When you start marketing your brand, you might make rookie mistakes that can lead to campaign failures and slow down the time taken to meet your business goals. In order not to make these digital marketing mistakes, you need to understand the sensitivity and the procedure of doing it right.
Here is the set of most common digital marketing mistakes that all marketers have made at some point of time in the past. Please avoid these digital marketing mistakes for better result in your Digital marketing.
1. Not setting goals or setting unrealistic goals
All your action starts with setting a goal towards which you move further. A goal helps you in strategizing your campaigns in a proper direction. It’s important to define what you need to achieve from a campaign or any action you take. For example, when you are sending an email, you need to know what to expect out of it – signup’s, branding, sales, etc.
Similarly, setting unrealistic goals will not help your business either. It will discourage you to continue your campaigns if you are not able to reach your goals repeatedly.
Although pushing yourself a little, getting out of your comfortable zone and achieving better will help your morale. Trust us, we do that all the time, there is nothing better than achieving better than you promise.
2. Not identifying the right target audience
Identifying whom you want to reach out with your campaigns is the key factor that decide your action steps, your plan, execution and budgets. Basically, everything you do depends on your target audience.
For example, if you are running a banner ad on google display network. Here are a few things you need to think about in general:
- What all industries are you targeting.
- Area/Location where you want it to be displayed.
- Interests of people who would likely buy from your ad.
- What would be your CPC budget considering the profits you make if a sale occurs.
- For how long you should run the ad.
- What would be the best time/season to carry this campaign.
3. Not caring about what your customers want
Not everything is about selling your product!
You need to be customer centric and you have to think about what they want to consume and what possibly would help them in solving their problems. Getting someone to visit your website one time and making them consume your content is easy, but retaining the same person to repeatedly consume and share your content is the most difficult task.
Engage your customers with promotions, offers and contests, by which they should get rewarded and would want to come back again.
4. Not setting up analytics
The best thing about internet marketing is the ability to track, measure and forecast your campaign performance. After running a campaign for some time (2 – 3 weeks) you should always look back and see how it performed so that you can improve and get most out of it in near future.
5. Relying only on keywords for SEO
A lot of people think having relevant keywords on a page would fetch them results. Well that’s not true. There are a lot of things that matter in driving results. Some of them include description, content quality & relevancy, domain age, backlinks, etc.
Curious? Learn how SEO Works
6. Over optimizing your website
A lot of people think placing action keywords, forms, promotions and call-to-actions will result in more conversions. Well that’s not completely true.
Using irrelevant and a lot of keywords that doesn’t go with the content will result in penalty. Similarly, over-usage of buttons, call-to-actions, forms and creatives might annoy a lot of your users who might bounce away from the page.
7. Not Using Social Media Channels To The Fullest
A lot of people even after having social media profile and pages, do not post or participate actively on social media. According to a study, millennials spend 40% of their time on phone checking their social media accounts. So, why not use it to the fullest and get traction from there. A good example of how social media can be leveraged: https://www.facebook.com/nike
8. Not Putting Much Thought In Your Campaigns
Apparently a lot of marketing strategies are focused only on the short term goals that needs to be achieved rather than the long term goals. This limits the way you strategize your marketing plans. For example, a lot of people end up thinking only about budget, timelines, targeting, outcome that needs to be achieved and end up compromising on the quality and communication which will affect the brand in long term.
9. Not Using Email Marketing Effectively
Even today, email marketing is the most effective and pocket friendly medium for promotions. Leveraging email marketing doesn’t just mean sending out emails on a set frequency, but also means sharing personalized content to the right audience, building a fan base that would love to consume your content and in return start interacting with your brand.
10. Not Producing Enough Content
One of the biggest mistakes in digital marketing that everyone including big brands do is not producing fresh content on a regular basis. According to the survey conducted by Writtent, 93% of the respondents claim to create fresh content on a weekly basis.
There is always a need of fresh and engaging content that could attract eyes and senses of your customer to make them familiar about your brand and believe. Content doesn’t have to be just blog posts, articles or white papers, it can be images, videos, infographics, white boards, etc.
11. Not A/B Testing Your Stuff
Although you think you are doing the best you can and you are getting unbelievable results from your campaigns, there is always a scope for improvement. By testing out specific things, you can understand the opportunities and chances to make things better. For example, while testing an email you can split test button placement and test what works better.
Most important, “Never give up. Never quit. Never lose interest”. It takes quite some time to build online reputation and presence on web, but once you do it – it’s easy to be there for a long time.
Happy Marketing!
