Common Digital Marketing Mistakes Your Business Might be Making:
- No true clarity on marketing goals
- No documented strategy
- No social media plan
- No determined audience
- Not improving SEO strategy
- Not using case studies
- Not communicating with sales team
- Not measuring results
- Not investing in marketing
One of The Biggest Marketing Mistakes to Avoid Involves Your Website
Today I’m gonna talk to you about the number one biggest digital marketing mistake people make. In fact, this is the biggest marketing mistake they make, period. Because these days almost everything is digital, right?
Everything is online, and there’s just one thing they get me more than anything else you can imagine. And I don’t know if you guys know, but one of my companies is a marketing company. I own a company called Titanium marketing and what we do is we build websites and do search engine optimization and do all kinds of social media stuff for companies, and we’ve got some unbelievable things that we do that are revolutionary.
Well, we’ve changed the entire industry and some of our clients are getting results that are just absolutely destroying and blowing away their competition because we have these incredible systems and they came from the fact that I’ve always been really good at marketing.
Focus on Marketing First
That’s something I really enjoyed, so every time I started a business, I would always focus on marketing first. And I got to be pretty good at marketing for my companies. Long story short, eventually, I decided that I was gonna start my own digital marketing company not to service other companies, but to just serve as my own six companies.
We got to be so good that my friends and families started asking me if I can help them and we start helping them and one thing leads to another and we’ve now taken on so many other clients and we’ve got an incredible results for these companies over the last few years and we really enjoy doing it.
This is one of my passions, which is why I know forgetting about marketing is the biggest mistake marketers make. You can see this if you just go online and you start searching around. There are all these websites that are beautifully designed. People have these beautiful websites that you can see.
They spend literally tens of thousands of dollars on, but the problem is, they don’t convert for them, right? They have these beautiful websites, but they’re not getting leads from it, they’re not getting sales from it. And what it is that they don’t understand, is that people don’t typically understand how the web works.
How Pretty a Website Looks Doesn’t Matter
So they think that if you have a really pretty and well-designed website, that’s gonna mean you’re gonna get a lot of leads. Why? Because that’s what your friends and family are impressed by, right? When you tell someone “oh I got a new website” they’re going your website they go “wow, it’s really nice.” They think that now the leads are gonna start pouring in.
Well, see, having a really nice website is the equivalent of buying a beautiful gown for the ladies out there or for the gentlemen, buying a brand new suit, right?
If you buy that beautiful gown, and that beautiful suit and you do your make-up really nice and you put on those incredible shoes that you have and you get yourself all ready and your hair all done up and perfect, and you sit in your room and you never leave, will anyone see your outfit?
No, so as far as the rest of the world is concerned, do you really have this beautiful gown? Well, I don’t know. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it really make a sound?
See, I’m not sure, and I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned it doesn’t make a sound. So, with digital marketing what you have to understand is there is the Titanium and Arman Sadeghi ten to one rule.
The Titanium Marketing 10:1 Rule for Getting Massive Results
What that means is this, for every dollar that you spend on building a website, you must be prepared to spend ten dollars to do what, to promote that website. The same is true for time.
For every minute, or hour you spent on creating a website and designing a website, you need to spend ten minutes or ten hours driving traffic to that site. And this is where people make a mistake like people will tell me, “you know, I wanna build a new website, I wanna create, you know, how much you’ll wanna spend?
What’s your marketing budget? Well, you know, my budget is about ten thousand dollars”, and when they say ten thousand dollars for a new website to me, would that tells me is that they should have a minimum of a hundred thousand dollars, ideally a hundred and ten thousand dollar budget for marketing. Because then, you build the ten thousand dollar website and you spend a hundred thousand dollars driving traffic to it. But as soon as I said that, they gonna… no no no… My total budget is ten thousand dollars.
I say, great, so then you should spend about let say nine hundred to a thousand dollars on a website and then spend nine thousand dollars driving traffic to that website. And this is the part that people get really freaked out by. They don’t understand that.
Where I want you to understand is today when it comes to your business, and when it comes to marketing, it’s not about how pretty your website is, because the only person seeing your website is you, maybe your parents, and a couple of your friends. Possibly, some of your clients are seeing your website as well.
But these people are all coming to your website, already being familiar with your website, in fact, most of the clients we take on, when we first search to see how people are finding their website, would you believe that over eighty percent of their traffic comes from people who are actually searching variations on their company name, right?
So, it would be the equivalent of you finding us by searching for example, Titanium Success, right. If you search Titanium Success and you come to our website or you search Arman Sadeghi and you come to our website, that’s great. But see, what we really want, is we want you to find us if you’re searching for example, business coach.
If you’re searching for business coach and you land on our website, it means you’re someone we don’t already have access to, right? Or let say you go online, and you typed, great podcasts or great business podcasts, and then Titanium Life comes up.
See, that’s valuable because now we’re gonna get new people, but what if the only time we came up is when people typed in Titanium Life podcast, but see, that’s what most people have so they spend, money, all the resources designing these beautiful websites, beautiful images, and pictures and this and that, content, all this stuff, but no one’s seeing it. And so you have to understand there are these concepts of this “ten to one rule” and you have to absolutely abide by it.
Now stuff, let me tell you, because doing search engine optimization, right, the stuff that it takes people to drive to your website is one, time-consuming, number two very expensive, number three very very boring, and number four, you can’t see any of it. See, that’s the problem, you can’t show it off to your friends and family.
SEO Isn’t Sexy But it Gets Results
There’s nothing you can show them to be like, “oohh look at this here’s some search engine optimization that I did,” It’s not like that pretty website, and in fact, your friends and your family and your colleagues and your employees will start to complain about your website. “What do you mean you’re doing all this stuff to build your website but look at your website, it’s not that great” and it’s because they can’t see search engine optimization.
But when you look at my companies, and all the businesses that I made, one of the first things I ever do is I start to build a website and do search engine optimization around it.
I’m proud to tell you that here we are in January of 2016 as I’m recording this and I will tell you, our website for Titanium Success sucks, it’s a horrible website, it’s ugly, it’s not very well done, and I’m proud of that. Because you know what, here’s the thing, we don’t have a huge budget, this is something I do out of the goodness of my heart to help people, right.
Titanium success hasn’t made me any money, so we don’t have a huge budget, the budget that we do have, I put over 90% of our marketing budget on driving traffic to my website. See, I’ve got some great guys here, nutrition guy, the fitness guy, the entrepreneurship guy, time management, all these great are the cause really really incredibly valuable content.
Now, I could go spend ten thousand dollars making it all beautiful and by the way we’re in the process of doing that. These year we’re gonna upgrade to a massive upgrade on the website. But it’s amazing, I can count probably two dozen complaints I’ve gotten from people about my website.
Use the Titanium 10:1 Rule to Avoid Common Marketing Mistakes
This rule will keep you from committing all of the biggest marketing mistakes to avoid. People saying well, it’s not pretty, it’s not this, it’s not that, and I hear that and I thank them, I said, thank you so much for caring, I appreciate it, and you know right now we don’t have the budget.
But the reality is, is that every bit of the budget that we do have, we have to take it divided into two parts, there’s the 10%, and there’s the 90%, or you wanna do the exact math, it’s ten to one, so one part and ten parts, and take it, and make sure that ten parts are going to promoting the website, and only one part is going to building the website itself.
So, if I was gonna build a ten thousand dollar website, I would first make sure that I have a budget at a hundred thousand dollars to drive traffic to it. Now, that happens with search engine optimization, it happens with social media, it happens with getting creating amazing content and putting it after on the web for other places to see so you can get traffic coming to your website.
Dominating Your Industry All Comes Down to Marketing Strategy
And that’s consistently what I have done with everyone on my businesses. When you look at my companies and you look at my websites, all of my websites generate massive, massive amounts of traffic.
In most of the industries that I’m gone into, I very quickly dominated the industry online, and when you dominated the industry online, let me tell you what it does, it drives massive traffic to your website and that is where you get all of your leads from, my recycling company for example, our website, gets all of this traffic every single day.
Today as I’m recording this podcast episode, during the recording of this episode, we’re probably gonna get dozens of visitors to that website and we’re probably gonna get several leads. Just in the time it’s taking me to record this thing, a magic, imagine if the near business you could get that many leads, it would be incredible but the way it was done is by focusing on driving traffic.
Because most people are spending all their money building that website, making it beautiful, doing this and that, but that’s not what gets the job done, you need to do search engine optimization. Now, what is this search engine optimization thing?
Beware of SEO Companies who Try to Fool You
Well this podcast is not about me teaching you what it is, there are some companies out there who provide these services, I know, my company provides it and I think we’re the best in the world at it.
We do some incredible things for our clients but there are other companies, a few other good ones out there, the problem is, most of them are not that good because what they do is they fool you and they give you exactly what you want. See, with me, I have to battle my clients all the time, in fact, this podcast episode, I’m gonna take and I’m gonna send it to every one of my clients, I’m gonna say, please listen to this episode. Because every month, I have to fight my clients.
Why? Because they don’t understand why they spending so much money and their website doesn’t look as good as someone else’s website. And I consistently tell them, by the way, it’s true no matter what your budget is, right? Because if you have a thousand dollar total budget, I would say spend only a hundred dollars on your website, right?
So you’re gonna be unhappy because you’re gonna be like uuhhmm, spending a thousand dollars in my websites worth a hundred dollars, so if your budget is ten thousand the same thing, even if you have a million dollar budget. You come to me with the million dollar budget, I’d say, awesome let’s spend 90 thousand dollars on building you a website, and then spend over 900 thousand dollars driving traffic to that website.
So, whatever your budget is, in my opinion, your website should only still only represent less than 10% of your total budget. And so it’s a battle that I have with people who don’t understand this. So many of my friends and my family will go out there and build their own website. I say forget trying to build this amazing website.
Get yourself a hundred dollar website, when I re-launched my recycling company, I spent $45 launching a website. Would you believe that? $45 is all I spent launching the website. Now, it took me a lot of time, and I had to do a lot of searching on Craigslist and I bought a template, and I got people’s help, blah blah blah… But the bottom line is that’s all I spend and my competitors had $50 thousand websites.
Well that $45 website, let me tell you, that $45 website, within a year, was beating the $50 thousand website. And then I upgrade it and of course, we consistently upgrade it, right? But that’s what I want you to understand. So if you’ve got a business, number one make sure you realized online marketing is important and you must have a website and gotta have a good website.
Focus on Building a Plain Website
But the key with your website is it has to be functional and it has to be built for conversions and it has to be built for search engine optimization. It should not be designed to be pretty and fancy. You can’t have JavaScript or any of that fancy stuff.
You wanna limit that stuff, have a very plain and simple website that gives people what they want and actually research shows that fancy websites, although your mom and dad think they’re really nice, and your friends think they’re really cool.
They actually don’t convert very much because they distract people so websites that have a lot of sounds on them. They have moving parts and things like that. People actually don’t convert as often on those pages, which is why if you go to Google and you search for anything right now, and you click on any of the ads is that come off of the top, most likely they’re gonna send you to what’s called the squeeze page.
The Squeeze Page is Where Conversions Happen
on the squeeze pages what you see is they actually have limited capabilities, there’s partly anything you can do, some of them have just a couple of pictures and some texts some will have a video but the key is this very very basic, they even take the menu options away.
The next time you click on one of those ads noticed that most of the websites you go to don’t even have the menus at the top, why? Because they don’t want you to get distracted, they’re all like, you came here for one thing, here it is, take it or leave it.
And that’s what you wanna do, you want to make sure that your focus is on getting people to your site alright. Now, when I say that, I do not mean by the way that you go spend 90% of your budget on ad words or pay per click or things that are gonna drive traffic. I think you need to spend a considerable amount of your budget on doing things related to search engine optimization, which is gonna bring you free traffic for life.
That’s what you do is you spend the money on that. Now, the way you do that is a whole different story, it’s all about creating incredible content, getting it out in the web and making sure that there are backlinks from it coming back to your site and making sure you have awesome content on your website and making sure you create things like infographics and all this other really really cool stuff I don’t have time to talk to you about today.
But that’s what I want you to know that ten to one rule, do not forget that rule. For every dollar you spend on your website, spend $10 driving traffic to your website, no matter what kind of budget you have and by the way if you ever wanna change that rule, change it in the way of spending less on your website and more on driving traffic.
Don’t go the other way. So if you did it 20 to 1, I would be even happier with you. Do what you can to make that happen and you are gonna see incredible incredible results.
You will see people come to your website and you’re gonna get leads even though your website will not be up to your standards as far as how it looks. As I said, I’m proud to admit that the Titanium Success website absolutely sucks but that’s okay because we have over 20,000 visitors a month. By the end of today, about a thousand people will have visited that website, and for a website that’s less than 2 years old, that’s pretty darn good, right.
That’s just organically people finding us. So, get out there. Do your thing. Kick some butt, make sure you build yourself a solid, quality website that converts. That’s key. It’s not like you wanna cheap out on that part, but then spend most of your budget trying to drive traffic to that website. Hey, I love you guys, I am your neuroscientist, your business coach, your relationship coach, your finances coach, blah blah blah… all that stuff. But most importantly I’m here to tell you and coach you to always lead with your heart. Have a beautiful day.
