3 Avoidable Mistakes When Starting a Digital Marketing Campaign

Digital marketing has become the most powerful platform to advertise your service, product or company in the world. Digital marketing has the capacity to put you or your company in front of millions of people lightning fast. This can be the greatest thing that has happened to your business…or the worst possible outcome for you depending on whether it is positive or negative in nature. In this short article, we are going to discuss some of the pitfalls businesses make when setting up their digital marketing. I want you to be successful, so let's get started!

1. Failure to establish a specific and concrete campaign goal.

While it seems like a no brainer to set up goals, way too often things like "make more money”, “get in front of people” or “reach our target audience" are pushed to the forefront. If these are what you are aiming for, you will fail at digital marketing. Digital marketing is too complex and all-encompassing to allow general goals. Just think of all the methods available in digital marketing like: SEO, PPC, Mobile, social media or video. Your strategy needs to specify what type of medium, who you are targeting and what would be a successful outcome. Finally, your campaign goal should involve proper budgeting and a way to oversee it. 

2. Failure to target and focus on the right audience. 

Do you really know who your audience is? I always ask my clients to give me the ‘avatar of the perfect customer’. Your ‘customer avatar’ is the exact person you are communicating with and selling to. You need to find out very targeted information about your customer--down to the last bit of detail, like what car they drive. You really need to know who that person is so that you can create a message that resonates with them. Once you understand who they are, the next step is to find where this person is. Pick the best digital avenue to target them and then focus on small, concentrated campaigns to reach that audience. Gone are the days of unfocused, ‘spray and pray’ methods of advertising that consumers ignore. Your goal is to find that audience where they are and place your strategic message in from of them.

3. Sending your audience to the wrong place.

Most digital marketing campaigns are created to get your perfect customer to do something. Digital marketing, at its core, is really creating traffic for your product, company or cause. So what do you do with that traffic? Generally speaking, you want to get them to a landing page you own and have them take the next step in your funnel. Driving people to a bad, content-lacking, bland or poorly designed landing page is worse than doing nothing at all. It is vital that your landing page is engaging; it should spark their interest or gives them something they really care about. Have a customer-centric mindset and give them what they want…and they will give you what you need!

Well, there you have it! Some very easy to fix mistakes that digital marketers make when setting up their campaigns. Obviously there are many more issues we see on a regular basis. My hope with this article is to point out some common errors in the hope you can avoid these issues and have a successful venture. I am curious what, if any, issues you see regularly with digital marketing startups, so please comment below and keep the conversation going.