Weekly Review The Top 3 Online Mistakes by Dubai Companies

[Weekly Review] – The Top 3 Online Mistakes by Dubai Companies

After working in Dubai for a couple of years, I’ve realized that many companies here were doing a bunch of recurring mistakes when it came to promoting their businesses online. As a region that is trying to adapt as quickly as possible to the digital landscape, most traditional marketeers are not using online tools to their optimal capacity and sometimes develop tactics that do not translate into the results they expect. Here are the top 3 mistakes we have noticed and surefire solutions that will help strengthen your online marketing activity:

1- Facebook Focus

Mistake: Daily Facebook Post

With more than a billion active user, there is no doubt that Facebook is the place to be. For the mean time at least! Many of our customers or people that we follow on Facebook try to communicate daily in order to get people’s attention.

The idea is nice, keeping the connection with people and engaging them. But think twice: If I like a shop fanpage, does it really mean I wanna get a daily post on my feed ? No.

Solution: Get a strategy

In this case our favorite answer is usually to ask people what they are trying to achieve. As many won’t have any specific answer you should wonder: What am I expecting out of my X number of fans ? Keep in mind that a very few of them will see your post. So it’s better to fire posts when you have something really engaging for your audince and then “boost” it with the Facebook Ads system.

2- Invest as little as possible on their web presence

Mistake: Invest as little as possible on a website without Digital objectives

Many of our SME customers will explain that they can get cheap websites and do not need to think about their digital marketing and so on. Actually yes, you can get a website for free. Except that you are going to have to buy the domain, submit your sitemap, install tracking tools, choose the template, add your text … So at the end of the day you’ll spend: A lot = Number of hours * Your hourly cost.

Even though we do recommend people to spend as little as possible until they reach they first objectives, you should make sure the effort doesn’t out weigh the expense. Keep in mind that for many people your website will usually be the first point of contact with your brand and product.

Solution: Go step by step

This is something we do like a lot. When you don’t have money for a full web project. Start by a simple page and invest a % of all your marketing budget to improve it. Step-by-step when rolling out your web presence focus on these elements in the following order: Landing page > Logo > Website > Ads > SEO > Social Media > Newsletter > Blog. The idea is simple: maximize all your steps to get the most out of your online presence

3- Non optimized Adwords Campaigns

Mistake: Open an adwords campaign and try to manage it yourself

Well, you can’t master everything. Your website, your social networks and all your online tools are changing regularly. So keeping up to date, means you’re ready to invest a fixed amount of time on your Digital Marketing. Once again the idea is good. But try to figure out how much money you’ll loose doing this and if you can find any good company doing it for less. GO AHEAD !

When we add new adwords customers, we’re forced to notice that a huge part of their budget is going into: non relevant keywords, low quality score expressions, etc. Usually spending a few hours on an account we know that we can improve a lot their clicks or ROI.

Solution: Define your objectives before you start and sub contract if you can’t reach them

As always better to do it yourself if you can do it good. But I do recommend people to put some clear deadlines and targets: 5 leads within 1 week with 500 aed budget for instance. It’s important to do it as it’ll force you to build up a strategy based on this.

Once again this is my personal opinion about something I’ve been watching during the last few years. If you have your own nifty solution, or if you’re facing one of those problems, please let us know. We’ll be very happy to hear your opinion !