Every enterprise owner has plans to grow their business and position their brand in such a way that they become the leader in their niche industry. While a sense of urgency is essential to hit the home run, there are some mistakes that need to be avoided during the planning and execution stages. These mistakes will prevent your business from achieving the revenue targets, thereby resulting in wasted time, effort, and cost.
Here are 10 costly digital marketing mistakes to avoid in 2017:
1 – Not Being Aware of Your Audience
Knowing your audience is the first step that you take for building your online marketing strategy. When you do not have a proper understanding of your audience and their needs, your entire strategy could fail. Digital or online marketing isn’t just about publishing content, tweets, and Facebook posts; it’s about getting a return on the efforts you make. If you don’t really understand your audience, you won’t be rewarded with the results you’re looking for.
Categorise what your audience has been responding well to: What has driven the most successful engagement? Based on your analysis, you may have to make minor or major changes in your online marketing strategy.
Never quit learning how you are to leverage digital marketing tools to expand your business prospects.
2- Focus Deficit
Besides knowing your audience, there needs to be a clear focus. Devote your time, energy and resources in the areas where you know things could happen first for quick and quality results. Long-term goals must be a part of your online strategy, but concrete and quick rewards along the way drive consistent and improved efforts made towards reaching those bigger objectives. This certainly keeps the momentum going throughout your enterprise.
3- Inaccurate Expectations
Expectations hold the key to setting your marketing team up for victory and knowing where your team is in achieving annual goals. It is very important that with every campaign you launch, you set a realistic goal. Factors that help you set your goal include the budget for your campaign and targeting the correct audience base. Estimating the timeline from strategising to execution is also a major factor when it comes to knowing when to expect results.
4- Using Social Media Inefficiently
Remember not to post on social media just for the sake of it; exploit the different platforms to your advantage. Recognise the strength of each platform from the perspective of your business. Facebook and Twitter may be the best platforms for customer engagement, and LinkedIn could be the best medium for realising one’s sales prospects. Outline and design your campaigns as per the channel you’re planning to use to reap the best results.
5- Multiple Profiles on Social Sites
A new trend has come up where a business has more than one profile on social media – all of which link to the main website. Firstly, having more than one profile is not legally right. Secondly, it’s a waste! Channel your efforts in one direction and get people, real people, to your company. It will be silly to build loads of followers who really aren’t interested in your work and are simply connecting to build ‘following’.
6- Budget and KPI are Not Set
When you launch social media campaigns, your budget predominantly plays a major role in your campaign’s success. Be familiar with your budget so that you can set practical goals and expectations about how your campaign is going to perform.
7- Lack of Planning
The biggest mistake a business owner can make is not having a concrete plan to execute their digital marketing strategy. Your online strategy must exemplify your brand and you must know your audience and have clear aims that help you focus on growing your business. Here is an example of a content strategy for Legal or service firms.
8- Ignoring the Importance of UX
Without a good desktop and mobile experience, your brand could miss out on conversion opportunities. You have roughly 10-20 seconds to capture consumers’ attention on their smartphone, tablet, or computer. A prospective customer may choose to quit your webpage if it is slow.
Building a positive UX may take time, and it requires money and effort, but it is definitely worth it. “Mobilegeddon” became a turning point in SEO when Google started penalizing websites for poor mobile-friendliness. Hence, if you want searchers to see you online, you need to have an amazing mobile and desktop user experience in place.
9- Engaging in Shady Practices
You have may have seen such e-mails in your inbox – “Rank amongst the top 10 in Google. Guaranteed!” Sounds very tempting, doesn’t it? .
Be careful, it’s a trap. Such fraudulent companies employ what is known as “black hat” methods that involve “tricking” search engines into giving your website a better position for certain keywords.
While you may experience a short-term gain, you will be playing with fire. Google invests millions to combat cheating. You will ultimately lose. Once Google bans or penalizes your company, it will be extremely difficult to recover from this setback. It causes irreversible damage to your marketing efforts and your website’s reputation.
10- Marketing to Anyone and Everyone
It doesn’t matter what product you’re selling or service you’re offering; the bottom line is more targeted marketing ensures a better return. When you target a specific audience, it gets you in front of them more often, and you can create messages that can touch them emotionally. If you try to be everything to everyone, your message becomes vague and less impactful.
