Getting your digital marketing strategy right, and working for your business, can be tricky. Often businesses find themselves putting in a lot of time and effort to get a strategy in place, only to find they aren’t getting the results they hoped for.
If you find yourself struggling to figure out why your digital marketing isn’t working, make sure you consider whether you’ve missed any of these commonly made mistakes…
1. Your strategy lacks realistic goals and focus
One of the biggest mistakes businesses make in digital marketing is starting without having a clear strategy. A scattergun approach is more often than not, an expensive way to get nowhere.
Without understanding what you want to accomplish, and what is realistically achievable, it is easy to set your business up for failure. Unrealistic goals are not only discouraging but in the long-term can result in a negative impact on all digital marketing activities.
Keeping track of these goals is also key. If you don’t track your goals, you won’t know if your campaign drives success. You won’t know where you succeeded or what areas you need to work on improving.
To avoid making this digital marketing mistake, make sure you set SMART goals at the start. These must be;
- Specific: Goals must aim to achieve a precise action, whether it’s clicks or leads.
- Measurable: You must set trackable goals. When you know what you want to accomplish, you can determine relevant data and metrics.
- Achievable: Goals must-have digital marketing objectives that you can achieve. Think about what you want to accomplish and where you want to be at the end and set milestones that are feasible.
- Realistic: A good goal should stay within the means of your budget and resources. Don’t try and bite off more than your resources or your team can handle. Setting regular meetings to re-evaluate how you are doing with your milestones will help keep your goals realistic and achievable.
- Time-sensitive: Goals need to have time limits. Setting deadlines will help keep your team on track and motivated.
Keep track of your KPIs using Google Analytics throughout your campaign. Your KPIs will help you measure the return on investment (ROI) of your campaign.
2. You haven’t considered your audience and the full customer journey
Another common mistake for businesses in their digital marketing is not being specific enough when it comes to identifying their target audience.
Businesses either believe their target audience is ‘everyone’ or set out with the aim to reach as many people as possible, meaning their target becomes too broad. When you target too broadly, it means you then inadvertently provide irrelevant content to un-interested people.
To avoid this, it’s imperative to research and fully understand your target audience. Start by creating customer personas, these are fictional profiles that represent your customers based on data about your target audience. These should be based on information like:
- Demographics
- Interests
- Hobbies
- Buying habits
- Online habits
You can establish more than one customer persona if you cater to a diverse audience. After establishing these, you can incorporate these targets into your marketing activity.
Businesses also need to consider what stage of the buying cycle their customers are at, throughout each digital marketing activity. Each stage requires different methods and techniques to move the potential customer along the funnel to eventually become a customer.
However, many companies focus too much of their attention on a single stage of the customer journey, not accounting for the nuances within their target audience and implementing a one-size-fits-all strategy. To remedy this, take time to map out the typical customer journey and consider what you could do to engage your target audience if they are in each different stage.
3. Your website isn’t user-friendly
Organic traffic to your website is high, but the bounce rate is higher, meaning you are attracting people to your site but when they arrive, something is putting them off going any further. More often than not there’s a simple explanation – your website isn’t user-friendly.
This could be because your pages are not specific or targeted enough meaning Google has misunderstood the purpose of your business and sent irrelevant traffic to it.
To thrive in today’s digital world, you need a user-friendly website that’s easy to use and provides valuable information. If you don’t put effort into optimizing your site to provide a positive user experience, you will undoubtedly fall behind your competition.
To avoid this mistake, you’ll want to make sure your website is:
- Mobile-responsive: Make sure that each of the elements on your page is scalable, so they fit your visitor’s screen no matter the device.
- Quick to load: Compress elements with large file sizes on your page like images, GIFs, and videos.
- Easy to navigate: Plan out your site’s navigational structure and test different versions to see which works best for your audience.
- Engaging: Include content in the form of text and visuals that is relevant and engaging to encourage users to make actions and stay on your site for longer.
4. Overlooking the importance of SEO
Another of the biggest digital marketing blunders is neglecting to use SEO. Search engine optimization (SEO) is how your customers find your business on search engines.
If you haven’t incorporated SEO into your digital marketing strategy, it’s unlikely that your customers will be able to find your website. This means you won’t reach new and valuable leads for your business. As a result, you’re losing potential traffic to competitors.
When it comes to SEO, many companies make the mistake of not giving it enough time to develop. SEO takes time, so you must be patient. In return, your campaign will grow over time and drive the results you desire.
The most important thing about implementing SEO is keyword research. Researching keywords lets you target the queries your audience conducts. You can integrate these keywords into pages on your site or blog posts to help you appear in searches for those terms. Planning out your content around the keywords your audience uses enables you to reach valuable and relevant leads.
In addition to keyword research, follow other SEO best practices like:
- Delivering high-quality, targeted content
- Optimising your site’s load time to deliver information fast
- Updating title tags
- Sharing quality content on social media
5. You aren’t using the right channels
Similar to the scattergun approach, using the wrong marketing channels can also be a huge hindrance to a successful strategy. For example, perhaps you’re putting all of your energy into social media when email marketing could be much more effective.
Going after links in the national press can be great for brand awareness and prestige, but what if your target audience prefers reading niche blogs or chatting on forums?
To get this right, spend time investigating where your audience congregates and make sure your business is visible there.
For example, if your audience lives on social media, and you’re not on it, then you’re making a major digital marketing mistake. You’re missing out on an integral opportunity to build relationships with your customers and boost their affinity with your brand, as well as reaching new audiences.
6. Neglecting to remarket
Another big digital marketing mistake is neglecting to market to leads that already showed interest in your business. Companies tend to focus on acquiring new customers, rather than focusing on leads who need a nudge towards conversion.
This cycle leads to companies constantly acquiring new leads but neglecting to get those leads to convert.
To avoid this digital marketing mistake, focus on developing a remarketing strategy. One of the easiest ways to do this is by creating an email marketing campaign, so see if you can gather emails from your audience.
Remarketing is about getting people to think about those purchases again, so you don’t lose them. You can use emails to remind users of something they viewed previously (and offer a special discount) or remind them about an abandoned cart to give them another nudge to convert.
Remarketing ads can also help you reengaged these leads. These ads are a commonly used remarketing tactic where you use cookies or a tracking pixel to track what people look at on your site and where your visitors go after they leave your site. You can then target users with ads to remind them of your products. These can be set up through Google Ads and Facebook. For help with remarketing on Facebook please get in touch!
7. You’re impatient
Chopping and changing between strategies and techniques can be appealing if things appear to be going wrong or not improving as quickly as you’d like. But in the world of digital, the results can take time to appear – the changes you make to your website, or an increase in links, might take anywhere between three and six months to have an effect on how you appear in search results. If you cut and run or change tactics before these results have time to bed in, you risk blunting your success.
Done the right way, digital marketing can bring in some incredibly lucrative results. Done the wrong way, it will be ineffectual at best and damaging to your site and brand’s reputation at worse. So, if your stats start to slide, review these top seven tips and review your strategy and website accordingly.
For more tips on digital marketing, or to speak to our team about getting a social media strategy in place, please get in touch!