5 Common Marketing Mistakes To Avoid
Sep 25, 2017
10 min read
Table of contents
Marketing is a kind of big investment for all sized business. A powerful marketing plan not only brings you across the right customers, but it can also let everyone talk positive about your organization and your product or services. However, this marketing strategy should be properly planned and developed properly. Even a few flaws of your marketing plan can cause a big disaster in your business, costing your business millions of dollars in other expenses and huge loss of revenue. Here is a list of five common mistakes which most of the business owners make while marketing their business online:
1. Choosing wrong Target Audience
Always remember that you cannot sell your products or services to everyone. Generate an effective idea of the psychographics and demographics of your target market and focus at it effectively. If you have customers from different psychographic or demographic purchase from you, it acts as an additional bonus for your business. As soon as you start focusing on a definite group, its trends, interests and purchasing habits, you will soon understand its requirements. This will help you in providing a creative marketing solution to the users.
2. Lack of Testing and Market Research
Initial testing and market research are essential processes as they help in determining the overall performance of your marketing efforts. They also find out what exactly your existing customers and clients expect from your business. You should try to ensure that you execute your task accurately when in terms of testing your different prices, packages and offers, The next step is to obtain a feedback of your customers to analyze their reaction towards all your marketing initiatives.
3. Not Updating your Business Website
Maintaining and updating business profile reflect your business presence in front of your current and prospective customers. If you have a blog on your website, then, it should be updated as well. It can also help you in building trust and loyalty between you and your clients. Updated content on your website even helps your business in building domain authority.
4. Improper Positioning and focus area
Marketing is not just about building up a big organization while ignoring the most essential aspect i.e. brand awareness in this process. Try to generate a creative marketing plan which demands an instant and positive response from your customers. Improper market positioning and focus area could be avoided by following a genuine solution and positioning of successful marketing.
5. Losing your Repetitive Customers
Eighty percent of your business comes from your current customers and the remaining twenty percent is the outcome of your prospective customers you have attracted. Losing your current and repetitive customers can have a destructive effect on your business profits. This can cost you ten times the actual cost to sell your new customer than selling it to your current customer.
Conclusion
By avoiding the above stated common marketing mistakes, you can definitely increase the potential of your business growth and success rate. To know more about marketing strategies and latest digital trends of marketing, Contact us !
Understanding Contentful: A Comprehensive Introduction
There's no denying that creating captivating content is the backbone of a website and business. But content creation is one thing, and website content management is entirely different. What's more important than the quality of content is how you present it. Even the most captivating content feels uninteresting when its presentation could be better and more thoughtful. A robust system enables organizations to overcome content creation, distribution, and scalability challenges. There are plenty of content management systems (CMS) you can choose from, and among the most brilliant options is - Contentful. Content creation often becomes a tangled web of disconnected tools and fragmented workflows, making maintaining consistency and streamlining processes challenging. Traditional content management systems may offer some relief but often need more flexibility and adaptability to evolving business needs. But these problems are easily bypassed with Contentful, an innovative CMS that has garnered immense applause for its modern architecture and flexible approach. It empowers businesses to create, manage, and distribute content seamlessly across multiple channels and devices. This blog aims to provide you with a comprehensive understanding of Contentful, equipping you with the knowledge to harness its full potential. Whether you're a developer seeking a flexible CMS solution, a content creator striving for a streamlined workflow, or a business owner aiming to deliver exceptional digital experiences, Contentful is your gateway to success. Furthermore, we will examine Contentful's extensibility, as it allows customization and integration with third-party tools, providing endless possibilities to enhance your digital experiences. We will highlight real-world use cases and success stories, demonstrating the transformative power of Contentful in diverse industries and how a Contentful company can leverage its full potential. Let's get started! What is Contentful? Contentful is a cutting-edge content management platform that revolutionizes how businesses create, manage, and distribute digital content. Unlike traditional CMS, Contentful offers a modern and developer-friendly approach, empowering organizations to deliver exceptional digital experiences efficiently. In hindsight, Contentful is designed to address the challenges businesses commonly face when dealing with content. It provides a centralized and structured content repository that enables seamless content creation, organization, and delivery across multiple channels and devices. With Contentful, businesses can break free from the limitations of monolithic CMS solutions. It adopts a "content first" approach, allowing you to focus on creating engaging content and shaping meaningful experiences for your audience. Contentful's flexible content modeling system provides the building blocks to structure and organize your content in a way that aligns perfectly with your specific needs. Business problems that can be overcome with the help of a contentful company: Content Fragmentation: Traditional CMS often leads to fragmentation, where content is scattered across multiple tools and platforms. Contentful provides a centralized hub for all your content, ensuring it is organized and accessible in one place. Complex Content Distribution: Distributing content across various channels and devices can be challenging and time-consuming. Contentful simplifies content distribution by offering a decoupled architecture, enabling businesses to deliver content seamlessly to any digital platform. Integration Challenges: Integrating existing tools and systems is often a hurdle with traditional CMS solutions. Contentful overcomes this by providing powerful APIs allowing seamless integration, enabling businesses to leverage their existing infrastructure and enhance their content management capabilities. Collaboration Bottlenecks: Inefficient content collaboration processes can lead to bottlenecks and delays. Contentful offers collaborative features, such as granular user roles and permissions, facilitating smooth teamwork and streamlining the content creation and publishing workflows. How Does Contentful Work? Let's explore its architecture to understand how Contentful operates, which forms the foundation for seamless content management. Contentful follows a headless CMS architecture, which decouples the content creation and storage from the presentation layer. This architectural approach allows flexibility and adaptability in delivering content across various platforms and devices. Contentful's infrastructure is designed to ensure high availability, scalability, and security. It leverages cloud-based services to provide reliable storage and delivery of content. With Contentful infrastructure handling, businesses can focus on creating exceptional content without worrying about the underlying technical complexities. Now, let's explore the components that make up the content structure within Contentful: Spaces: A space in Contentful represents a logical container that holds all your content. It serves as a dedicated environment where you can manage and organize your content. Depending on your requirements, you can have multiple spaces tailored to a specific project or team. Content Types: Content types define the structure and attributes of your content. They act as blueprints determining what fields and data types your content can include. For example, if you have an e-commerce website, you may define content types such as "Product," "Category," and "Customer Review" to structure and manage your product-related content. Entries:Entries are instances of content within Contentful. They are created based on the defined content types and represent individual pieces of content. Each entry corresponds to a specific content type and contains the actual content data. Key Features of Contentful Content Infrastructure: Contentful provides a resilient and scalable infrastructure, ensuring your content is securely stored and reliably delivered. With Contentful handling the backend complexities, you can focus on crafting compelling content without worrying about infrastructure management. Content Delivery API: The Content Delivery API serves as your gateway to retrieve and access content from Contentful seamlessly. Developers can leverage this powerful API to fetch structured content tailored to their requirements. Integrating the Content Delivery API allows you to deliver consistent and optimized content across websites, mobile apps, and other digital platforms. Content Management API: The Content Management API empowers content creators and developers to interact programmatically with the content repository. This API streamlines content authoring, modification, and management processes. You can automate workflows, facilitate collaboration, and enhance content creation efficiency by leveraging the Content Management API. Multi-language support: Contentful understands the global nature of businesses today. It offers comprehensive multi-language support, enabling you to create and manage content in multiple languages. This dynamic feature empowers firms to tailor their content to diverse audiences, providing localized and personalized experiences on a global scale. Web app for content creators: Contentful provides a user-friendly web application designed specifically for content creators. This intuitive interface streamlines content authoring, editing, and publishing, eliminating the need for technical expertise. Content creators can collaborate seamlessly within the web app, manage editorial workflows, and deliver consistent content. Benefits of Using Contentful Scalability and performance: Contentful's scalable infrastructure ensures your content operations grow seamlessly alongside your business. Contentful effortlessly handles the load as your content demands increase, maintaining optimal performance and delivering content with lightning-fast speed. Flexibility and customization: Contentful provides unparalleled flexibility, allowing you to adapt your content structure to meet your unique requirements. Its versatile content modeling system enables you to define content types and fields precisely tailored to your business needs. With this level of customization, you have the freedom to create and manage content in a way that aligns perfectly with your brand, offering endless possibilities for creativity and innovation. Simplified content management: Contentful simplifies the complexities of content management. Its intuitive web app for content creators streamlines the entire content lifecycle, from authoring and editing to publishing and distribution. Content creators can collaborate seamlessly with an easy-to-use interface, ensuring a smooth workflow. Contentful's centralized content repository brings all your content together in one place, eliminating the hassle of searching through multiple systems or tools. Contentful vs Traditional CMS Contentful sets itself apart from traditional content management systems (CMS) in several ways, offering distinct advantages that empower businesses to thrive in the digital landscape. Headless Architecture: Unlike traditional CMS platforms, which often have tightly coupled front-end presentation layers, Contentful follows a headless architecture. This decoupling of content creation and presentation enables businesses to deliver content seamlessly across multiple channels and devices. Contentful's headless approach allows for greater flexibility in content delivery, empowering businesses to easily adapt to changing digital trends and user preferences. Customizable Content Modeling: Traditional CMS solutions often impose rigid content structures, limiting flexibility and customization. In contrast, Contentful's content modeling system offers unparalleled freedom. Businesses can define and tailor content types, fields, and relationships to suit their requirements. Agile Content Delivery: Contentful's API offers a dynamic and efficient content retrieval and distribution approach. Traditional CMS platforms often need help with slow performance and inflexible data retrieval mechanisms. Contentful's API-centric architecture enables developers to retrieve content in a structured and optimized manner, resulting in lightning-fast content delivery. Enhanced Collaboration: Contentful fosters seamless collaboration between content creators, developers, and other stakeholders involved in the content management process. Traditional CMS platforms often need more robust collaboration features, leading to fragmented workflows and communication challenges. Granular user roles and permissions ensure controlled access, facilitating efficient content creation, review, and approval processes. Cloud-based Scalability: Contentful leverages cloud-based infrastructure, providing businesses the scalability they need to grow and adapt. Traditional CMS platforms often require significant investment in hardware and maintenance to accommodate increased content demands. Getting Started with Contentful Getting started with Contentful is an exciting step toward transforming your content management approach. You can either do it yourself or take the help of a contentful company if you find the process complex. Setting Up Your Contentful Account Visit the Contentful website (www.contentful.com) and click "Get started for free" to create your account. Provide the necessary information, including your name, email address, and password. Choose a plan that suits your needs, whether the free plan or one of the available paid plans. Once you've registered, you can access your Contentful account dashboard. Creating Your First Space A space in Contentful acts as a container where you organize and manage your content. From your Contentful account dashboard, click on "Add space" to create a new space. Provide a name for your space, representing a project, website, or any organizational unit. Optionally, you can add a description to provide additional context for your space. With these simple steps, your space will be created, and you can start structuring and managing your content. Defining Your Content Model Contentful's content model defines the structure and attributes of your content. Navigate to the "Content model" section inside your newly created space. Click on "Add content type" to create a new content type. Give your content type a meaningful name, such as "Blog Post" or "Product." Define the fields for your content type, such as "Title," "Description," or "Image." Specify the data type and any additional settings for each field, such as validation rules or formatting options. Repeat these steps to create additional content types to represent different types of content within your space. Use Cases of Contentful Contentful is a versatile content management platform that caters to diverse business needs across various industries. A contentful company is assured to take advantage of its numerous benefits to bring out the best of each brand in its specific sector. Let’s see how: E-commerce Websites: Contentful empowers e-commerce businesses to deliver captivating product experiences. With Contentful, businesses can create and manage product catalogs, enrich product information with multimedia content, and ensure consistent content across multiple channels. Digital Publishing:Contentful provides a robust foundation for digital publishing endeavors. Publishers can structure and manage content across different publications, seamlessly distribute content to websites, apps, and social media platforms, and personalize content for specific target audiences. Travel and Hospitality: In the travel and hospitality industry, Contentful enables businesses to showcase destinations, hotels, and attractions in a visually compelling manner. Businesses can manage and distribute rich multimedia content, curate engaging travel experiences, and provide real-time information to travelers. Digital Agencies: Contentful is an ideal platform for digital agencies managing content for multiple clients. Agencies can create and manage content across various projects, customize content models to fit clients' requirements, and streamline collaboration with clients and team members. Mobile App Development: Contentful seamlessly integrates with mobile app development workflows. It provides a reliable content infrastructure, allowing developers to retrieve and update content programmatically via APIs. Mobile app developers can create content-rich apps with dynamic content updates, ensuring engaging user experiences without the need for extensive backend development. Harness The Power Of Contentful With Saffron Edge Contentful is a game-changing content management platform that empowers businesses to create, manage, and deliver captivating digital experiences. From its flexible architecture to its powerful APIs, Contentful offers a comprehensive solution for businesses seeking to revolutionize their content operations. As the best contentful company, Saffron Edge understands the transformative potential of Contentful and is here to help you unlock its full power. Our Contentful implementation and customization expertise let us guide you through every step, from implementation to maintenance. We will assist you in setting up your Contentful account, creating spaces and content models, and leveraging the platform's features to optimize your content management workflows. Contact Saffron Edge today to begin your Contentful journey! ...
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6 Set Up Essentials You Need to Complete Your E-Commerce Website
With the internet becoming an absolute necessity, customers are switching to the next generation of shopping. E-commerce is the way of the world at the present time. The pandemic gave the industry a boost that took it to all nooks and crannies that were earlier left unexplored. The prevalence of the practice has cemented that people’s trust in online shopping is not a primary issue anymore. Getting customers to splurge on your website rather than a competitor's is the real challenge now. Your e-commerce site needs to strive to stay up-to-date and incorporate a number of crucial components if you want to draw in customers and generate revenue. Your e-commerce website needs to offer customers a strain-free shopping experience in addition to being aesthetically beautiful. You can keep your current clients and grow your business by bringing in new ones if you create an intuitive online store with a smooth checkout procedure on any device. Make sure to include these set-ups in your website. 6 Essentials For Your E-Commerce Website When redesigning or creating your e-commerce site, these are the 6 set up essentials that you need to take into account: 1. Is your Website User-Friendly? You will have a better chance of closing a sale right away if your site is simple to use. Visitors should feel welcome and encouraged to click on the products or groups of goods they are interested in buying from the site. In order for visitors to easily locate what they're looking for, categories and subcategories should be self-explanatory. Once the user types their query into the search field, all relevant items that are being sold should appear immediately after. 2. How Smooth are your Shopping Cart and Checkout Processes? It must be easy to add things to the virtual cart. Style or color preferences should be simple to examine and choose from. Customers prefer to see what they have put in their shopping carts as they browse other products, so make sure your design and layout allow the functionality for this. During checkout, avoid confusing customers. Most businesses lose their sales because they make their checkout process too tedious and long. The pandemic era has reduced everyone's attention span and patience. So, keep it simple and respect your customers' time. The customer should feel comfortable making purchases on your website. 3. Does your Website have Mobile Compatibility? Most of the online-using population has a smartphone. Nowadays, mobile visits frequently outnumber desktop visits. Simply because e-commerce is especially common in metro cities. With people constantly moving to get from one place to another, it is only logical that people use their mobile more frequently than their desktops. Your e-commerce website must be created and optimised for use across all platforms, not just desktop and laptop computers. Your business will be hugely missing out if your site isn’t mobile-friendly. 4. Do you have Calls to Action (CTA)? Ensure to be using calls to action that are relevant to what you wish your visitors to accomplish and to guide them around your website. Your CTA button, for instance, could read, "Click Below to Save 10%!" if you were having a sale. Even while it may seem apparent to you as well as to the majority of people, there are nevertheless a lot of individuals who have lived, raised children, or are now raising children, own businesses, or both, and therefore don't devote much time online. Having that extra assistance instills confidence in your company, demonstrates your concern for your clients, and makes things less frustrating. 5. Does your Website have the best Images and Descriptions? Before making a purchase, consumers who are looking for a product want to be fully informed about it. Since one can't physically feel or see the products they are looking at virtually, online shopping can have its disadvantages. It is crucial to have high-quality photos of your products and, when possible, images taken from various perspectives and angles. It's crucial to fully describe each thing in depth as well. Include all relevant information, such as texture, size, usage, advantages, available colors, etc. Your goal should be to make potential consumers feel comfortable enough with your product that they will choose to buy it over the competition. 6. How good is your Customer Support? There must be some kind of customer service provided in case of issues or inquiries. Customer service comes in a variety of forms, including online chat, email assistance, and 800 lines. Choose the option that best suits your needs in terms of price and the nature of your business. Always remember to be welcoming and reply promptly to any difficulties to ensure your customers' satisfaction. In Conclusion The digital era is great for a lot of things, but by providing a levelled and open platform, the competition in the market has become quite cut-throat. Only a few things separate you from your competition, and your online presence is a big part of that. And this is where Saffron Edge comes into play. We provide end-to-end digital solutions for all your needs. From digital marketing to paid media, we handle all things (and more!) in between. Contact us today to get the Edge. ...
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Ten Must Skills You Should Look For In Your Virtual Marketing Officer
In recent times, the world has made a paradigm shift to digital platforms, and it has notably impacted the way businesses market their products or services. The proliferation of smartphones, the rise of the internet, and the influx of online shopping have played a huge role in changing the way we eat, talk, buy, research, and gather information. There are 5.112 billion unique mobile users and 3.484 billion unique social media users around the globe presently. With the advent of advanced tech, the only way for businesses to reach the top is through the course of these digital platforms and the charter of this course will be your marketing officer. However, developing an in-house team can strain your finances. Now, in such a scenario, Virtual Marketing Officers (VMO) are your best bet. A VMO works beyond the fundamental duties and envisions strategies that get you a competitive edge without draining your resources. Various types of technical and analytical skills continue to proliferate for VMOs in today’s day and age. Use of AI, incorporation of Machine learning, leveraging big data, all these new skills are gaining importance in the world of digital marketing and for the VMOs as well. With a VMO you get not only your Marketing Head but also a full-fledged team.Now, how do you make sure the VMO services offered by a firm are competent and scalable enough for you? To make things easier, we have compiled a list of the top ten skills that you will need to look for - Understanding of Paid Social Media With paid social media ads-spend reaching $43 billion by the end of 2020, it becomes crucial for your VMO to have a good hold on different types of social media advertising strategies. An ideal VMO will be well versed in paid social media advertising on popular platforms like Facebook and Instagram, especially when there are more than 3 billion companies that advertise on Facebook. A VMO should have an in-depth knowledge of both analytics and insights for all social media platforms and should be able to build a unique and engaging experience for your custom audience base, all the while, experimenting with his creative strategies. There is a myriad of cost-saving opportunities on social media platforms, and your VMO should be able to make the most out of them. Technical Competency No one can make it into the world of marketing without solid technical competency. A modern-day VMO is required to have a thorough knowledge of modern-day technologies as they are an essential part of today’s digital world. Any marketing team works along with professionals from various domains ranging from business intelligence and content creation to web development and data analysis. A VMO must understand the correlation of work between all these people to make the marketing efforts successful. You will be surprised to know that almost half of the modern-day marketing professions require technical skills along with field experience and the same should be expected from your VMO as well. Data Analysis If you keep tabs on the digital world, you might be familiar with the word big data, a hot topic of debate for marketers. However, it is not just big data that is being paraded down marketing alleys but also the usage of available data within an organisation. The efficiency of analysis of the said data can significantly increase the chances of success for your marketing campaign. An ideal VMO knows exactly how to leverage data and draw out strategic campaigns. Indeed, a VMO can never become a data scientist, but he is required to have a basic understanding of different types of data and how to utilise the insights and patterns drawn from it. Knowledge of AI and Machine Learning With the AI market growing to become a $190 billion industry by the end of 2025, there is no surprise that it has made its way to marketing as well. Go by Gartner’s Hype cycle for digital marketing and advertising and you will realise that all the expectations related to the incorporation of AI in digital marketing have reached new heights in the last year. By taking advantage of modern-day technologies like machine learning, a VMO should be able to easily achieve marketing-specific goals like tracking real-time customer experience or keeping tabs on spending across various channels. In addition to this, AI can be used by the VMOs to streamline automated content tagging and personalisation on a real-time basis. Source: Unsplash Email Marketing A VMO should be a remarkable email marketer as for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you get $42 in return, and this is one of the highest ROI generated from any digital marketing campaign. The VMO should have comprehensive knowledge of creating an enticing email marketing campaign, and they should be well versed in building a quality email list as well. The attention span of emails is concise, and that’s why the VMO will need to be good at making people succumb to opening the email and clicking on the CTA. Video-Based Marketing Videos are the new king of content. Videos on the digital platforms generate 12 times more share than any other type of content, and therefore, your VMO needs to be exceptionally good at social video marketing. A VMO will need to don scriptwriting and advanced video production as well. Your potential VMO should be well versed in creating videos that don’t only engage the audience but also create leads. In addition to this, a VMO also needs to have a basic understanding of how videos work on different types of social media platforms. Mobile Marketing With the introduction of the Mobile-First Index by Google, you must already be aware of the importance of strengthening your digital presence on mobile devices. Therefore, a VMO needs to master the art of mobile marketing to stay relevant in the industry. An impeccable VMO will have the know-how of strengthening your presence on mobile platforms and optimising the website so that users on different mobile devices can easily view it. Knowledge of Drip Marketing Campaign When it comes to lead generation, inbound marketing can do wonders. Numerous marketers can easily come up with a unique CPC campaign. But, what you need to look for is a marketer that can examine the incoming data and build a robust drip marketing campaign. Building a drip marketing campaign is all about personalisation and well-written communications. So, make sure that your VMO is not only good at creating the CPC campaign but is also able to use drip marketing in the best possible way. Account-Based Marketing Approach The world of marketing is being led by account-based marketers where the right message is sent to the right person at the right time, and this is why ABM is proving to be successful. A VMO needs to be thorough with his ABM approach and be able to channel the given resources to make the best out of it. With the use of ABM, VMOs can push the marketing campaign to not only a single person but to several decision-makers in the buying process. Customer Data Security, Privacy, and Data Governance The involvement of some of the biggest names in data breaches has made people lose trust in companies for protecting their information; This is the main reason why only 25 percent of the people believe that a company can handle its data with ethical responsibility. If you don’t want to lose your precious data, go for a firm that has the right knowledge to act as the most vital guardian of the private information of its customers. In addition to this, a comprehensive understanding of cybersecurity hygiene and usage of critical customer data is also a crucial aspect to look for in your VMO. An ideal VMO can act as a magic wand for your business and this is why you need to analyse potential VMOs on the parameters as mentioned above properly. The skills of VMOs have evolved a lot in the past couple of years and the need to move beyond the fundamental skills has risen. Saffron Edge offers the best VMO services with qualified marketing professionals backed by a team of exceptional content writers, market analysts, and much more. Connect now to know more. ...
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