Digital marketing is one of the most common and effective ways to boost your brand awareness and attract more customers to your business. But whether you’re just starting your marketing efforts or you’ve been doing it for years, it’s possible you might be making some mistakes that could be holding you back. That’s why it’s helpful to understand the most common digital marketing mistakes and the best way to avoid them.
9 Common Digital Marketing Mistakes To Avoid
Here are some of the most common digital marketing mistakes you can make and how to avoid them:
1. Undefined Goals
Creating clear goals is one of the best ways to ensure your digital marketing campaign is successful. Without them, you might be uncertain about the best places to allocate your business’s resources to ensure your campaign’s success. Clear goals include specific details of what you want to accomplish and the timeline for accomplishing them.
For example, let’s say you want to increase your brand awareness. A good goal might be to increase your brand awareness by 12% over three months. That gives you a quantifiable way to measure your success and a clear deadline for achieving your goal.
2. Ignoring Mobile Users
If your website and content isn’t developed for mobile platforms, you’re going to miss out on a large chunk of your target audience. In fact, 62.06% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. That’s why it’s so crucial to make sure your content is mobile friendly. If your website looks unintuitive and confusing on a mobile device, your visitors are going to bounce from your page.
When developing your website, a lot of website building services, like WordPress and Wix, have a tool to test what your site looks like on a mobile device. Using this tool, you can see if your site is mobile friendly and ensure you don’t miss out on potential leads.
3. Not Knowing Your Target Audience
Knowing your target audience is everything to a digital marketing campaign. If you don’t understand your audience, you’ll have a much harder time knowing where they consume content and what type of content works best to attract them. Instead, you’ll be taking shots in the dark and hoping what you create is strong enough to develop leads. When you better understand your audience, you can know exactly what it takes to build better relationships with them and ensure you’re creating something worthwhile and effective for your digital campaign.
4. Not Using Data
It’s almost impossible to perform a good marketing campaign without data. Data helps you find the best places to target your audiences, understand the best approach for marketing to them, and see how your marketing is performing. Without data, you’ll not only have a much harder time knowing if your marketing is having any effect, but you also might be missing out on beneficial marketing channels.
But using data is one thing, first you have to know where to find it. Randall Reilly offers expert marketing services, including content marketing and programmatic marketing solutions, that pairs our proprietary data with a custom audience list to make your marketing efforts as effective as possible. We have the data to implement a powerful marketing campaign and track its performance as it goes. Contact us today to see how we can help you with your digital marketing strategies.
5. Overlooking Channels
Even if you think that certain channels, like email marketing or social media marketing, might be a waste of your time, they could be a crucial communication tool to connect with your target audience. When starting a digital marketing campaign, make sure that the channels you’re using are the most effective ones for the job. Look at the data and see what channels your audience prefers. You might even find that channels you hadn’t thought about hold a niche audience that you and your competitors have overlooked.
6. Rushing Your Campaign
The thing that a lot of businesses forget is that digital marketing campaigns take time. It takes time to build a presence online, rank higher on search engines, and see the overall fruits of your labor. Make sure that you give the results some time before you start changing your strategies or tactics. If you change your strategies too early, you might miss out on valuable learnings as well as potential customers, and reduce your marketing’s ROI.
7. Forgetting Next Steps
Digital marketing is a great way to build your brand awareness and attract more leads to your business, but then what? Some businesses expect digital marketing to do all the heavy lifting, and they’re surprised when those leads don’t automatically become buyers. Once you’ve generated leads through your marketing efforts, make sure you have quality sales systems in place to nurture those leads and turn them into paying customers.
8. Ignoring Competition
Looking at your competition’s digital marketing campaign can tell you a lot about how you should or shouldn’t run your own. Consider using competitive research to see how your competitors are focusing the messaging of their campaign and what type of content or channels they’re using to reach their audience, and the best way to stay ahead of the curve.
For example, let’s say you notice a lot of your competitors use a blog to perform SEO and build their business’s awareness. If your business doesn’t currently run a blog, you could be missing out on a huge opportunity to create content that engages with your audience and leads them to your site. To start your competitor research, take a look at your competition’s social media profiles, email campaigns, and websites. See what content they’re creating and which of their social media posts get the most engagement.
9. Trying To Do It Alone
With all the current digital marketing tools available to businesses, it makes sense to try to tackle it all on your own. But talking and working with marketing professionals can give you a significant advantage over your competitors. That’s because marketing experts, like Randall Reilly, have the skills, experience, and proprietary data to strengthen your marketing efforts and help them go from good to great.
Contact Randall Reilly today to learn more about the marketing services we offer and take advantage of our data to make your marketing as powerful as possible.
