7 Digital Marketing Mistakes you Need to Stop Making Now

What would you do if you were to market a product extensively, in a short period of time and at the most affordable budgets? Our guess is that you’d rush to the online platforms and push tons of content to your audience in the hope that it would convert.

The marketing tactics to build a name for brands has come a long way and is mostly dominated by the digital landscape. Any industry expert would second us when we say that you absolutely can’t do without digital.

However, with the increasing number of digital platforms coming up, getting your way through to the top can be a tough game. Sometimes the best of strategies end up failing, just because you missed a small time slot in which the opportunity was at its peak.

But since digital marketing is unavoidable, it is important at least to make sure we are not making a few mistakes from our end. Here are the top 7 mistakes that most digital marketers end up making:

1. Not Setting Objectives or Goals

Digital Marketing cannot be conquered without the right goals in mind. Each step that you take on this land, has to lead you somewhere and you need to know where you’re headed. Having objectives in place will also help you measure your growth the right way and will let you strategize more effectively.

Once you have the objectives in place you will know exactly what tactics to adopt, you will easily draw insights from past campaigns and the measurability of it will allow you to craft a more successful strategy in the future.

For instance, if you’re boosting a post on social media, you need to know why you are doing so and what value does this post hold for your business’s end goal. Does it encourage people to subscribe to the blog or sign up for a free trial of your post?

2. Not Choosing the Right Platforms

Like we mentioned before, the expanse of digital marketing is never ending and it gets hard to keep up with. Each digital platform comes with its own set of opportunities for businesses and it is important to identify those to be able to leverage from them.

While starting out any kind of activity on social media, most marketers make the mistake of not having a documented plan beforehand. It is important to list down what value each platform holds for your business, the audience you’re targeting on each of them, what action do you need them to take to reach your business goal and what metrics would define your success.

Another important part here is to understand which platform is the best for your business. It is not necessary for your business to be present on every channel just because they exist. Identify where maximum of your target audience is present.

3. Keeping Impractical Expectations

The one thing that most businesses and marketers don’t understand about digital, is the fact that it takes sometime to establish a presence on – that too with consistent efforts. To think that your brand will catapult to fame in one day of online activities would only make you seem na?ve.

Just like setting goals, create small targets for your business on social media over a period of time based on the marketing budgets and other resources you have access to. For example, if you have a $100 spend for a week, set the number of likes you expect on your page by the end of the campaign – but keep in mind the existing number, your potential reach and your market competition.

4. Avoiding Paid Advertising Completely

Why do you think advertising on social media even came up in the first place? It’s because there’s no better platform that could give you a better targeted advertising strategy and such a vast pool of audience, receptive to these ads.

But most businesses and marketers think ‘organic’ is the only way to go. What needs to be understood is that there is a lot of market competition today and if you really want to stand out, sometimes you need to give your business that extra boost. Finding a balance between organic and paid efforts is the key to success.

5. Or Not Measuring and Optimizing their Paid Efforts

Continuing on the point above, there are a lot of marketers that in their zeal to ‘establish business presence’ totally forget about analytics. When you’re running paid campaigns on any digital platform, you’re utilizing budgets that are allocated for the growth of your business – hence, it is important to know they are not going waste.

In this case, using tools like Adalyz that offer a unified dashboard for all your digital marketing campaigns is a wise idea. Making a collective decision based on all the user insights collated from various campaigns would result in a far more effective campaign. It is also important to consistently keep optimizing your campaigns to suit the current market data for better results.

6. Trying to Evade Content Marketing

When industry experts were making marketing predictions for 2016, even they listed content marketing in various formats. And even though this marketing tactic has been around long enough to prove its effectiveness, there are businesses who think is avoidable.

Here’s getting one thing straight – the hyper informed generation of today doesn’t need your sales pitch. What it needs is information and knowledge that can add value to them, and probably help them achieve their end goal. Creating and sharing good content will not just drive traffic to your website, help in SEO and give you content to share on social channels, but also help you establish an authority in your domain.

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7. Buying Followers on Social Media

Okay, the last mistake is probably a bit obvious. But look around and you’ll instantly know that there are so many marketers who are still doing this!

To think that you can buy likes and followers for social accounts in bulk and succeed in the campaigns that follow, is a huge mistake. Firstly, these likes and follows are most likely either fake or don’t include your target audience. Secondly, adding people who are least bit interested in your business, is just a wastage of resources. So, don’t fall for those Twitter accounts offering 20,000 followers for $40! (A targeted paid campaign in that amount would yield much better results.)

A better approach would be to remain consistent with your marketing efforts on social media. Share content that your audience wants to see and actively engage or interact with them. The best way to grow your business on digital channels is through proactive interaction.

Digital marketing is a strategic game that needs to be planned and executed thoroughly to succeed!

What other mistakes have you seen digital marketers make?