Digital Marketing Mistakes to Avoid (and How to Avoid Them)

With so many disciplines, approaches, tactics and theories in the digital marketing sphere, it’s easy to forgive businesses for making mistakes. Even if a brand’s intentions are good, there’s a lot that can go wrong – and these mistakes can happen more than you might think.

If you’ve struggled to promote your business, increase sales, see a return on your investment or any other number of positive results, then this post is for you. Below, we’ll look at the most common digital marketing mistakes, and what you can do to avoid them so you can start seeing results instead.

Common Digital Marketing Mistakes

More often than not, these are the mistakes or oversights we see when working with businesses looking to improve their digital marketing.

Not Having a Solid Strategy

Without a strategy, the mistakes will soon start flooding in. When you have no vision or plan to map your activity, you’ll have nothing in the way of goals, tactics or results to keep track of.

How to avoid: There’s only one answer to this and that’s to create a strategy. To do this, start by defining your targeting audience, set goals that are achievable and measurable, work out the channels and tactics you’ll use to land them, and measure your results so you can see what you should keep doing and what should be improved.

To learn more about how to write a digital marketing strategy here.

Not Using Social Media Channels

If you think social media has had its day, then you’ll be missing out on all sorts of great opportunities to promote, engage and increase brand awareness. Or it may be the case, that you do use social media, but not with any kind of regularity or approach.

How to avoid: Identify which social channels make the most sense for your business – look to your competitors to see which they do or don’t use – and use them to post content that’s relevant to your audience.

A strategy once again comes in useful here, giving you goals to follow, content pillars to follow, and a calendar to schedule posts at times your audience are most online. Don’t forget to respond and interact with your followers either!

Neglecting Your Website

Nothing gets users to look elsewhere like an out-of-date website that’s slow to load and frustrating to use. If it’s been a while since your last site spruce up, then there’s a good chance your number of customers will have been dwindling away in the background.

How to avoid: A site refurb will do the trick here, as will making sure the new site is optimised for mobile as well. Across your site, make sure you’re doing the following as well:

• Keep load speeds quick by reducing files sizes, and compressing images
• Use a navigational structure that makes sense to the customer
• Make the checkout process (if it has one) simple and streamlined

You can find more tips for improving your website here.

Not Knowing Your Audience

Don’t know who your audience is? Creating content across the channels they use is going to be a real struggle.

How to avoid: Creating customer personas unlocks insights into your users’ needs, pain points, hobbies and online preferences, which you can then use to make sure your content targets and engages them.

Not Tracking or Nurturing Leads

When you don’t track the sources bringing in leads, then you won’t be able to make changes to your strategy or gain anything valuable you can then use to your advantage.

How to avoid: A tool like Google Analytics can give you all sorts of insights into your target audience. As well as where your leads are coming from, investigating its results will clue you in information that help you to better understand what to do with your data.

Not Targeting Upper-Funnel Users

Targeting users at the top of the funnel is surely a case of the broader, the better with your content, surely? But irrelevant blog posts and other content attempting to target anyone and everyone tends to backfire – and waste plenty of time and money in the process.

How to avoid: Again, this is where knowing your audience is going to be essential. Creating audience personas is going to help you understand what they like or the pain points they need soothing, so you can create content that targets these topics.

Not Adding Value for Users

Likewise, this irrelevant content won’t do anything in terms of creating value for users either. Value builds up trust and loyalty, and without it you run the risk of losing your audience’s attention. From an SEO standpoint, you’ll miss out on opportunities to rank too. 

How to avoid: Creating content that sticks to Google’s E-E-A-T framework will help out here. This is what the engine uses to evaluate the quality and credibility of what you create, helping you to keep your content focused and people centric.

The framework looks like this:

• Experience: How much first-hand experience the content creator has
• Expertise: The author’s level of knowledge or skill on the topic
• Authoritativeness: The extent to which the website is well-known source of info within the field
• Trustworthiness: How accurate, honest and reliable the content or website is

How to Avoid Making Digital Marketing Mistakes

Below, we’ll run through some more general approaches to digital marketing that you can use to avoid mistakes in the future.

Research

There’s no shortage of information you can deep dive into to help you strengthen your digital marketing. Try giving these a go:

• Investigate channel tactics and best practices to make sure you’re not falling into any bad habits across your activity
• Comb over your audience data so you can fine tune and refocus your efforts and make your content even more relevant to your audience’s needs
• Carry out competitor analysis to see what your peers are doing right, what they’re doing wrong, and the gaps they aren’t filling which you can take advantage of
• Scope out relevant, high-performing content that you can make your own – better – version of!

Align Your Teams Internally

Teams that are out of whack with one another stand little chance of achieving their goals. It’s well worth reviewing the wider objectives of the business so that all teams – inside and outside of marketing – are on the same page about what they want to achieve. This way, you’ll all be working towards the same goals, and keeping the margin of error low as you do so.

Carefully Plan Budget and Resource

Without the correct budget and resource, then even the most well-intentioned strategy will have little chance of getting off the ground. When it it’s time to devise a budget, you’ll have to weigh up the likes of your business structure, objectives, sales funnel.

You should also account for how much you’ll pay for the products and services you expect to use. Analysing your goals will help here, since they’ll often dictate the costs required for things like bringing in extra people, tools and software and the campaigns you want to broadcast to your audience.

Knowing Your Digital Marketing Capabilities

Another mistake that businesses make is attempting to move onto higher levels of marketing activity before they’re ready to.

But when you know your level of digital marketing maturity, you’ll be able to identify your strengths and weaknesses – and better understand the changes you need to make to move up to that next stage of activity.

How can you work out which level of maturity you’re currently at? By taking our Digital Marketing Maturity Quiz here, of course!

Download your free Digital Marketing Maturity Matrix

That’s not all – our downloadable matrix lets you score your capabilities across 37 individual success criteria, so you can better understand the areas you need to focus on going forward when it comes to achieving your commercial goals.

Get your free downloadable matrix here.

Still having trouble with pursuing your goals? Whatever your objectives are, our digital marketing experts can create a strategic path to help you reach them. Head here for more details or give us a call on 0345 459 0558 and let’s get started.