
- Drop in SEO
- Fewer sales (84% of consumers won’t buy online from insecure websites)
- Breaching General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
- Higher risk of security breaches
- Lawsuits and fines
It’s possible to get a free HHTPS-SSL certificate, so there’s no reason for small businesses not to take this step.
Long Page Load Times
A Google report found that the average mobile web page takes 22 seconds to load. Note that this is for all mobile sites. It is likely that small business pages take even longer to load than their big-business (and bigger budget) competitors.
This statistic is alarming because 53% of visitors will leave a mobile site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. For online retail, a one-second delay can decrease conversions by up to 20%!
Practical Ecommerce backs up these findings. They report that a 100 millisecond delay in load time can decrease conversions by 7% and bounce rates increase by 103% when load time increases by 2 seconds.
Slow load time is particularly devastating for ecommerce, but local businesses are also impacted. The same Google report found that consumers are more likely to abandon a mobile site if it takes too long to load. Small businesses could be losing 53% of mobile traffic if their site takes more than just 3 seconds to load!
Not Meeting Web Accessibility Standards
Because of strict laws, virtually all small business owners know that their storefronts must be accessible to people with disabilities.
Yet, few realize that their websites should also be accessible.
People with disabilities use various tools to help them access the internet. For sight-impaired people, for example, this could mean using a screen reader. People with motor impairments might use tools like mouth sticks or voice commands.
If a website doesn’t meet certain standards, it could be difficult or even impossible for people with disabilities to access the website.
Not only is this bad for business (approximately 20% of online users have some sort of disability), but businesses could find themselves hit with a lawsuit for not being accessible.
The best practices include meeting WCAG 2.0 standards and performing manual testing to ensure everyone can access the website.
Focusing Too Much On Social Media
There is no denying that social media is important for small businesses. Being present on social media can boost branding, customer loyalty, sales, and new leads.
But social media isn’t the end-all of online marketing!
According to stats at Blue Corona, 32% of small businesses are only investing in social media.
What about all the other methods of digital marketing – like local SEO, email marketing, Adwords, content marketing, or coupon deals?
As Entrepreneur notes, diversifying digital marketing methods means benefits like:
- Reaching more customers
- Cross-pollinate to drive better results
- Better optimization
- Reducing risk
- Having more data to analyze
- Providing more relevant content
- Reducing dependency on one channel
So, while small businesses certainly don’t want to stretch their budgets to cover all digital marketing methods, they should think outside of social media to get better results.
Conclusion
The sheer number of platforms and tools for online marketing can be overwhelming, but the key to remember is that you have to start somewhere. Marketing drives the continuous growth of businesses.
What mistakes do you think are the worst in small business marketing?