What are some of the worst blunders that marketers make today? Not all errors are equal. Some mistakes can hold back a company from taking advantage of the benefits of digital marketing.
Let’s dive into the 10 of the worst digital marketing mistakes that marketers can make and that you should avoid making at your company.
1. Don’t Know Target Audience
Knowing your future and current customers are the foundation of an excellent digital marketing strategy. Spend time figuring out who your ideal customers are and determine their demographic, technographic, psychographic, and behavioral characteristics.
For example, you should know their education, age, gender, values, interests, hobbies, technologies they use at their company, and their purchasing habits.
To generate more leads, it’s critical to know and clearly define your target audience. You can pick the right marketing channels to connect and engage with your target audience when you know them.
Do your research on your target audience and the best way to market to them. Digital marketing gives your business a wealth of data, so it’s critical you get to know your target audience so you can better market and sell to them.
2. No Keyword Research
Future customers need to find you online, so search engine optimization (SEO) is essential to capture them when they search for answers to their questions.
Search engines such as Google and Bing drive a lot of traffic to a company’s website if done correctly. To rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs), identifying the right keywords is crucial. Companies must pick keywords that have high search volume and are easy to rank. Companies that do their keyword research find potential customers who use those keywords.
3. Don’t Have a Blog
Companies must have a blog to provide relevant, valuable, and insightful content to their target audience. Companies who answer questions through their blog find people who are looking for answers. A blog helps companies drive traffic to their website, have content to share on social media, convert website traffic into leads, and build a deeper relationship with their future and current customers.
With a blog, you can be your own media company. You can tell stories without relying on traditional journalists to tell your story. A business blog provides companies with a marketing channel like social media and email marketing to communicate to their target audience.
4. Not Using Social Media
Companies must have social media to communicate to their target audience who use social media. Businesses who don’t use social media miss out on conversations on platforms that their future and current customers use.
Social media helps companies follow the digital body language of their target audience. They can become more informed about their online activities and find out what they like, don’t like, and talk about. Companies that use social media such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok can attract potential customers through their content and conversations.
5. Not Optimizing for Mobile
More than half of worldwide web traffic comes from mobile. Mobile optimization is adjusting your website content to ensure your visitors on mobile devices can have a good experience on smaller screens.
Suppose you don’t optimize for mobile, you risk poor customer satisfaction. The goal of mobile optimization is to keep your potential and current customers satisfied while engaging with you on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices.
Your website should be mobile-friendly, mobile-optimized, and have a responsive website design, so it operates well and looks good on any screen. If you don’t optimize for mobile, your future and current customers will not trust your brand because they don’t have an excellent end-user experience that loads quickly and adjusts to different screens.
6. Bad Customer Service
Research says that 70% of customers will continue to do business with a company if they resolve their complaints well. If companies don’t solve the problems of potential and current customers with helpful customer service, there’s a risk they won’t purchase from the company again.
Customer service is one the most vital parts of digital marketing because excellent customer service can overcome lousy marketing. It’s tough to overcome poor customer service without strong digital marketing efforts. Companies must have a page where visitors can contact them via their website, a virtual chatbot to engage with their audience online, and a helpful toll-free number.
7. No Strategy
Things can change quickly in digital marketing with new competitors and technologies coming into the marketplace. If you don’t have a digital marketing strategy that is well defined and communicated, your marketing will fail.
Marketing is becoming more like sales, so a strategy is critical to success. The problem is that many businesses don’t have a marketing strategy. Everyone at your company probably thinks they know marketing, so your digital marketing efforts can go sideways quickly if you don’t have a strategy.
Without a plan, vision, and strategy, your marketing can be a waste of time, money, and resources. Your digital marketing strategy should be able to communicate to your C-suite on whether you are spending your marketing dollars wisely. The role of marketing is to farm the field so sales can harvest it and sell it to the buyer.
8. No Competitive Analysis
For a company to stand in digital marketing, they must know the competition. What makes a business different and special from its competitors? When a company doesn’t engage in competitor analysis, it doesn’t know its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Competitive analysis helps businesses find a gap in the market and enhance their digital marketing strategy.
9. No Conversion of Web Visitors to Customers
A solid website has a strong call to action and well-optimized landing pages that turn visitors into leads. A website conversion rate is how many website visitors turn into paying customers.
A website must earn the trust of its visitors before those visitors are willing to become customers and buy a company’s products and services. The goal of digital marketing should be to attract visitors to a website and then turn visitors into customers.
10. No Lead Tracking
A lead can come from different digital marketing sources. Marketers must find out what channels are working to invest more marketing budget into the channels that are working. Lead tracking gives marketers the data they need to improve marketing campaigns, personalize content, and increase digital marketing return on investment (ROI). When a company doesn’t track its leads, it doesn’t know how future customers found out about the business.
Bringing It All Together
Digital marketing can be a powerful way to promote your company’s products and services. There are 10 digital marketing mistakes that are bad and that your company should avoid making. Digital marketing can boost your business if you don’t make these errors.
Companies who make digital marketing mistakes, don’t know their target audience, don’t do keyword research, haven’t launched a blog, don’t use social media, haven’t optimized for mobile, have bad customer service, have not created a marketing strategy, have not analyzed their competitors, can’t convert website visitors to customers, and don’t track their leads. You can grow your company’s revenue if you avoid these digital marketing mistakes that are the worst ones you can make.