Most of you must be tired of hearing about the different types of digital marketing strategies necessary to make a brand successful. Everybody talks about what you should do. However, only a few shed line on the mistakes that one should avoid resulting in saving time and cost.
The truth is, all the ‘must incorporate’ elements often surface as a result of mishaps or errors made during digital marketing. But people don’t like to talk about these. Why? Because they want their competitors to make mistakes due to the increasing competition in the business market. However, in this article, we’ve outlined five digital marketing mistakes that you can avoid to remain on top of your game.
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Not focusing on your SEO strategy
If you want to remain visible on the SERPs, improve your SEO. If you aren’t visible in the search engines’ top results, then the chances are that most of your customers won’t find you. Fortunately, there are some tried and tested methods that can help your blog and website show up on Google’s first page. For example:
- Improving dwell time by adding interactive content and visuals
- Incorporating authoritative backlinks
- Using your primary keyword in the URL, meta description, title tag, and in your post (semantically and naturally)
However, search algorithms continue to evolve, which means that if something works today, there’s no guarantee that it’ll work tomorrow as well. Therefore, it is best to remain competitive by staying abreast of the latest SEO practices. If you don’t hone your SEO strategy, you’ll be making the number one biggest mistake in digital marketing.
If the thought of SEO, backlinks, keywords, etc., overwhelms you, seek help through a digital marketing agency. They’ll advance your online marketing efforts by using their expertise so you can focus on other areas of your business. Plus, any professional SEO agency will keep updating your website from time to time, giving you enough edge to stay ahead of your competitors.
Not knowing who your target audience is
There are no assumptions in digital marketing. You should always know your target audience. It includes people who would like to invest or purchase your products or services. If you still don’t know, you’re making a big mistake.
Today, through social media and a ton of analytical tools, it’s easy to determine your target audience, their current and future needs. Remember, engaging and understanding your customers affects your overall digital marketing campaign in ways you couldn’t imagine. How do you keep them engaged? By providing the right content.
With the right analytics, you’ll be able to narrow down your focus. It will furthers allow you to spend the most money and time on content and ads that your target audience will see.
Not setting realistic goals
If you’re failing to set your marketing goals, stop and start setting them. If your team blindly jumps on a marketing campaign without a set of realistic goals in mind, they’re doing more harm than good.
Remember, the goal shouldn’t have to be something over the top. It could simply be the number of sales you’re looking to accomplish during a specific marketing campaign. So, write down the goals and objectives with realistic expectations in mind. It will improve your understanding of the strategy, and therefore, the chances of you attaining success. Here are some generic examples of how your marketing goals can look:
- To set a secure marketing budget
- To increase revenue and sales
- To tap into new markets
- To increase traffic on the website
- To grow the email list
- To increase click-through conversion rates
Just focusing on digital marketing
You’ll often see your co-marketers focusing on ideas like, “how to increase our likes and shares” or “let’s post something new on social media,” right? This isn’t surprising because we’re living in a digital world, but to entirely ignore the traditional forms of marketing – that’s myopic thinking, which you must overcome.
Numerous digital campaigns that have been successful also had a touch of traditional media with them. For example, Dove’s long-form video and TNT’s guerilla stunts – with proper execution, they can leave a tremendous digital footprint.
Today, digital marketing has become an avenue for every kind of content distribution, not just social posts. Now, the question is: How will you spend your hard-earned money to create a digital splash? Will you bet it all on native content, roadblocks, promoted posts, gimmicky websites, and paid media? Or will you build something that gets the whole world talking about your business? Remember, an incredible stunt can lead to impressions worth millions. Just think!
Oversharing
Nobody would stop you from showcasing your product on social media – it’s an interesting thing to do. But don’t go too far with it. If you discuss topics that don’t relate to your business or volunteer a lot of unnecessary information, you’ll negatively impact your bottom line.
Your social media content plays a vital role in building trust with your brand. However, if you don’t refrain from sharing intimate details about your business processes on the social media accounts of your business, you’ll be leaving a reasonably bad impression – if you don’t value your privacy, would your customers think you’ll value theirs? Nope.
Besides, giving your opinions or posting about taboo topics is also detrimental to your business. Therefore, give up the idea of discussing religion, politics, or other sensitive issues on your business’s social media accounts. Since social media reflects your company’s culture and values, keep things professional by distancing yourself away from discussing critical subjects.
Conclusion
If you’re making some of these mistakes, then now is the best time to correct them. Once you’ve identified start planning strategies to correct them. However, you’ll see that some of the errors are interconnected. Just fix one of these mistakes, and others will show slight improvements.
Don’t overwhelm yourself. Nobody is expecting you to address all mistakes at once. Take small steps, and try to improve with each step. Now, go and set realistic goals for how you can improve. s