It’s estimated that 75% of marketers have used online strategies to boost their company’s credibility, but it’s still common for companies to have digital marketing mistakes.
Countless companies across the US are using SEO, PPC, social media, and other forms of marketing to improve their results. That said, developing a perfect marketing campaign requires extensive attention to detail and experience.
Not only this, online trends change constantly, which means that marketers need to stay updated with new changes and make the right adjustments to improve their campaign performance.
At Fannit, we’ve spent more than a decade helping companies achieve sustained, predictable growth through digital marketing.
As a part of this process, we analyze the current marketing resources being used in order to identify elements that can be repurposed.
In this article, we’ll go over some of the common online marketing mistakes we’ve found and tell you how to eliminate these from your digital marketing strategy.
Are Digital Marketing Mistakes Permanent?
Digital marketing is extremely flexible.
It can help you drive traffic to your site, build brand loyalty, and exponentially increase the number of new customers you generate online.
But, what happens when you make a mistake?
Unlike conventional advertising techniques, digital marketing allows businesses to correct the vast majority of mistakes at little to no extra cost.
For example, if you make a spelling mistake, publish a post at the wrong time, or schedule paid ads for a bad day, you can fix these very easily.
That said, these are some mistakes that digital marketing can’t help you correct.
While you have full control of your landing pages, emails are a different thing.
If you make a mistake in an outgoing business email campaign, all of your mailing list will see it.
This is the reason why avoiding mistakes at all costs from the very beginning is so important.
17 Common Digital Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
Everyone makes mistakes, that’s a fact of life.
The main issue is that marketing mistakes can impact business areas like lead generation, the growth of your customer base, the quality of the professional team, and the performance of other strategies.
Therefore, it’s important to implement effective campaign optimization protocols as well as other steps to evaluate your campaign.
One of the biggest mistakes that inexperienced marketers make is setting unrealistic goals.
While it’s true that digital marketing produces faster results than conventional advertising, it’s important to note that it takes time to generate relevant leads.
Instead of assuming that there will be more traffic as soon as the relevant content is published, marketers need to rely on experience to develop a realistic time frame.
In addition to this, some of the biggest digital marketing mistakes we see regularly include:
1. Not Accounting for Mobile Users
Global mobile internet usage surpassed desktop back in 2017 and it has only grown since. Mobile website traffic made up more than 54% of all online users in 2021.
There are many reasons why this trend won’t catch up in the US, but not accounting for mobile devices is a major mistake.
Mobile marketing allows you to connect with users at a deeper level.
Not to mention the fact that mobile users made up more than 47% of all website traffic in the US, which means that mobile campaigns may allow you to connect with half of your target audience.
Keep in mind that creating a mobile app for your company is not always the best alternative.
App installations are difficult to generate, plus this setup also represents additional server costs.
Instead, your best alternative is to create a responsive website that adapts to any screen size visitors are using.
2. Not Creating Promotions or Offers for Customers
Customers absolutely love promotions, to the point that offering discounts is one of the best ways to increase sales.
However, many companies opt to bypass sales and avoid organizing promotions.
This, in part, is fueled by the belief that paid advertisements are enough to capture the interest of paying customers.
The truth is that promotions make customers feel as if they are getting great value.
This is why big fashion brands and other companies create multiple promotions for every season.
These brands use early-season promotions to attract more customers and end-of-season sales to sell the rest of their inventory ahead of the following year.
Now, every promotion needs to be accompanied by a strategic paid campaign through social media channels and other platforms in order to be even more successful.
3. Avoiding a Blog on Your Site
When some companies think about creating a blog, they only picture the challenges of keyword research, researching the target market, creating quality content, and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) through Google Analytics.
This is the reason why many marketers and business owners avoid having a blog.
With the above in mind, a blog can become the centerpiece of your marketing efforts.
It doesn’t matter if you’re doing organic, paid ads through social media platforms, or a combination of techniques, blogs are compatible with all marketing strategies.
Quality blogs can help you rank on search engines, act as landing pages for your ads, and serve as social posts.
So, make sure to ramp up your blogging efforts to improve the performance of your digital marketing campaign.
4. Being Invisible in Social Media
Appearing on Google search results is key, but customers pay attention to a collection of channels outside of search platforms.
Just take social media networks.
Consumers are now turning to social media networks like Facebook and Instagram when searching for products in their areas.
This means that you need to develop social media marketing campaigns and invest resources into creating content for these channels.
With the above in mind, many companies fail to see Facebook and other channels as more than a place to share social media posts.
Not including social media as part of your marketing tactics can not only hurt your reputation, but actually result in lost business.
5. Failing to Leverage Videos
YouTube users consume more than 5 billion individual videos every single day.
The platform has 2 billion monthly active users, and although YouTube is the most popular in its category, it’s worth noting that these numbers are just for a single video platform.
The problem is that videos are difficult to create, not to mention resource-intensive.
But, are they?
The internet is now flooded with tutorials and amazing tools that allow you to create short and long videos at little to no extra cost.
This, combined with new smartphone camera technology, has put businesses in a prime position to leverage video platforms.
This is the reason why not creating video content or taking the time to post videos is a major mistake.
Not only should you use video as a resource, but also publish it through different channels, like every relevant blog post you publish.
6. Not Keeping Track of ROI and Other KPIs
If you can’t figure out what your ROI or return-on-income is, you’re probably missing an essential piece of the puzzle.
Now, ROI is not the only KPI you should track.
Use Google’s free tools to monitor your website analytics, understand how existing customers came to be, and make adjustments to improve your numbers.
Keep in mind that the KPIs you need to track will depend directly on your marketing goals.
For example, if your objective was to attract web traffic, you should verify new visitor volumes.
Or, if you’re attracting the wrong audience and need to revamp your content, you should optimize your content until you hit the right audience focus.
7. Broadening the Target Audience Too Much
You need to learn as much as possible about the target audience, or potential customer group you want to attract.
If you know in-depth information about your audience and keep it in mind while producing content, your marketing campaign will have a much higher chance of being successful.
Although it’s true that all marketing campaigns should start with a broader audience, you also need to narrow down the users you’re targeting.
If not, you run the risk of investing resources into attracting audiences that are not as profitable.
Keep in mind that the audience narrowing process looks slightly different depending on the marketing strategies in place.
For example, paid online marketing channels like PPC (pay-per-click) allow you to narrow your audiences by location and interest.
Other online marketing techniques, like search engine optimization (SEO), require localization of content, which requires more work.
8. Narrowing Down the Target Audience Too Much
Now, it’s important to understand that narrowing down your audience too much can also have a detrimental effect on your digital marketing efforts.
Every successful business requires a certain volume of customers to achieve its sales and marketing goals.
If you focus on areas or demographics that can’t provide this customer volume, you run the risk of sabotaging your marketing performance.
You should always verify that the audiences you’re targeting are large enough to generate the amount of business you need.
9. Not Seeking Help (Or Seeking the Wrong Type)
Finally, the most common pitfall we see companies fall into is trying to take on all their marketing by themselves.
The idea of having an in-house marketing team may sound appealing.
But, conducting interviews to find the ideal candidates, increasing internal expenses, and increasing your administrative load rarely result in more sales.
Instead, you should consider working with a knowledgeable agency that has the experience and can join your team and start producing results right away.
10. A Slow Website
There are many elements that impact the SEO performance of a website, but speed is among the most important variables.
It may seem relatively simple, but building a fast website that’s also secure, functional, and attractive is extremely difficult.
Now, every major digital marketing strategy requires a website (or, at the very least, can be bolstered by one).
So, it’s no surprise that some companies spend almost their entire marketing budget trying to get this right.
11. Spammy Emails
Emails marketing is among the most popular digital marketing strategies because it’s effective and relatively easy to manage.
That said, not knowing what your audience likes is a crucial mistake that can lead to an even bigger one: sending emails that look and feel like spam.
Spammy emails are usually caught in the spam filter.
But, on the rare occasions that these make it to customers’ collective inbox, spam-like emails can result in a negative review and encourage users to unsubscribe.
12. Not Focusing on Conversions
The goal of every business is to make money.
Now, there is no doubt that direct, product-centric strategies are not as effective as they used to be, which is the reason why many business owners focus on informative content.
But, if your content is not optimized properly, it won’t lead to conversions.
Instead of focusing solely on value and aesthetics, you also need to monitor conversion rates and determine what elements impact this metric.
Once you have a good understanding of these variables, you should test out a few different ones until you boost your business website’s conversion rate.
13. Ignoring Abandoned Shopping Carts
The overall objective of an ecommerce website is the same as any other page, with the difference that the former uses a more direct approach.
As such, ecommerce website owners should adapt their business strategies based on their industry.
For instance, if you own an ecommerce site, you should definitely leverage the power of abandoned shopping cart recovery tools.
14. Using Only Paid Marketing Strategies
PPC and other online paid advertisements can be effective, but having a strategy that only includes this type of channel can be extremely challenging.
The reason for this is that paid advertising techniques are budget-intensive.
If you want to run a PPC campaign on Google Ads, you need to create a specific budget just for ads and pay for every interaction generated.
A healthy digital plan should include SEO, social media posting, and other organic techniques to support any paid channels.
The idea is to build up an organic presence while the paid ads get immediate results. T
hen, slowly transition from paid ads to organic leads without disrupting the sales volume.
15. Not Knowing the Origin of Your Leads
Do you know where most of your leads come from? It may seem trivial, but potential customers behave differently based on how they landed on your page.
This means that users coming from social channels behave differently than their search engine and direct traffic counterparts.
If you become familiar with these nuances, you’ll actually be able to build campaigns that are more personable and engaging.
16. Sending Generic Messages
Whether it’s marketing emails, reminder SMS messages, or any other form of communication, sending a generic text is a big mistake.
Customers register higher engagement metrics when they are exposed to personalized materials.
So, you should figure out how to include the first name of the receiver and how to personalize other areas of your message without having to do so manually.
17. Forgetting Email Marketing
Creating spam-like emails is not actually the worst mistake we see in our new partners.
As a matter of fact, many companies believe that email marketing is no longer effective, so they avoid it completely.
This is by far the biggest mistake you can make in terms of your email marketing plan.
How to Fix Your Online Marketing Mistakes
Now that we’ve gone over our list of the most common digital marketing mistakes to avoid and fix, let’s go over three general steps you can take to eliminate mistakes in your campaign.
Assess Your Current Resources and Performance
First off, never assume that your current campaign has no mistakes! Take the time to go through our 17 mistakes, make sure you don’t have them, and address anything that stands out.
Create a Comprehensive Digital Marketing Strategy
Your digital plan should work as a cohesive mechanism that connects all of your techniques.
If you haven’t already, take the time to create an organized and detailed plan that includes details about each goal and how you will achieve it.
Track, Monitor, and Optimize Your Performance
Lastly, set up a tracking mechanism and focus on monitoring as well as optimizing your campaign on a regular basis.
If you notice one of your KPIs starts to decline, it may be an indicator that you may have an issue with your plan.
Ready to Address Your Digital Marketing Mistakes? Fannit Is Here to Help
Developing a tailored marketing strategy that’s free of mistakes is not easy.
We hope that our tips above help you eliminate mistakes and improve the performance of your content.
To pick up more useful tips or learn more about working with our team, contact Fannit today and we’ll be glad to help.
