When it comes to digital marketing, small mistakes can have big consequences. Without proper research and testing, you could lose revenue or even the trust of your customers. After all, it’s important to put your best foot forward.
Truth is, there’s a lot of work involved with digital marketing these days. With the intricate strategies of search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, and ad campaigns, it’s easy to make mistakes.
I’ve put together the eight most common digital marketing mistakes I’ve seen brands make. Are you guilty of any of these? Don’t worry, they’re easy to fix. Just remember, mistakes can be a great learning opportunity for your brand.
In this piece, I’ll run you through 8 common digital marketing mistakes brands make and what to do to fix them and turn your online business fortunes around.
1. Not setting S.M.A.R.T goals with a monitoring strategy
Unfocused marketing – a business’ most common online marketing mistake – can be devastating. Setting goals gives you insight into how your campaign is progressing. You won’t know how it’s taking shape if you don’t set them.
If you don’t set realistic goals for digital marketing, you put your company at a disadvantage. Unrealistic goals are discouraging because they’re hard to achieve no matter how well you execute and optimise them.
In order to assess success, you must track or monitor your results vis-a-vis your goals. Otherwise, you will not be able to identify what areas need improvement.
What to do:
Before starting a campaign, ensure that you have SMART goals. This means the goals must be:
- Specific: Any goal must be geared towards a specific action – whether that’s clicks or leads.
- Measurable: Make sure your goals are trackable. You can determine relevant metrics and data once you know what you are trying to accomplish.
- Achievable: It is important to set goals with achievable digital marketing objectives. Set realistic milestones that you can achieve as you work toward your goals.
- Realistic: Your goals should remain within the budget and resources available to you. Establish regular meetings to evaluate your progress toward your milestones so that your goals remain realistic and achievable. Don’t try and tackle more than you or your team can handle.
- Time-bound: It is extremely important to set deadlines for your goals. This will keep your team motivated and on track.
Identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that fit your goals best. Make sure to track your KPIs throughout your entire campaign with Google Analytics. By tracking them, you’ll be able to measure the ROI of your campaign.
2. Targeting the wrong audience
You may want to start by taking a look at your current marketing efforts. Are you really targeting the audience that is most likely to buy your products or services? Or, do you just have content and ads showing up in areas where there is no good match for who they are?
If your target audience is too wide or thin, it can be hard to get them to really notice you, reach out to you or visit your website.
A lot of companies target too broad of a market and try to attract as many people as possible. But because of the general lack of engagement and sales, they become discouraged when fewer people use or buy their products.
Some other companies think they know their audience but often end up targeting people they don’t actually want to reach. This way, spending time and money on the wrong people leads to waste. Yet it is easily preventable!
A business that targets broadly means they aren’t providing relevant content to the people who are interested.
What to do:
Do some research on your target audience!
Research and testing are necessary to find the right audience. It is essential to know who might be interested in your services or products. Begin by creating your business buyer personas based on your past customers.
Research and testing are necessary to find the right audience. It is essential to know who might be interested in your services or products. Begin by creating your business buyer personas based on your past customers.
Buyer or marketing persona involves building a mental image of your ideal customer’s demographics, behaviour, aspirations, needs, what they care about, and how you can motivate them by fulfilling their dreams.
It may also include data like the type of promotions they respond to, when they’re most likely to purchase a product, and what they would expect with that purchase (i.e. free shipping).
With this information, you can shape both your product and your marketing efforts to meet these expectations.
3. Not paying enough attention to your website design
There was a time when a regular business like yours needed to have a site, but it didn’t necessarily need to be highly functional or even informative. It was just there. Things have changed since then and if you fail to realize that, you could lose out.
Today’s internet user is way different from the internet user of years ago. Nowadays users expect more than just words on a page. They want a site that makes them feel comfortable and convenient and above all else – users want it fast.
The only way to ensure you meet these expectations is through the integrated application of user experience design in your web design and development process.
What to do:
To thrive in today’s digital marketing sphere, it is vital that your website is user-friendly and provides valuable information. This means ensuring your website is:
- Clear, simple and easy to navigate.
- Mobile-responsive. That is, you should ensure each element on your page is scalable so that it fits any device with the same dimensions.
- Has brand colour conistentcy and harmony that’s soft on the eye.
- Call-to-action buttons.
- Intelligent use of white spaces.
- Fast-to-load images and videos. Optimize images and videos for the web by compressing the file sizes.
- A search bar etc.
If you fail to prioritize user experience for your site or optimise it for your target site visitors, you’ll lag behind your competitors.
4. Neglecting SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the largest component of digital marketing. It represents about four out of every five dollars made online. The goal of SEO is to make your website rank higher than your competitors and drive highly qualified, relevant traffic to your website.
Your website won’t show up in Google search results pages (SERPs) if you haven’t incorporated SEO into your digital marketing plan. This means you won’t be able to attract new and valuable leads for your business. As a result, your competitors capture all valuable traffic for your search keyword.
SEO takes time to develop, so you must be patient. Many companies don’t give it enough time to start showing results and drive the results they desire. This is often one of the biggest digital marketing mistakes of businesses.
What to do:
SEO is the most important thing to do for any website. No matter what type of website you have, you need to be ranking high in Google.
While ranking high in Google isn’t easy, it’s easier if you know how to properly do keyword research. Specifically, before doing any SEO work, you need to understand what people search for and what they click on when they have a buying intent.
Simply put, keyword research is the most important thing you need to do if you want your website to generate mass interest and sales on autopilot. The purpose of your content must be to rank for your target keywords in Google and attract organic traffic to your website.
You can target your audience by researching the queries they make. By integrating these keywords into pages on your site and blog posts, you’ll be better positioned for search results for those key terms. Knowing your audience’s keywords helps you reach relevant and valuable prospects with your optimised content.
Learn from your customer service team and research your competitors and industry to identify the questions your customers have.
Learn from your customer service team and research your competitors and industry to identify the questions your customers have.
After you have identified keywords to target for your buyer persona, you can go on to utilise such as AnswerThePublic or Ahrefs to finetune or articulate the keywords into proper search queries. Then creatively and naturally integrate them into your marketing content in the right density.
Additionally, double-check your content matches your target audience’s search and compare it to high-ranking posts.
Besides keyword research, Make sure to follow these key SEO checklist:
- Regularly write high-quality content crafted to satisfy your audience’s needs.
- Make your site load faster so people can access information faster.
- Optimise your title tags.
5. Leaving remarketing opportunities untapped
Simply put, remarketing is a marketing technique that allows you to re-engage site visitors. It is intended to help businesses bring customers back to their websites when they are ready to make a purchase.
Marketing to leads who have shown interest in your business, product, or service is a crucial part of the sales and conversion cycle. Leaving these customers out in the cold and focusing your marketing efforts on acquiring new customers is a big mistake that businesses make when optimizing their marketing strategy. This leads to a cycle in which businesses continuously acquire new leads, but fail to convert those leads.
See this ‘We miss you; have a N1K voucher’ email I got from Jumia ECommerce Store after I’d not shopped with them for a few months! It’s an excellent example of how remarketing can work for retaining undecided customers.
What to do:
Remarketing is a great way to stay connected with your customers online and maximize your return on investment.
You won’t get your conversion right the first time every time. So, remarketing through targeted messaging offers the best chance of converting them into paying customers. It’s about getting people who have come close to buying something from you in the past to actually buy it or sign up.
To develop an email remarketing strategy, start by creating an email marketing campaign that will help you collect emails from your audience.
You can send them emails reminding them about an abandoned shopping or an item they viewed previously. You may also want to throw in an incentive by offering them a special discount.
6. Ignoring custom blogging on your website to help build your brand identity and authority
While blogging is often thought of as an effective means for sharing your content with the world, it can also be a helpful marketing tool for establishing your business as an authority and driving traffic back to your site.
A well-written blog with unique, high-quality content is one of the best ways to not only share information about your products and services but help you rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
One of the biggest mistake brands make is thinking that if they create a custom blog page on their website, it will take away from the time they have to work on client projects.
But this couldn’t be further from the truth. If anything, creating a blog for your business can be an opportunity to get even more work while also building your brand identity and presence in the industry.
Sadly, many businesses don’t have a blog page on their business website, or only publish 3 – 4 posts and think they’ve done enough. As a business, you need to blog regularly if you want to outrank your competition.
What to do:
To make your blog more effective, you need to:
- Blog consistently: It’s important that you blog on a regular schedule so it doesn’t appear as a one-off or an ‘if I have time’ event. If you want people to regularly come to your blog, it might be a good idea to stick to a schedule and plan ahead.
- Create quality and relevant content: Quality content is content that has been created to satisfy your audience and provide them with a reason to want to engage with you more. Taking time to produce quality content will make your business blog page win every time with a positive user experience and, in turn, increases traffic and sales.
- Engage with your audience: You can keep your audience interested and increase engagement with your blog post by interacting with them in the comment section.
7. Neglecting social media marketing
Your audience is on social media every day and week. They share pictures, videos, links and content. They talk about their lives, their frustrations and their experiences dealing with you, your competitors and companies like yours.
If your audience is on social media, then your business should be, too. The logic is simple. If you don’t share content on social networks and are found to be absent from networks where audiences spend much of their time, then you will appear not to care about them. Or worse, as old-fashioned and stuffy. If your competitors are active on those platforms, then you need to be too or risk being overlooked.
Every day social media is becoming an increasingly important part of a company’s digital marketing strategy. In fact, the average user spends 28% of their internet time on social media sites. A recent study has found that 47% of B2B marketers use social media to drive traffic to their website, and 48% use it to generate leads.
Additionally, it will help your business:
- Boost brand awareness and loyalty.
- Get leads and convert them.
- Optimise your marketing budget by reducing costs.
- Enhance customer experience.
What to do:
Social media marketing can be a great way to increase your website traffic and engagement. However, not all social media platforms are created equal; some offer high-quality content and others lack it.
While the benefits of social media marketing are undeniable, you should always choose a social platform that is right for your business.
By studying the demographics of your audience it gives you insight into what they look for and basic information about them. This will enable you to tailor your content based on what interests them the most.
And don’t forget, social media interaction isn’t about being a person anyone can follow; it’s about being the source of original ideas, interesting discussions, and emotional engagement.
If you are trying to grow your brand or business on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and other popular networking sites, then social media advertising is one of the best ways to do it, especially if you want more exposure for your products or services. You’ll get seen by the people who matter: influencers, bloggers, and website visitors.
8. Taking on too many plans with lean resources
It can be easy to feel overwhelmed if you are investing in multiple strategies. This results in strategies that get neglected or abandoned, resulting in a failure to achieve the results you wanted.
Your marketing strategy can be challenging to build when you are busy running your business. Because you do not have the time to devote to building campaigns, it could mean you lose money on those that do not deliver results.
What to do:
It is important to consult experts about your digital marketing strategy to avoid these common digital marketing mistakes.
Experienced and dedicated digital marketing agencies like NaijaCopy offer a full-service digital marketing solution that enables your campaign to succeed without you needing to lift a finger.
NaijaCopy’s experts are some of the best in the business and have successfully delivered multiple SEO copywriting and digital marketing projects to top client businesses across different niches in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
With a focus on delivering results, we help you become an industry leader. To find out more about our digital marketing packages email us at [email protected].
Also published on: https://naijacopy.com/common-digital-marketing-mistakes-brand-make-today/