Navigating the world of Digital Marketing can be tricky, especially for a small or new business. In this article, we outline the ten common digital marketing mistakes for your business to avoid!
1. Trying to do everything yourself.
It can be tough to be an expert in all aspects of digital marketing, so make sure you ask for help! As your business grows, ensure you utilise a wide range of skills and experience and use a variety of software and social media platforms to implement your digital marketing strategy. One person can’t be an expert in all these areas, so, a great idea is to hire or outsource some of your digital marketing work to others in the industry with relevant expertise. Design Grid can help you with your Digital Marketing needs if you are not sure where to start!
2. Forgetting about stats.
It’s easier than ever to monitor your digital marketing statistics through Google Analytics and Google Search Console. You can view your paid and organic traffic levels, conversions, bounce rates, and more through these applications. Regularly Monitoring these will help you identify how you can tweak your digital marketing strategy to reach a bigger audience. Many platforms and social media giants even have built-in insights, making it nice and simple to find out how your adverts have performed.
However, one crucial statistic that sometimes gets neglected is ROI (Return On Investment). You can work out the ROI by taking the financial gain from your investment away from the cost of your investment. Divide that number by the total cost of your investment, and you will have your ROI. By using stats from insights, you can therefore work out how much of the money you are investing you are getting back through sales and leads, ensuring you are spending your money as efficiently as possible. Then, if it’s working, you can stick to your digital marketing strategy and change it up if it’s not.
To do this, you need to decide what stats you want to focus on measuring. These could include traffic, leads, click-through rates and conversions.
3. Not having a clear digital marketing strategy.
A common mistake is for companies is to jump into their digital marketing without having a clear strategy. Without a focus, it will be a challenge to plan and organise your campaign’s direction.
Having a clear digital marketing strategy with goals will help you work out which social media platforms to use, how much to invest in different areas of marketing, and your target audience.
You can use the SMART method to help develop your goals. From this, you can create a detailed marketing strategy that will be effective for your business.
The SMART method includes:
SPECIFIC: The aim of your goal;
MEASURABLE: How will you measure the success of your goal. What data and metrics will you use?
ACHIEVABLE: Set goals that you think will be achievable, with consistent long-term outcomes being the key. Think about where you are now and where you want your business to end up in the long term. Then, focus on small targets to help you get there.
REALISTIC: Ensure you don’t overstretch yourself or expand too quickly – make sure your goals are financially viable.
TIME-SENSITIVE: All good goals need to have time frames. Set your achievements with time frames you think you can stick to, making you more likely to hit your targets and grow the business.
Once you have defined your goals, created your plan and implemented your strategy, you can monitor the outcomes of the KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators ) that you have chosen using Google Analytics and the effect on ROI (Return on Investment ). A positive ROI will indicate whether you are smashing your goals or whether you need to make tweaks to your strategy.
4. Trying to target everyone.
Another common mistake many businesses make is trying to target everyone with digital marketing campaigns.
Although this can be tempting to reach more people, trying to market to an audience that is too broad could lead to fewer leads or sales by diluting the importance of your efforts. You will also be marketing to customers who are not interested in your products. So what can you do instead?
The first thing is to conduct some market research or collect customer information from ‘Call To Action buttons. This data should provide information about the key demographics for your product. You will then be able to tailor your marketing campaign to the right audience. Information including the age, hobbies and buying habits of your customers will help you focus your marketing campaign. This, in turn, should result in a more efficient ROI as you can invest money in customers that will respond to your campaig
5. Not using social media effectively.
Studies show that around 4.48 billion people use social media of some kind, with people spending on average around 2.5 hours per day on social media. So, it’s crucial to make sure you are using it effectively for your business. Investing effectively in social media will allow you to reach a larger audience, improve customer experience and drive leads and conversations.
The first thing to do is to decide which social media platform is best for your business. Think about the demographic of your audience and which social media platforms they use most regularly. You can invest in and use multiple platforms, but you may need to tweak the content for each one so that it is suitable. Make sure you are posting regularly to your audience, increasing user awareness of your brand. Increased user awareness in the long term should then result in user engagement and brand loyalty.
When using social media, businesses may think solely about images and videos to grab users’ attention – but actually, blogging can also be a highly effective way to generate interest and leads.
By creating blogs and posting them regularly on various platforms, your pages will become more visible. For example, on Facebook , their algorithms will generally prioritise and boost pages that regularly post or have a large amount of interaction.
But also make sure you are not drowning your feed in too much low-quality content. High-quality content posted every few days is more likely to get a more positive response from users and result in backlinks from other companies, further increasing your presence online.
6. Wasting money on paid ads.
Research shows that only 25% of money spent on digital marketing reaches the correct audience. When you work this out for the ROI, that works out as a pretty bad deal.
Marketing on social media platforms can be effective for PPC (pay per click) when done properly. But, it can also be a waste of money if implemented without a clear strategy.
Ensure you do your market research to have a clear target audience and invest your paid ads in this demographic. You can run trial ads on different audiences, with varying types of ads, to see which ones get a bigger response and more user engagement. Then, you can work out your paid ad budget and get a more positive result on your ROI.
7. Neglecting SEO
The primary way that potential customers will find you on Google and the internet will be through SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). If you haven’t considered SEO as part of your Digital Marketing Strategy, now is a good time to start! Otherwise, you could be losing valuable traffic to competitors.
Many businesses expect to see outcomes straight away with SEO, but it won’t happen overnight. By adequately implementing SEO and allowing time for it to develop, your campaign should continue to grow over time, and you will get the results you are looking for.
One of the main factors of SEO is keywords. Keyword research will help you target the primary searches from your target audience. Your website should then start appearing in Google results for searches of those key terms. You can make keyword research a regular part of your digital marketing strategy by utilising keyword tools including UberSuggest , SEMRush and Ahrefs. These websites all provide insights and analytics to help improve your results.
8. Not having a fast or mobile-friendly website.
Studies indicate that up to 50% of users said they would not use a business if the website was user-friendly. In addition, more than four-fifths of time spent online is on a mobile device. So, it’s worth taking the time to make sure your website is fully optimised for smartphones. In addition, 53% of customers will click off a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Even if you don’t have the time or resources to develop an app for your website, you can take steps to make sure that your website is optimised for mobile devices with a quick loading time. If you are having issues with customers not staying on your website, this could be a factor.
9. Not utilising testimonials or reviews.
Testimonials are highly effective at boosting sales, as they increase customer confidence and trust. Up to 90% of customers read reviews before making a purchase, and 94% say a negative review stopped them from buying a product.
Having a positive online presence is a highly effective way to convert leads, boost organic traffic and increase brand credibility.
10. Expecting to see immediate results
Businesses may be hoping to see an immediate result from a newly launched Digital Marketing Strategy, but this isn’t always the case. Facebook ad campaigns need around a week or more to show effective results. The outcome of a new SEO strategy is usually apparent after around two or more months.
But, you can also use digital marketing to target people:
- Take the time to reach them.
- Gain customers’ trust.
- Engage them with new content and products.
The only way you will truly guarantee results with digital marketing is through consistency and trying our different ways and methods.
Contact us today for more information on how Design Grid can help you with your digital marketing strategy!
