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*.

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.

What’s the Biggest Mistake Digital Marketers Make?

No matter what level of expertise, there is always something new to learn about digital marketing, even for the top senior managers. However, it’s clear that right now, the things listed below are some of the most severe mistakes modern marketing teams can make.

There is always a risk of making a crucial error in digital marketing, leading to money loss. Your marketing strategy may seem perfect, but you may find yourself making serious mistakes. These mistakes could interfere with your business goals and success.

You might think that your digital marketing strategy is effectively producing a good return on investment. What if you’re wrong, and you’re just wasting your money? Let’s explore the following deadly mistakes for you to avoid them and lead your business to success.

Some campaigns fail to deliver the expected results for even the most experienced digital marketers. But you can help ensure your next digital campaign doesn’t meet with failure and a bad experience by avoiding these 12 potentially costly digital marketing mistakes.

I list some of the most common digital marketing mistakes to avoid and which businesses everywhere make. I have also made lots of these mistakes over the years. So I’ve compiled this comprehensive list to help marketers and business owners avoid them.

These digital marketing mistakes also prevent you from making sales and connecting with your target market. When you don’t know how to avoid undetectable errors, it is best to follow this marketing guide that provides you some guidelines.

If you can avoid these common digital marketing mistakes, you will likely see more significant improvements faster.

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.

Keep Your Audience at The Forefront of Your Digital Marketing Efforts.

Unfortunately, the most common mistakes can sometimes be the most costly. If you don’t keep your audience at the forefront of your marketing efforts, you risk devoting ample time and energy to potentially ineffective digital marketing strategies. Don’t make the mistake of focusing only on your products and ignoring customer interaction, one of the biggest digital marketing errors.

Not Having a Presence on Social Media

A major mistake in digital marketing comes when you don’t use social media to engage with your audience. You’re missing out on a tremendous opportunity to build a relationship with your customers, boost their affinity for your brand, and reach out to new audiences.

Marketing managers have come ’round to the idea that social media marketing is no longer optional. It is one of the essential marketing channels. Several digital marketing mistakes continue to be made by those new to the field.

You can help ensure your next digital campaign doesn't meet with failure and a bad experience by avoiding these 12 potentially costly digital marketing mistakes. Click To Tweet

You can avoid this digital marketing campaign blunder by taking advantage of the social media marketing plan. When you venture into social media for the first time, you need to determine the best social media platform(s) for your business. The most effective way to attract your target audience is by setting up an account on the platforms they frequent. If you know where your followers are spending their time on social media, you can concentrate your social media effort on posting content regularly to get them engaged. Not posting and engaging consistently with followers is a social media marketing mistake you need to guard against.

Now, back to the account, I was relating to 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! You need digital and social media marketing. The world is now digital, so brands need to step into their online community and interact with their existing and prospective customer through social media. Customer engagement is 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 as part of their social media marketing strategy. 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 major social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or YouTube.

Choose the social 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.

Don’t Expect All Visitors to Convert into Sales.

Also, many digital marketers expect all visitors to convert into sales, which is another deadly mistake they make. This creates doubts about the benefits of digital marketing.

Rather than putting all your efforts into customer acquisition, try to focus on your existing customers and core audience. Make sure you do all in your power to turn an existing customer into a happy customer. By so doing, you will convert the person into a loyal customer and brand advocate. Customer retention is crucial for B2B marketers whose conversion rate for their product or service spans a long time.

You Are Not Using Video-sharing Platforms to Promote Your Brand.

Another common digital marketing mistake is not using video-sharing platforms to promote your brand. Digital marketing with video content is a great SEO strategy and is an effective way to engage your customer base and drive them to your website. People are more visual, so they would rather watch videos than reading long posts.

Neglecting Website Design and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

A user-friendly website is a must for your business in the digital age. Neglecting their website is one of the most common digital marketing mistakes companies make. You need to have a website that’s easy to use and provides valuable information.

All your marketing efforts will come to nought in our digital age if you neglect your website design and search engine 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. They can assist you with various tasks such as creating high-quality content, your social media strategy, keyword research, selecting the proper social media channels and more.

If you don't keep your audience at the forefront of your marketing efforts, you risk devoting ample time and energy to potentially ineffective digital marketing strategies. Click To Tweet

It will help if you 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.

Optimising your website for mobile users is one of the most crucial marketing tactics for digital marketers nowadays. With billions of mobile users on social media in the era of mobile users, this one would be hard to miss for marketers. This would probably be one of the most unforgivable digital marketing mistakes we may ever have to commit.

A mobile-friendly and search engine optimised website is a must these days to ensure good customer acquisition and customer experience.

Don’t Forget Your Users and User Intent.

Like the number one costly mistake in online marketing (mentioned above) is forgetting about your users and user intent. As online marketers, we get so caught up in all the metrics and stats and tools that we now have access that we forget that there are actual humans behind those numbers.

Lacking Realistic Digital Marketing Goals and Goal Tracking

One of the biggest online marketing mistakes a business can make is creating an unfocused marketing campaign. 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.

It is imperative that you plan your digital marketing campaigns. This is one of the biggest marketing mistakes around. It’s essential to establish your goals and map out your business’s activities to make them happen.

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 plans must be flexible and adaptable 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 a realistic goal, i.e. an achievable goal that is also a measurable goal based on the time and resources available. This is critical to having a successful campaign.
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 that it won’t affect your marketing budget.

Implementing it on your website will help you take the guesswork out of your ROI.

Not Defining Your Target Audience Or Targeting the Wrong Audience.

Suppose you intend to create valuable content for your business. In that case, the primary purpose of your content is to attract your target audience and help them become educated about your marketing message, your product or service, your business, and your industry.

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

You can avoid this digital marketing campaign blunder by taking advantage of the social media marketing plan. Click To Tweet

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

Therefore, audience research is essential. 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 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 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 different elements of your marketing. So don’t make the common email marketing mistake of running your campaigns in silos and independent of your other marketing efforts. This is a common marketing error for those newbies to a digital marketing solution.

Your customer service representatives also need to understand your marketing plan to 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 a specific example of an unhealthy testing strategy. This is making the number of tests you run a goal. Suppose the number of tests is your only criteria for evaluating the success in split testing. In that case, the quality of tests you conduct might go down drastically without any qualitative measures.

A smart goal for any A/B test is to increase specific 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 concise duration. In the absence of comprehensive data (collected after the test has run for sufficient time), conclusions become biased.

It would help if you got 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.

Not Having the Correct Content Strategy or No Strategy at All.

Another common marketing mistake you could make is 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.

One of the biggest online marketing mistakes a business can make is creating an unfocused marketing campaign. Click To Tweet

You need to ensure that you produce relevant content and quality content for your target or broader audience to appreciate it and take the desired action. Otherwise, you will not get the expected 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.

Rather than silly write-ups or guest posts, I recommend providing appropriate and in-depth content.

Your content must offer a solution to your clients’ issues to draw more audience. Create content that satisfies both your campaign goal 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 an excellent way for you to gain exposure. They can also help to increase your domain authority.

Conclusion

In this article, we have learnt that digital marketing evolves rapidly, and you often find yourself trying out new tools and tactics daily. When you’re constantly venturing into uncharted territory, you’re bound to make mistakes. Don’t sweat it; making mistakes is how you learn.

These are some of the biggest marketing blunders you need to avoid.

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. Click To Tweet

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.

As a business owner or entrepreneur, do you give 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?

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.

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