Are Online Marketing Irresponsibility Making Competitors Steal Your Business Sales?

Gillette’s promise of offering blades that are the ‘best a man can get’ might not seem to be effective any longer, now that online shoppers are choosing newcomers like Dollar Shave Club, Harry’s and 800Razors for cheaper blades and more convenience. Online sales of razor blades have swollen tremendously higher this year and already round up to an estimated figure of $141 million dollars of which, the California based online brand Dollar Shave Club will most likely be dominating the market. This leaves leading brands like Schick and Gillette worry about their marketing strategy, so much so that Gillette has already come up with their own Gillette Shave Club in an attempt to prevent competitors from luring away their customers, with convenience and savings as the winning factors.

Online marketing is indeed giving Gillette a tough time to save itself from sales wreckage for sure and a chance for us to wonder whether shopping centers would soon become obsolete. But what puts us down with immediate concern for now is how to stop competitors from taking over your ‘once upon a time’ loyal customers. No, this article does not ask readers to ponder upon the determining factors to influence your store’s ecommerce platform. It’s true customers should come first but how do you serve them better without tackling your competitors, who are always ready with schemes to take your sales away? Time to sit back and rethink of a guerilla combat action plan. The first step is to begin reassessing your existing marketing practice. Now this might sound a little bit complicated, for you know there are so many things you would need to consider. But there are at least 1 out of 5 issues that is gnawing away your website’s brand reputation.

Figure them out to save your brand from losing away all the sales or take a look at the following reasons to understand how your competitors are set to tackle you with a new surprise everyday.

#1 – Lack of Multiple Cross Channel Promotion

Digital marketing involves social media marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization, pay per click advertisement, video promotion and more. You cannot stay focused on one channel and expect the rest of the world to know about you. No wonder your competitors find better advantage if they are siphoning away clients from your list. Cross channel promotion helps raise both brand awareness and return of interest. There was a time when online social media promotion was all about sticking to just Facebook and Twitter, but now even Pinterest and Google+ are taking turns to reign. Besides, many of your target audiences happen to spend most of their time in these places. You cannot miss them out, can you? But choosing your mediums is also an important part of cross channel promotion. You have to understand which one of them would work out the best when paired together. For example, search engine optimization finds better advantage when you team it up with pay per click advertisement. When customers search for a particular service online, they are likely to convert with brands that they find to occupy a better position in relation to organic and paid ranking. Both the channels are extremely advantageous and when combined, businesses can lock down potential keywords to draw in viewers from both paid and organic search results and improve the click-through-rate.

#2 – Failure To Include Quality Content Optimization

Content marketing is a powerful promotional medium and can increase your website’s ranking as well as generate quality leads. A good content marketing strategy requires marketers to generate quality content that can reflect sound technical knowledge, well researched information as well as special keywords meant to target selected business audiences. This helps to convey readers that they are communicating with the right person who can provide them with the exact solution to their needs.

Better watch out who are still not following this trend cause low quality content is not helping your business sell or even promote. Besides, your competitors have started to steal away your market by now, for good content makes search engine bots rank websites better, which can improve one’s online visibility on the search engine results page.

#3 – Forgetting All About Content Personalization

Content personalization helps businesses reach out to specific client needs and hence is a powerful content marketing tool. Unfortunately, a lot of online marketers tend to miss out its potentiality. You can study customers in detail by segmenting them based on demographics and habits and then customize the contents that would best address their needs. Some of the best ways to do this is making use of email newsletters, landing pages, local pages and certain parts of your website. This makes the search of your target audience easier, for they can enter directly through your conversion funnel instead of wandering around cluelessly where to go or even the least, squandering over to your competitor’s page.

#4 – Ignoring the Potentiality of Mobile Presence

If 87% of the US millennials never walk around leaving their smartphones behind, then how can you not realize why a business web design should be responsive by now? Besides, Google’s recent algorithm update had taken every website owner’s attention when they declared – Make your website mobile search friendly or lose Google rank. But come to talk about this from a consumer’s point of view and you would realize why not being mobile responsive is in fact hurting your online business and is turning out to be a gain for your competitors.. Everyone is mobile now. The time spent by a US citizen over the internet is approximately eleven hours and that is no small deal. If you are mobile 24X7, you can become an easy access to their service needs when they search the internet for someone to sort their problem out. Not being mobile friendly not only hurts your online visibility but is like gifting away keywords to help competitors cater to the requirement of your clients in a better way.

#5 – Not Taking Care of Your Web Design

There are some websites that do not pay much attention to the effective web design principles. Web designs should not only be visually stimulating to the viewers’ eyes, but also should primarily focus on making clients convert. If you don’t already have a well optimized web design, then start by mapping out your site’s navigation pattern. Make sure your website is designed with a clear structure in mind so that it is easy for a visitor to enjoy a smooth user experience without any complications. Too much complexity often leads to increased bounce rates and that could be hurting your website’s ranking in the eyes of the Google search bots. If you really are looking for some advice on how to give your competitors a piece of their cake for attempting to steal away your competitors, then here is what I suggest – Research your competitor’s web design before starting a new project (your website).

Do not forget to follow it up with an A/B split test, which is important for every web design.

Enough said! But let’s hope these points would help you trace down problems that are actually making your business lose sales online. In fact, the above mentioned factors are the reasons why websites often suffer a tough competition from rivals. A business website needs to be handled with care and responsibility, especially when you are seriously at work. Make sure your investments are not getting drained out because of nothing but your own irresponsibility.