3 Mistakes New Entrepreneurs Make in Online Marketing

We live in an age where you can start a business with little-to-no financial investment. Start your free Instagram and Facebook accounts. Create a website by filling out the template. Design a free logo on Canva. What a time to be alive…

But endless opportunities and options can mean bigger chances of making mistakes. How do you know which platform will give the biggest return on investment? What will make you stand out in a crowded marketplace? Is it even possible to take advantage of all these platforms without getting completely burnt out?

Before you start feeling overwhelmed, rest easy in knowing you’ll be ahead of the game once you learn the 3 biggest mistakes new entrepreneurs make and how you can avoid them.

1. Ignoring Your Best Online Marketing Tool

Most new online entrepreneurs focus on their website and social media pages first. It’s a rookie mistake that I made too, probably because they take the least amount of effort. Most of us were already using Facebook and Instagram for personal reasons. Starting a new account for business involves very little learning curve.

I spent months posting on social media, writing blogs, doing Facebook lives, trying to figure out Pinterest… all the things you’re told to do to find online business success. None of it worked.

Then I started paying attention to what people hired me for most often – emails! The 6 and 7-figure entrepreneurs with the budget to hire a copywriter must be onto something because they’ve made the money.

And what are they prioritizing? Good copy in their emails!

Your email audience is full of warm leads – people who actually choose to hear from you regularly. People who can see your content as often as you send it out, as opposed to social media where you’re constantly fighting the ever-changing algorithm.

So few people actually see what you post on Instagram and Facebook. But everyone on your email list can see every email you send out.

2. Forgetting to Nurture Your Email List

It’s not enough to simply grow your email list and then only send out emails when you’re ready to launch a new product or service.

For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you get $38 back, according to the Direct Marketing Association. That’s an amazing ROI, but you’ll never see that if you aren’t consistently sending emails to your list.

You have to stay fresh in their minds. You want to build a connection, so they feel like they know you.

In today’s online world, trust is paramount. Consumers want to buy from a real person! Sending consistent, personality-filled emails is a great way to show them you’re real and relatable. You can be trusted.

If they only hear from you when you’re trying to make the sale, you come across like the used car salesman rather than the friend from down the street.

3. Forcing New Content Every Day

Whether we’re talking about writing emails, blogs, or social media posts, it can feel like you’re stuck on the hamster wheel of content creation.

There’s a lot of advice out there about how to create your content more efficiently, but your best bet will always be to repurpose.

If you wrote an Instagram post that’s getting excellent engagement, repurpose that into an email to your list with a slightly different angle.

If you put out a killer podcast episode, make it a Facebook post or share it in your Instagram stories.

If one of your blog posts is getting great traffic, write about it in an email and talk about it in a Facebook live. In fact, you can probably take a great blog post and break it up into several different social media posts.

Before you throw out the objection that people will think you’re just repeating yourself all over the place, think about this – very few people are seeing every single piece of content you put out.

The social media algorithms almost always ensure a small percentage of your followers actually see your posts. And go check out your email open rates. I’m guessing about 70-80% of your readers aren’t even opening those emails.

An even better reason to repurpose? The average person needs to hear your offer 6-7 times before they’re ready to commit. That’s an excellent reason to repeat yourself!

Repurposing takes the pressure off of staring at that blank screen, trying to come up with something new every day.

The entrepreneur life is often riddled with uncertainty and testing out several avenues before figuring out what works best.

If you start with your email list, put in the work to nurture them, and repurpose your content across your platforms, you’re already ahead of the game, avoiding most of the rookie mistakes in the online business world.