Mistakes people make in digital marketing and how to avoid them
Businesses need to be more focused and determined on their digital marketing strategies. This is the only way to generate substantial gains in growth and profit and boost the reputation of your website to your target audience. Otherwise, chances are, you might never be able to generate enough attention to rank higher on the search engine results pages of Google.
Even the most experienced digital marketers occasionally have campaigns that don’t yield the desired results. But you can help ensure your next campaign doesn’t meet with failure by avoiding these potentially costly digital marketing mistakes.
1. Not having clear campaign goals.
One of the biggest mistakes digital marketers make is by not establishing analytics goals prior to the start of a campaign. In order to track the success of a digital marketing campaign, it's necessary to define goals such as, sales, form completions, calls, sign ups, etc., and to ensure that analytics tracking is properly set up for these goals.
2. Not Listening to the Audience.
Your target audience and customers are the lifeblood of your business. Not listening to them can create a negative image of your company. Users hate it when their voice goes unheard at times. You must try to solve problems and issues people are experienced by carefully listening to audience feedback. This can tell you what you’re doing right and what you should skip in the future.
3. Not Engaging on Social Media.
In this digital world, if you still haven’t created profiles or engaged on social media, it would probably be considered a shame. Bear in mind that social media marketing is crucial to your digital marketing strategy and helps you in communicating and engaging personally with your target audience. By commenting, liking and sharing, you connect to your audience on a more interactive level. This way, you become a part of their lives and can feel assured to receive business from your fans and followers.
4. Basing buyer personas on your own aspirations.
Creating buyer personas is a big part of the inbound methodology, but many marketers get it wrong. Your audience is not the face in the mirror, they are the real life people purchasing and using your product. The trick is creating buyer personas based on the customers you already have and incorporating their needs as the foundation for future projects.
Take the time to find out exactly how your audience are spending their money and what they are devoting research to. If you are yet to establish a customer base then look at competitors in your industry or ask new customers to complete a survey. Personas define what content you write and who you reach out to at which times, so it’s important to get them right.
5. Failing to test.
Many of us leap to conclusions about why something is or isn’t performing without doing the proper legwork to find out for sure. Leaping to conclusions about what works and what doesn’t is a mistake that can have serious ramifications for the success of campaigns. Making testing a priority is the best way to ensure marketing spends are put to good use and campaigns are given the best chance to thrive.
6. Underestimating the importance of mobile.
Mobile must be a consideration in everything your brand does online, otherwise you risk missing out on the chance to connect with an enormous segment of your potential audience. Failing to account for mobile means alienating many potential customers, and it’s a mistake that can wreak havoc on the success of your digital marketing campaigns.
7. Not using retargeting pixels.
A user who visits your website and never returns is a missed opportunity. You spend all this time driving traffic to your site but rarely do users make a purchase the first time they visit a site. In fact, the average shopper makes nine visits before deciding to buy. If you’ve ever wondered how you can get those one-time visitors to your website, to return again and again, then using retargeting pixels is a digital marketing strategy you don’t want to miss out on.
8. Not promoting your content.
You spend hours creating awesome content that your target audience will love, post it on your website, sit back and wait for people to show up to read it, then you wonder why your posts get only a couple likes or shares. This brings us to another common digital marketing mistake many new companies make: not promoting your content. You need to promote your content on a number of different platforms, numerous times, in order for it to be seen by all of your potential customers.
9. Not doing keyword research.
As you are putting together or tweaking your editorial calendar, try to do keyword research to see what people are searching for. You may be producing the most valuable content on the web, but if no one is searching it, no one cares.
Some people say that you learn more from your mistakes than your successes. However, if you’re a digital marketer, your mistakes might be seen by hundreds of thousands of people and could cost your company an equal, or greater, amount of money.
It’s not always easy to stay on top of everything you need to do to ensure your brand’s success with digital marketing, and you’re virtually guaranteed to make at least a few mistakes along the way. However, knowing which major missteps to look out for can save your brand time, money, and stress, and help make your campaigns more fruitful in the long run.