Avoid These 6 Digital Marketing Mistakes
Marketing: It’s everywhere. With the digital revolution, marketing has long since moved from traditional mediums to a ubiquitous experience. Consider the amount of time that we spend looking at sponsored content, listening to unskippable ad campaigns, and scrolling through email marketing from your favorite brands. The increasing density of marketing makes it all the more difficult to truly capture a customer’s attention. They’re constantly inundated with marketing so it easily becomes white noise.
For that reason, digital marketing is essential to successful marketing efforts. However, there’s a learning curve. Without the proper resources and strategies in place, you’ll be stuck in a marketing rut. And if you don’t have the time and/or expertise, mistakes will inevitably be made. However, you can learn from them if you’re aware of them moving forward. Knowing what mistakes to look out for from the start can help your company get on the fast track to better website ROI and keep things moving.
1. Little to No Planning
It’s easy to throw caution to the wind and jump straight into brainstorming marketing ideas. However, it’s always important to go in with a plan. What’s the goal of your campaign and how will success be measured? It’s important to take the time to define what your marketing will look like. That way, if it isn’t working out, you can make necessary adjustments with the goal in mind.
By having a set goal, you can give more thought to what strategies you want to use and what you want to focus your energy on. For instance, should more of your time and money go towards search engine optimization (SEO), or is customer engagement more beneficial? After you have specific goals, create deadlines. Making a timeline, complete with an end date, will help keep you accountable and on top of your digital marketing efforts.
2. Product Over People
Keep customers at the forefront of your website. While your product is important, people get turned off by companies who are purely focused on making a sale. To establish a connection with your visitors, think about how your product can help them and speak to that. The customer should always be at the center of your website’s content. How can you engage with them? How can you build customer relationships?
This doesn’t mean that you should stop concentrating on high-quality products. Instead, pay attention to and start combining high-quality products with equally high-quality customer experiences. Experience-driven commerce is a growing trend, with good reason. Companies are no longer just selling products to customers but also approaching customers as individuals. This shift has occurred because the customer no longer needs the brand, but the customer needs the product.
Your website is a channel between your company and your customers. Your customers will have questions and are looking to your company for answers. Treat it like conversational learning. Actively engaging with customers will foster strong relationships and build your sales pipeline.
3. Lack of Customer Retention
Marketing strategies are often focused on how to bring in new customers. However, retaining your customer base is as, if not more, important. As we mentioned earlier, treat those loyal customers as individuals. For instance, personalize when possible. Use the customer’s name, if available, and use your name in the signature instead of the business’ name. This personalization is more likely to sustain a connection between the company and the consumer. In a world of automated services, being treated as an individual stands out.
· 82% of companies agree that retention is cheaper than acquisition.
· 75% of consumers say they favor companies that offer rewards.
· 56% of customers stay loyal to brands which “get them.”
· 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers.
· Increasing customer retention by just 5% boosts profits by 25% to 95%.
· 58% of companies pursue personalization strategies for customer retention.
Reference: Review42
When budgeting for customer acquisition, be mindful of the importance of the customer base you already have.
4. Wrong Target Audience
Many companies think any traffic is good traffic. However, this type of thinking results in inefficient, and costly, campaigns. You want to focus your target audience down to people who will want and buy your products and services. These are the same people who will refer your company to other like-minded customers.
Consider that target audience when creating content for your website. Neglecting to decide on a specific target audience often ends up in more generic posts. Customers desire a personalized experience, it communicates that the company understands them. Feeling as if they are being spoken to directly makes them feel heard, and more likely to listen to you in return.
Ultimately, it’s your readers who determine whether your content is good. You must cater to their preferences if want them to click on your content, let alone engage with it.
5. Failure to Measure Analytics
If you’re going to create a high-performing digital marketing strategy, a key component to success is continuously measuring analytics. Once campaigns and content are live, it’s easy to let them go off on their own.
Instead, study your past campaigns to see which ones worked and which ones flopped. What trends do you notice? What is the breakdown of your audience d? Which channels gave you the highest ROI? What type of content did your users engage with the most?
Your chances of sales are much higher if you keep track of how they’re performing. Monitoring your analytics is a vital but simple step in digital marketing.
Furthermore, pay attention to the overall trends the data offers. Look at which pages get the most traffic and if that traffic translates into quality leads. Make sure visitors aren’t simply visiting and that leads turn into sales. By consistently checking analytics, you can continually improve to yield the most success.
6. Ignore Marketing Strategies
Lastly, leverage the strategies available to you. It’s easy to create a marketing strategy and forget to follow through when it comes down to execution.
But those KPIs are rarely achieved with blind shots in the dark. 65% of the most successful content marketers have been using a documented content marketing strategy. 56% have been relying on technology to analyze and understand their audience’s behavior and preferences.
Every content marketer should be looking to develop an awareness of their brand, drive traffic to their site, and create custom content for a specific audience. Your strategy is the foundation upon which all else is built.
Own Your Mistakes
Building digital marketing campaigns, especially for the first time, is hard. There are so many channels, methods, and tools that it can be overwhelming. Mistakes are always going to happen. But being aware of those mistakes helps ensure you stay on the right track, reduce pitfalls, and experience fewer setbacks.
If you're not happy with your digital marketing efforts and don't have as much time as you’d like to fix them, consider working with us. We help companies turn their websites into results by creating a strategy that works toward their goals. Feel free to schedule a consultation with us to discover more about how we can help you with your website.
