It is almost half of 2020 and no matter what your business is, we are sure that digital marketing is an important part of your marketing. With an average person spending about 6 and a half hours online daily, there are high chances that your next customers will find you online. This is the reason why every business must have a rock-solid digital marketing strategy. But businesses make few mistakes. Here are a few digital marketing mistakes that businesses are still doing.
Table of Contents
1. Having No Clear Goal
One of the important elements that must be included in the planning stage of your online marketing strategy is to have a clear goal. Failure to set a clear goal and not explaining the goals of your business can help you to achieve success by leading you in all kinds of directions. So, the first important thing is defining your marketing goals clearly. Have objectives that are aligned with the business objectives of the company. Ensure the goals are SMART. SMART stands for Specific Measurable Aspirational Realistic Time-bound.
2. Not Knowing Who The Right Targets Audience
For your brand to establish an effective online marketing plan, you must first identify your target audience. The services your business will offer revolves around the demands of your target audience. Thus, you must know your target audience and their preferences, interests, problems, and the solutions they are comfy with.
Business tends to jump into offering their products and services to several customers without knowing who needs their products and services. It will become extremely challenging to attract a large number of customers if you do not base your marketing strategies around your customer’s requirements.
3. Not Being Organized
It is nearly impossible to do marketing without organizing things. There are so many things happening around and if you are not organized, you are going to miss out on some important stuff. So, stay organized, write your strategy, make a content calendar, and use a project management tool that will help you to manage your team.
4. Ignoring The Usefulness Of An SEO Strategy
Most of the businesses do not know the rules that they should follow when it comes to SEO. Today, a lot of businesses continue to create duplicate content, target exact match search queries, and stuff too many keywords in their landing pages. However, these practices are bad for your website. If you want to improve the ranking of your site, you must put a lot of effort like for example, optimizing your site for voice search.
One of the best ways to increase the domain authority of your website and to lessen the bounce rate is to provide new and high-quality content that your customers will love. Always make sure you never create content just to improve your position in the search engine rankings. Do everything authentically and it will bring you positive results. A company that focuses on SEO will rank for long-tail keywords. Focusing on Search Engine Optimization will improve your visibility and will reduce your marketing expenditure with time, therefore improving your ROI.
5. Not Data-Driven
If you still make your marketing decisions based on your gut feeling, then it is to wake up. It is 2020 and you cannot ignore data at this time. Please investigate your data to make the right decisions about your next step in marketing. See what your analytics is showing and have a look at how your customer is responding to your campaigns. Understand what your numbers say. Are you going in the right direction or should you make any changes in your campaign? The biggest benefit that you have in online marketing compared to traditional marketing is the type of personalization you can do and the amount of data that you can collect for measuring your campaign. Ensure that you use the power of data to improve your marketing.
6. Not Testing
Not testing your digital marketing campaigns means not knowing what is working and what is not. You must split test your ad campaigns, be it email marketing running ads, where the form should be, or what call-to-action must convey. A split test, make a control group, send them information, develop a test group, send them the other, and find out which one performs better. All major companies do a split-testing to make sure they attain great results. So, never miss this one!
7. Avoiding Social Media
On average, people spend about 2 hours and 32 minutes on social media regularly. This is too much time. Social media is one of the best mediums to engage with your audience. Here are some of the common mistakes that businesses are doing when it comes to social media:
a). Many companies ignore social media completely and not even listed there
b). There are some companies that have set basic accounts but do not have anything in the accounts
c). Keep posting stuff that does not have any value and therefore no engagement
You must create a social media marketing strategy with an end goal. For this, you should focus on:-
a). Building your brand on social media
b). Engaging with your audience by posting queries, facts, and running engaging Facebook campaigns
c). Replying to queries and comments of your target audience
d). To learn more about Social Media Marketing and visit social media marketing courses.
8. The wrong strategy for content distribution
The research was done by SEMrush which says, 94% of the time, social media is used for distributing content by businesses. 86% of the time, they publish blog posts. Blog posts are not the most ideal type of content for social media. If social media is going to be your best channel for content distribution, then focus on something more visual like infographics, videos, and images.
9. Disregarding Mobile
Mobile traffic has raised about 222% for the last 7 years and now 53% of the whole internet traffic comes from only mobile. For achieving success, you must have a mobile-first strategy that includes:
- Is your site mobile-optimized?
- Are your newsletters/emails mobile-friendly
- Do you evaluate how people are engaging with your digital assets on mobile?
10. Not Investing Much In Content
All of us know that content is the king and every business must develop high-quality content. This is one of the best tools in your inbound marketing kit and is rewarding also. Research proves that per dollar spent, content marketing generates nearly 3 times the leads than traditional marketing. So, invest in content for that you can follow the top guest post site list. Understand your business and see what type of content will be most useful for your business.
11. Not Giving Much Importance To Videos
Video marketing is huge. YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook all promote videos on their platforms, and with the rising internet speeds, people are spending more and more time watching videos. Videos are shared 1,200 percent more compared to when both text posts and links are shared together with proper video marketing tactics. It is said that by 2022, online videos will make up over 82% of all customer internet traffic, which is about 15 times higher than it was earlier in 2017. If your business is still not using it, then you are missing a big opportunity. Videos are changing the way people are consuming content. Here are a few things that you can do:
a). Post videos on YouTube
b). Stories
c). Webinars
12. Missing Viral Loops
A viral loop is a process of how you can use your existing customers/ users to invite your next consumers. It is known as growth hacking. It happens when the product will serve better if your customer gets others on the platform. For instance, you are on Facebook because all your friends are. If you are using WhatsApp, Skype, or any other social media app, you need your friends to be there on the app. If you are using a gaming app, you develop leaderboards and ask your users to share their scores on Social media. This is known as a viral loop.
13. Aiming At Quantity Rather Than Quality
A lot of businesses fret over the numbers they want to hit, for instance, we will publish 10 blogs in a month, we want to do 12 tweets a day. Both these goals are fine if they are bringing the right type of engagement, but if you do not concentrate on creating something useful, it is not going to bring profit to your business.
14. Not Generating Subscriber Lists
It is not mandatory that whoever visits your website they will buy something from your site. However, that does not signify that the same user cannot buy something in the future. But to ensure that you have a chance to convert the user in the future, you must engage with them. If someone reads a whole article on your site, he possibly found some value in your content and might be interested in receiving more info from you and he might come back to you for business in the future. So, ask your customers to subscribe.
15. Spamming The Mail
Many marketers do not understand the dissimilarity between blatant spamming and email marketing. Sending 1000 emails without any personalization and credibility is not called email marketing. Everyone gets thousands of emails and there is no way you can grow your business by disturbing them.
16. Not Focusing On Customer Retention
It is affordable to retain a customer than to acquire a new one and many times, businesses are focused on attaining new audiences by not trying to upsell/ retain to their current customers. What tactics do you use to retain your customers? Does your marketing strategy discuss the steps that you are following to increase customer retention? If not, start doing it!
17. Overlooking Abandoned Carts
Consumers who added the products in the cart are just a step away from the sale. Do you know what is the reason behind abandoned carts? As a digital marketer, make it as simple as possible for people to checkout, only ask for the information that is needed. Do not force them to create an account. Just make an account by default if you want.
18. Not Calculating ROI
Not calculating your ROI is as same as acting blind. Without keeping an eye for ROI, you might end up losing a huge amount of money without any results. Calculate how much money are you spending on marketing, what type of results are you expecting, what is the return over investment? You must find out if the money is spent right? These are a few questions that you must ask while marketing your brand online.
19. Not Being Responsive
Marketing strategy is made once in a year, but new customers keep coming every day. Your marketing depends on externalities too, what is happening in the world, what is your competitor doing, and how the ecosystem evolves. You must be responsive to see the changes and fast to adapt.
20. Wrong KPI’s
Once you have clear marketing objectives, make sure that you track the right KPI’s. A mismatch in what you want to attain and what KPI’s you track can devastate your marketing. For instance, if you want to increase engagement on your site, then tracking the bounce rate, returning clients become more significant KPI’s than the total website traffic. So, it is necessary to align your KPI’s with your objectives.
Even a small mistake can become big, mainly in digital marketing. As a marketer, you must always keep in mind that there is no short cut for success, and you must always follow a step-by-step guide to achieve success. Setting a clear objective, knowing who your target audience is, investing in SEO and content strategy will help you to achieve great results in terms of traffic, user engagement, and lead conversions.