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The use of online marketing grow very fast in greater China Region, however, effectiveness is not always satisfactory. We had just indentified 6 common mistakes when doing online marketing. Most of them are related to lack of complete and detail planning.

Act before planning

Online marketing is an important part of annual marketing plan but not a standalone project, we need to combine and work parallel with offline marketing activities, research and analysis existing customer database, so that we can have a total planning on different promotion channel which can make us success like develop dedicate online sales channel, establish dedicate online marketing team, provide online after sales service etc. as part of a key component of your business.

Do not overlook functionality and usability of website

Website development is always a starting point of online marketing. However, most of the website focus too much on the creativity and presentation but overlook the important on the functionality like how to present your promotion message, how to encourage online sales, how to do better for call for action.

Another important point is usability that means how to facilitate your audience find information through your website, especially how they can find your product, the uniqueness of product/service, the interactivity, user experience etc. To make short, we should focus more on how to make your website more user friendly.

Spamming your customer

When a company want to promote your products to public, and they may choose deliver one size fit all message to public through email and blogging. However, non-permission based email marketing and spamming will harm your company image or even violate the law. Some may say it is the most direct and best way to touch with the most customer but in the long run it might really harm your image as a spammer.

Paid Search Engine Marketing should be highly relied

Google, Yahoo and even Baidu always promote paid keywords search is the most direct and effective way to promote your website. Yes, it is the best and direct way to attract the impression in search engine in the short run. However, in order to make it sustainable and cost effective, we should think about how to make your website attractive and sustainable, how to improve generic search engine result in order to lay off the rely on paid search marketing.

Do analysis your database

The born of Google Analysis make recording visitor’s behavior becoming a must and more easily for monitoring website’s performance. But we should stop in just recording and reporting.

The fact shown on the report only represent a number, but behind the number, say which area they interest the most, what is the most popular visiting path, where they come from and which of them are repeat visitors. Those statistics are more relevant and useful on how you can improve and enhance your website.

Do not cheat search engine for better generic search result

Generic search engine optimization is one of most common tactic is when doing online marketing. Besides the exposure and visibility of your website, it also build your branding if you equipped with a high performance in popular search engine like Google, Yahoo and Baidu.

I would not focus on the detail rules of Search engine optimization, but it usually focus on the linkage, content and website structure. In order to achieve a higher standard of search engine performance, some user will follow the game rules in order to cater the need of search engine but that may harm the usability and functionality to users. Some extreme case like keep repeating keywords on a passage in order to increase the relevancy between that keyword and website may result in a cheating to search engine, that will totally damage your branding. What we should focus is how to strike a balance between usability and presentation; improve user experience as our core value of website, as a result you can achieve a high standard of search engine performance.