Digital marketing is a powerful tool – but it’s easy to make mistakes that can mean your time and money are wasted. Here are 5 common digital marketing mistakes – and how to avoid them.
- A lack of realistic, focused, trackable goals
If you want your digital marketing to be successful, and if you want to be able to track and measure that success, then you need to set goals. Goals can help you focus your campaign and prevent you from spending time and money on activities that are not beneficial. Your goals should relate to results you can track and measure, so that you can monitor your campaign’s success and progress. Ideally, you should set SMART goals – that is, goals that are:
Specific – set out a clear aim, such as the number of clicks or leads you want to generate.
Measurable – you need to be able to use data and metrics to measure how well you have achieved your goals.
Achievable – make your goals feasible; make sure you have a road map for how to get there.
Realistic – ensure you have the budget, skills and resources to achieve your goals.
Time-sensitive – give yourself a timescale within which you want to achieve your goals.
2. Targeting the wrong audience
If you don’t have a clear and accurate idea of who your potential customers are, where you can reach them and how to communicate with them successfully, you risk wasting your digital marketing efforts. To understand who to target and how best to communicate with them, consider the following:
- How old are they?
- Where do they live?
- What spending power and patterns do they have?
- What are their interests and hobbies?
- Where do they spend time online?
- What challenges do they face and how can you help with these?
- What are their goals?
- What stage of life are they at?
- If you want to target B2B customers, you should also consider the size of these business and who makes the purchasing decisions.
To source this information, you can look at Google Analytics, social media analytics, your own customer database and Facebook Audience Insights.
3. Having a substandard website
Your website is your shop window so it’s vital that it looks great and is easy to navigate. Make sure your website is mobile friendly, as a large portion of visitors will access it on a tablet of smartphone, and ensure that it’s quick to navigate and has pages that load quickly.
4. Failing to carry out search engine optimisation (SEO)
If you want your website to perform well in web searches, you need to make sure you’ve carried out search engine optimisation (SEO). This includes multiple activities such as using keywords in your copy, making sure images are tagged properly and using the right headings. Take a look at this article, which will help you write great SEO blog posts, this article, which outlines how to use images for SEO, and this article, which will help you create content that will get used by Google in its Featured Snippets.
5. Failing to remarket
Remarketing is marketing that targets people who have already shown an interest in your products – for example, by visiting your website. You can even ensure that a product they viewed will start to show up in their social media feeds, keeping it fresh in their minds and helping them to progress towards buying it. You can pay the likes of Facebook and Google to run remarketing ad campaigns. Another wise move is to collect as many emails as possible from potential customers. This is why so many sites offer a discount in return for signing up to their newsletter. Once you’ve collected a person’s email address, you can send them targeted advertising via email.
Need help?
At Primedia Marketing we’re experts on digital marketing, working with a wide range of clients to ensure they perform brilliantly online. Get in touch today to see how we can help you.
