Digital Marketing Mistakes Brands Need to Avoid Today

Some years ago, on my way home in traffic, I saw a bus covered with an advert for a brand of mattress.

The advert caught my attention because it looked professional and friendly.

But to my utmost dismay, there was an error in the link given to the company’s Facebook business page! The URL was Facebook/brandname.com*.

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Anyone familiar with links to Facebook business pages does not need a soothsayer to tell them that there’s an error in that link structure.

As a digital marketer, I felt sorry for the brand. They must have spent a lot on this campaign only to have this mistake ruin it. Now all their potential customers will gravitate towards their competitors.

Digital Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Are you creating your digital marketing strategy from scratch or revising your existing one? Here is a list (in no particular order) of digital marketing strategy mistakes to avoid if you want to get the most of your digital marketing budget without an over-reliance on paid ads.

Lacking Realistic Digital Marketing Goals and Goal Tracking

Without realistic goals, you set your business up for failure. Goals improve your focus. They will help you measure your sales and the customer conversion process.

Your digital marketing goals need to be:

• Precise: Your digital marketing goals need to be explicit. Setting ambiguous goals leads to running digital marketing campaigns with no clear focus.
• Adjustable: Avoid rigid goals set in concrete. Your goals must be flexible and adjustable to respond positively to unforeseen circumstances. For example, businesses with flexible goals adjusted and thrived better than their counterparts during the COVID19 pandemic.
• Realistic: While it’s good to push yourself to get the best result, going over the top can be counterproductive. Unrealistic expectations are the perfect recipe for a failed marketing campaign. So, set realistic and achievable goals based on the time and resources available.
• Time-sensitive: Your goals should be time-bound. Specify your monthly targets and set short, medium, and long-term time limits to reach them.

This article notes that one of the biggest online marketing mistakes a business can make is creating an unfocused marketing campaign.

If you don’t set goals, you won’t know what’s going on with your campaign. Since you have nothing to target, you won’t know when you achieve your goals or if you’re achieving them in the right time frame.

Alternatively, setting unrealistic goals is also discouraging. You won’t achieve them no matter how well you try.

Without setting and tracking realistic goals, you won’t know if your campaign drives success. You won’t know which areas are succeeding and which areas need improvement.

You need to keep track of your marketing by measuring your return on investments (ROI) and key performance indicators (KPI) using tools such as Google analytics throughout your whole campaign. Not doing so will be like throwing money at your digital marketing strategies without knowing whether your campaign is working.

Google Analytics is one of the best tools for website analytics. It is also free, so it won’t affect your marketing budget. Implementing it on your website will help you take the guesswork out of your ROI.

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Not Defining Your Target Audience Or Targeting the Wrong Audience

If you intend to create content for your business, the primary purpose of your content is to attract your target audience and help them to become educated about your product or service, your business, and your industry.

Your content marketing efforts cannot yield the desired results if you do not direct it at a specific target market. Once you identify your target market, you’ll have more success with your campaigns.

Brands need to have an integrated approach to their marketing campaigns to reach their target audience. Click To Tweet

Therefore, audience research is important. The absence of target audience research will scar your content creation and marketing funnel at every stage.

Creating your marketing personas or buyer personas is therefore critical in defining your target customer. Marketing personas are fictional profiles that you create to represent your ideal customers based on data about your customers. Detailed customer research will help to enrich your customer personas.

Though paid advertisements can increase your website traffic and improve your brand’s visibility, you will waste your time, energy and resources if you target the wrong audience.

Not Having a Presence on Social Media

Now, back to the account, I was relating earlier. I tried to contact the organisation to highlight their mistake.

I went to Google to find their contact details. No website! No official contact details. Nothing! The links on Google are to other sites and forums!

There was no sign of them anywhere on the first page of their search results! Come on, guys! Your brand has no excuse not to have an official presence online! Your brand needs digital and social media marketing.

The world is now digital. Brands need to step into their online community and interact with customers through social media. It’s a two-way interactive conversation.

According to this article, “brands that devote more resources to interactive channels are on the right track”.
The article notes that people are more likely to trust your company’s social media communication than your advertisements.

Gone are the days when you leave social media to a teenage intern in your marketing department.

The management and staff in your organisation need to get involved. Social media marketing is not a child’s play.

According to the article above, successful brands see themselves as part of society. These brands will get into meaningful conversations on social media. Your brand, too, needs to have an active presence on social media! No excuses.

This incident of the advert on the bus has disturbed me a lot and motivated me to write this post. I see no reason a brand today (a well-known brand at that) should have no official online presence.

They should build connections on major networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. They are missing out on a tremendous opportunity to grow their business and be more successful.

You, too, will miss out on opportunities to grow your business if you’re not engaging in meaningful conversations on social media. At the very least try to have a presence on any of the major social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or YouTube.

Choose the platform where your target customers hang out the most daily. Share informative and educative content regularly. With the recent influx of video marketing, your business needs to provide video content on social media.

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Neglecting Website Design and Optimisation

A user-friendly website is a must for your business in the digital age. You need to have a website that’s easy to use and provides valuable information.

In our digital age, all your marketing efforts will come to nought if you neglect your website design and optimisation.

If you have a small marketing team that cannot do everything in-house you can leverage a digital marketing agency to help you out. Click To Tweet

You need to concentrate your marketing efforts around driving targeted traffic to your website and converting that web traffic into paying customers.

You can’t achieve this if your website design and search engine optimisation or conversion optimisation are not up to scratch.

Not Having an Integrated Approach to Digital Marketing

Brands need to have an integrated approach to their marketing campaigns to reach their target audience.

Those in their marketing team need to work as a team and not in silos. Working as a team will help prevent such embarrassing mistakes.

For instance, for best results your email marketing or search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign must integrate with your content marketing, search engine marketing, social media, paid advertising and other aspects of your marketing efforts. Your email marketing cannot work independently of the other aspects of your marketing.

Your customer service representatives also need to understand your marketing plan so they will understand your audience and the specific results you’re aiming to achieve.

Ensure that you have an integrated approach to your online marketing to avoid costly mistakes.

If you have a small marketing team that cannot do everything in-house you can leverage a digital marketing agency to help you out.

Lack of Adequate Testing When Planning Your Digital Marketing Strategy

According to this article, there’s a need for A/B testing (split testing), in a way that helps raise your revenue is rare.

The article cites the specific example of an unhealthy testing strategy. This is making the number of tests you run a goal. If the number of tests is your only criteria for evaluating the success in split testing, then the quality of tests you conduct might go down drastically in the absence of any qualitative criteria.

A good goal for any A/B test is to increase certain positive metrics (traffic, lead magnet downloads, sales) or decrease the negative success of metrics (bounce rate, lead leakage).

Yet another problem is that we often run split tests for a very short duration. In the absence of comprehensive data (collected after the test has run for sufficient duration), conclusions come out biased.

You need to get your team together to brainstorm hypotheses to find testing methods that genuinely contribute to your digital marketing strategy.

Many organisations also make the mistake of posting content to social media or blogs without testing the performance of these contents.

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Not Having the Correct Content Strategy

This article notes that another mistake you could make is by creating and distributing your content and imagining that it will improve your rankings on search engines without setting a content marketing strategy!

This is because your targeted audience will usually ignore a poor blog post or article loaded with keywords.

You need to get your team together to brainstorm hypotheses to find testing methods that genuinely contribute to your digital marketing strategy Click To Tweet

You need to ensure that you produce relevant content and quality content in order for your audience to appreciate it and take the desired action. Otherwise, you will not get the desired return on investment.

Avoid clickbait type of content. Click baits are not excellent marketing tools because they are against industry standards.

By setting the correct content strategy you will know whom a specific content is targeting and the expected outcome for the content.

You must focus on giving appropriate and in-depth content rather than silly write-ups.

Your content must offer a solution to your clients’ issues to draw more audience. Create content that satisfies both your goals and your audiences’ expectations alike.

Strategically place your relevant keywords to provide value to your audience and rank it higher in search engines. Then share your content on social media platforms for greater customer reach.

Guest posts may not sound attractive, but they are a great way for you to gain exposure. They can also help to increase your domain authority.

Conclusion

These are some of the biggest marketing blunders you need to avoid.
Everyone makes mistakes. I’m guilty too. Over the years, I’ve seen and had my fair share of online marketing blunders. It’s essential to learn from these errors and prevent them from happening again.

I hope that as a business owner or entrepreneur; you are giving digital and social media marketing the priority it deserves in your marketing plan? The internet and social media provide you with a level playing ground for your brand to compete.

How do you expect customers to trust your brand if you don’t have any visible presence online?

Don't sit back and leave digital marketing and social media marketing to your competitors or other big brands. Click To Tweet

You, too, can grow your business and be more successful in using digital and social media marketing.

Nobody is perfect. Have you made any marketing or advertising blunder? How did you correct it? Do you know of another company that’s doing this well on social media? Let us know.

Do you need a marketing expert to help you create quality content, or fine-tune your paid advertising and overall marketing plan? Contact us today. We would be glad to help.

* I have omitted the actual brand name in the link so as not to embarrass them further.

Related Article(s)

• Are You Making Any of These Content Marketing Mistakes?
• What Are the Types of Digital Marketing?

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