Digital marketing has been around for years now, yet it still won’t be a surprise if businesses make mistakes in it from time to time. What makes it even more frustrating is the fact that most of the time you think you’re doing things perfectly only to end up with subpar results. Nothing can be more frustrating for any marketer.
What’s causing this dilemma? Why do companies tend to veer off track when the goal and success seemed to be within reach from the get-go? Well, you might think at face value that there’s nothing wrong, but sometimes it takes looking at something at a completely different angle to see where the problem lies. This involves taking the time to stop and ponder where you went wrong or, even better, learn more about what the usual mistakes companies make when it comes to digital marketing.
Outlining the Worst Mistakes You Can Make in Digital Marketing
Mistakes. A lot of marketers are allergic to that word, and quite frankly, that’s a bad attitude to have. How can you improve otherwise? It takes a certain amount of courage to admit your mistake, so we highly commend you for taking the time to learn where you may have gone wrong.
Also, knowing what mistakes you need to avoid only ultimately gives your campaign a crystal-clear direction from here on out. With this considered, we definitely think that this is a very necessary step that every savvy marketer should take the time to do.
You are ignoring your users
Now, before you react violently to being accused of making this seemingly elementary mistake, know that a lot of online marketers tend to commit this without even knowing that they’re already doing so.
Have you paused and taken the time to consider that, maybe, you are beginning to focus too much on what pleases the Big G when doing your SEO, for example? Think you’re still paying enough attention to your clients? Yes? Good for you! If not, then it’s certainly high time to start and consider the very real possibility that you have lost sight of what matters the most – which is delivering to your audience what they need.
A lot of digital marketers tend to get too caught up in promotion and advertisement that they soon begin to neglect more vital factors such as user intent and user engagement. This applies even to how they create their content sadly.
What’s good is that with a proper data-driven approach, you can right the ship in no time, so to speak. Campaigns centered on data innately focus on analyzing the customer – with a high degree of personalization. It, in short, uses the available tech and tools in a more efficient manner.
Your promotion tactic is just plain overkill or too robotic
From having chatbots spam your audience mercilessly to being too sales-y with your CTAs, marketers tend to struggle in finding the balance in promoting their content. Arguably, this takes skill, but oftentimes, it just adopting a more people-oriented approach.
One good step towards the right direction you can take is to minimize your use of too much automation, especially when promoting. People want to be able to resonate with the company they buy products or get services from after all. Learn the best times to promote instead of just mindlessly bombarding your audience with unrelated and, worse, dehumanizing promotional content.
Good marketing nourishes trust, which in turn, leads to ardent belief in your message and what you offer. Once this is the case, you can effectively “let go” of the promoting aspect of your campaign and see your own grateful and loyal patrons start to do it for you. There’s arguably no better way to promote than that.
You are trying to cater to a too broad an audience
A lot of marketers are guilty of this, thinking that broadening your reach as soon as possible prevents your business from stagnating – and also what can possibly be bad about acquiring as much traffic as you can get? Well, it is if it’s a highly engaged audience. Because engagement often determines conversions. Without the conversions to show, lead generation or any other kind of tactic to acquire more clients just ends up a waste of time and effort.
This is why it’s better to focus on establishing stronger relationships with a few clients first and slowly make your way up from there. This takes consistent optimization of content and analyzing the data that you gather about your audience.
You are relying too much on paid platforms
Impatience often drives marketers to go straight for paid channels so they can see instantaneous results. Even if a lot of companies can attest to having success solely from relying on paid ads (e.g. PPC or social media ads), it’s just a totally precarious strategy that burns up money and is just not stable.
For this reason alone, having a long-term, excellent SEO strategy is often the recommended route to take for any marketer who is in it for the long run.
You are partnering with the wrong digital marketing agency
Sometimes even when you take the seemingly easier route of relying on a dedicated company to handle your online marketing needs, you are still not immune to the possibility of falling short of your goal. A good digital marketing agency should have a solid plan and strategy. But that’s arguably just the tip of the iceberg. After all, they must be willing to lay out the entire process to you, making sure they are attuned with your goals and visions for your company.
How do they conduct their web development projects? Are they more data-oriented and actually encourage creativity? Do they take the time to research your target audience? Do they, more importantly, care about the audience’s needs? Most of the time, it takes more than just relying on cookie-cutter approaches to bring about the results that you have been craving for. We are entering an era where being more compassionate and more “human” is nothing less than the rule of thumb, after all.
Conclusion
It’s good that you’re willing to admit that your campaigns are far from perfect. This only sets you up for success and continued growth, since you will probably not be here otherwise. However banal platitudes like, “Your best teacher is your last mistake” and “Mistakes are often the best teachers” might be, they still apply a lot in digital marketing. It’s all about how you pick yourself up, and what’s good is that there is no shortage of hands willing to help you do so and steer you, finally, towards the right path.