Digital marketing stands as the most effective, affordable, and promising advertising approach for small businesses. If, that is, you go about it the right way. As with many things in life, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about it.
The right approach will help to boost your online presence and earn you website traffic, leads, and conversions. The wrong approach can achieve exactly the opposite.
There are a few missteps that companies most commonly make regarding digital marketing. Here are some of the most common, and the most serious, digital marketing mistakes you can make.
Digital Marketing Mistake 1: Adopting Every Trend
Digital marketing involves a never-ending stream of trends and strategies. New ideas and approaches develop seemingly every week.
These trends can function a lot like the latest fashion. Bright, popular, and unique, they beckon. They might even create a sense of urgency: You have to adopt these strategies right away if you want to be seen online.
The reality, however, is that many trends, like much of high fashion, won't make it much past the catwalk. They either don't fit your business or they don't work in general. If you try to adopt every new trend, you are likely to end up spending a lot of time and money on strategies that don't always yield the results you need.
Instead, businesses need to pursue strategies that fit their brand and are proven to work. That is where a digital marketing company can come in handy: These professionals know how to evaluate trends in order to identify the most important and relevant ones for your business.
Digital Marketing Mistake 2: Not Having a Plan
Digital marketing is very easy to adopt. It only takes a few minutes to set up a social media account and start posting, for example. It doesn't take much longer to implement a basic Google AdWords campaign. You can even post content to your website pretty quickly.
However, the saying “Look before you leap” applies to digital marketing. It might be simple to start implementing strategies, but it isn't as simple to decide when, where, and how to market yourself most effectively.
You don't want to spend your budget posting AdWords ads that show up to people who don't need your products and services, for example. If you go into digital marketing without a plan, you probably won't come out with much besides frustration.
Instead, take the time to work with a digital marketing company on your strategy. Focus on the following decisions:
- What goals you have
- What needs you have
- Who your target audience is
- Which strategies to use
- What messaging to use
- What content/keywords to use
- Budget
- Frequency of marketing
- Who is responsible for each task related to your digital marketing campaign
- Testing
- Which analytics to track
- Metrics to meet
- Timeframe for seeing results/evaluating campaigns
With a specific plan in place, you can reach your target audience with meaningful messaging and therefore enjoy a more effective and affordable campaign.
Digital Marketing Mistake 3: Not Testing
When you start digital marketing, you start creating content and ads. But how do you know that this material is actually the most effective approach? Many businesses never bother to answer that question. They settle for whatever response their first efforts earn them and never try to find out if they could be doing better. In the process, they often miss out on the chance to maximize their online presence.
Instead, try testing your digital marketing efforts. For example, check analytics that show you how many people, from which demographics, are coming to your site from each ad and each piece of content you create. Study how they behave once they are on your site.
In addition, conduct A/B testing of your ads, posts, and content. Does one image work better than another? Does one call to action elicit a stronger response than another? Through careful testing, preferably with the help of a digital marketing agency, you can identify, and implement, the most compelling, effective, ads and content for your campaigns.
Digital marketing is fraught with mistakes you could make. However, you don't have to make these mistakes, especially if you elicit the help of a digital marketing company. Here at Distinct Web Design, for example, we can help you with everything from web design to Google AdWords to social media marketing to analytics and testing.
We can walk you through every single step of your digital marketing campaign. As a result, we can help you avoid potentially costly errors and instead embrace a campaign that is compelling and effective right from the start.
