It's the internet age. You and your business should be on the internet and leveraging this incredible tool to market yourself and your business.
The World Wide Web is a great place to market your business. The audience is broad, and there's a wide range of possibilities to be creative. However, while the internet is vast, it's a small place for businesses with a tarnished reputation.
Obviously, you need to get digital marketing right and avoid digital marketing mistakes. These mistakes can make or break your brand online, and you don't want that.
We've listed here the top ten (10) worst and most common digital marketing mistakes that you can commit and how to avoid them:
Digital Marketing Mistakes #1: Not having a clear marketing strategy
As with life, you need to have a plan before you kickstart anything. It's crucial to clearly understand your target audience, goals, and overall strategy. You must remember:
- If you don't know your target audience, you don't know who you're talking to. You won't know what your tone should be, what colors you'll use, or what your marketing's overall feel should be.
- If you don't have goals, you won't know what's going on with your campaign. How would you know if you're succeeding?
- If you don't have a strategy, your campaign will have no focus. If your campaign doesn't have any focus, you will not achieve anything in the timeframe that you set.
With a solid plan in place, it's easier to save time and money on tactics that align with your business objectives.
How to fix this digital marketing mistake?
Create a plan, and your plan should be SMART:
- Specific. Your goals should be geared towards achieving a particular action, like generating leads or selling red shirts.
- Measurable. Your goal should be easily measurable. You can determine data and metrics if you're clear with what you want to accomplish.
- Achievable. A top digital marketing mistake is setting goals without milestones. Set long-term goals and mini-short-term goals in between. For example, it's easier to write one blog article daily than five blog articles per day.
- Realistic. All goals should be feasible and stay within your current resources. While it's great to reach for the stars, you also need to make sure that you have enough fuel to get you there.
- Time-sensitive. Goals need time limits. Setting a deadline for yourself will help you keep track of yourself and keep you motivated.
Digital Marketing Mistakes #2: Failing to create KPIs to track and measure success
Regardless of your industry, you need to set KPIs. You need to gather it, evaluate it, and comprehend it. To make data-driven decisions and improve your marketing efforts, it's crucial to track and measure your progress.
You can use several tools to track your audience, like Google Analytics. It also tracks conversions and other key metrics.
How to fix this digital marketing mistake?
Monitor your data and strategize your results. When you properly utilize your data:
- You're targeting the right audience
- You understand your customers and their preferences
- You know if you're hitting your sales milestones
- You know if your conversion rate is what your plan aims for
- You'll reach your goals
Digital Marketing Mistakes #3: Neglecting search engine optimization
SEO is a critical component of digital marketing, yet many businesses need to pay more attention to it. SEO is how your customers find you in the vast sea of the World Wide Web.
If you haven't used SEO yet for your digital marketing, that's one of the digital marketing mistakes to avoid. Of course, one of the top digital marketing mistakes is impatience. SEO takes time, and you must be patient and wait for the results. SEO does not happen overnight.
How to fix this digital marketing mistake?
Do SEO. If you don't know how to do it, you can hire an SEO expert to handle your SEO campaign or learn it yourself.
You can find a quick SEO checklist on your Strikingly website editor to kickstart your SEO campaign. Yes, we make it easy like that.
Image taken from Strikingly
Digital Marketing Mistakes #4: Not using social media effectively
Everyone is on social media. Your audience lives on social media, and you're missing out if you're not on any. Social media is where you can create meaningful relationships with your customers and boost affinity between you, your business, and your customers.
Social media can be a powerful marketing tool, but it's vital to use it effectively. Identify the platforms where your target audience is most active and create a content strategy that resonates with them.
How to fix this digital marketing mistake?
Take advantage of social media! Sign up for every channel where your audience is, like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Remember to be on LinkedIn for your business.
If you have a Strikingly website, add a social media section to circle your customers back to your social media channels and add dynamic content to your website.
Digital Marketing Mistakes #5: Ignoring mobile optimization
Majority of online traffic comes from mobile devices. As of November 2022, 59.5% of all website traffic comes from mobile devices. Therefore, optimizing your website and marketing materials for mobile is crucial.
How to fix this digital marketing mistake?
It's pretty easy. To do this, you can:
- Designing responsive websites. This is a no-brainer if you're with Strikingly because all our websites are mobile-optimized automatically.
- Creating mobile-friendly email campaigns. Also not a problem with Strikingly because our email marketing feature also optimizes for mobile.
Image taken from Strikingly
Digital Marketing Mistakes #6: Overusing hard-sell tactics
People don't like being sold to, and any advert that's too sales-y has become taboo. Consumers have become increasingly immune to traditional hard-sell tactics.
How to fix this digital marketing mistake?
People love personalized campaigns and relatable ads. Instead of bombarding your audience with sales pitches, focus on building relationships and providing value through helpful content and resources.
Digital Marketing Mistakes #7: Not personalizing your marketing
Personalization can increase engagement and conversion rates. Since you have data, use customer data to segment your audience and tailor your messaging to different segments.
How to fix this digital marketing mistake?
You can start by creating customer personas based on your existing data. Personas are fictional profiles that best represent your clients. It tells data like:
- Demographics
- Interests
- Hobbies
- Buying habits
- Gender
- And more
Depending on your data, you can create a few customer personas to cater to a broader audience. Test out which audience responds more and which one gives more returns.
Digital Marketing Mistakes #8: Overproducing Content And Not Focusing On Quality
Most businesses have fallen on the false idea that as long as you post something consistently on your social media channels, you should be good. That's not the case, and this is one of those costly common digital marketing mistakes.
How to fix this digital marketing mistake?
Make sure that your content is amazing! Quality trumps quantity all the time. For example, you can focus on one spectacular blog post instead of posting five blog articles per week.
This one spectacular blog post can have:
- case studies
- visuals
- data
- infographics
- and other extras that can increase the value of your article.
Quality content is crucial for building relationships and driving conversions.
Digital Marketing Mistakes #9: Not having a blog
Believe it or not, blogging is one of the best ways to build your brand identity and authority, and you can't go wrong with it. It's sad that many businesses still don't have a blog just because they feel it's not working (SEO doesn't work overnight, right?).
Image taken from a Strikingly user’s website
How to fix this digital marketing mistake?
Blogs drive traffic to your website and can improve your site's ranking. If you don't have a blog yet, create one with Strikingly.
It's pretty easy to build a blog with us. You can have a website and a blog in 20 minutes or less by following these steps:
1. Sign up for a Strikingly account. Go to the Strikingly website and sign up for a free account. You can also choose to upgrade to a paid plan for more features.
2. Choose a blog template. Strikingly offers several blog templates that you can choose from. You can pick a template that best suits your needs, style, and goals.
3. Customize your template. Once you have selected a template, you can customize it by adding your text, images, and videos. You can also change the layout, color scheme, and font to match your brand.
4. Write your blog posts. With Strikingly, you can create new blog posts. Add text, images, videos, and more to each post. Remember to update your blog post image!
5. Publish your blog. Once you have finished creating and customizing your blog, you can publish it on the web. Strikingly will provide you with a unique URL for your blog, or you can customize your blog URL.
6. Share your blog. You can share your blog with your audience by promoting it through social media, email, or other channels.
Digital Marketing Mistakes #10: Having Subpar Customer Service
Customers are always wary about stores they haven't interacted before. They know they are taking a risk buying from you but having great customer service available can lower this risk.
People will always continue to do business with you if their complaints are resolved on time and their questions are answered immediately.
Image taken from Strikingly product
How to fix this digital marketing mistake?
Add a contact form on your website where your clients or customers can contact you directly. Don't forget to add links to your social media profiles so they can interact with you. Of course, adding a live chat feature on your website, like what we have on Strikingly, is the best solution because chat is real-time.
You don’t need to commit the same mistakes. Read through and create a plan before committing to your digital marketing campaign.
Good luck!
