5 Common Mistakes That Can Tank Your Digital Marketing Results

In the digital world, things can change in the blink of an eye – especially for businesses who are trying to navigate their way to the top of the heap in search result and drive traffic through digital marketing. The rapidly changing landscape means that small businesses need to be at the top of their marketing game, but this can be a challenge. Small and mid-sized businesses sometimes struggle gaining their footing when it comes to marketing, and as a result, make a few errors along the way that hamper their results.

It’s ok. We all make mistakes. However, businesses like yours can’t afford to keep repeating the same mistakes or to let past marketing errors hold them down. So, where do you start to ensure that your marketing strategy is on the path to success? Here are 5 of the most common marketing mistakes you want to avoid. 

1. Failing to Define Goals

Maybe you’ve read up on all the current SEO strategies and have even considered diving into a pay per click campaign for your business. You’ve seen others achieve success and you’d like to experience some for yourself. Enthusiasm for your new marketing strategy is great, but before you dive in head first, it’s important to take a little time and define your goals.

Without goals, your digital strategy is going lack purpose and substance. For instance, you know that SEO should produce more website traffic but what are you going to do with that traffic once it arrives? Are you hoping to promote a new product or service? Looking to boost lead generation? Is your website designed to move new traffic through your entire sales funnel?  Being short-sighted about your goals can lead to uninterested prospects and flat results.

One of the first things you should do in creating a marketing strategy is having clearly defined goals that will help guide you in getting the most from your marketing efforts and avoid further mistakes down the road.

2. Not Keeping an Eye on the Target

If we were to take a journey into the past, we’d see businesses spending a significant amount of money on advertising that hit a broad, general target at best. Outbound marketing strategies, like print ads and commercials, could be tailored to a specific demographic – such as stay at home parents that were likely to be home during school hours to see a specific ad on television. However, it was near impossible to narrow down the target much further. This meant that businesses experienced a higher cost per acquisition.

Digital marketing came along, and businesses started to see a more impressive ROI from their marketing efforts – but only if they took the time to identify the market they really wanted to connect with.

With digital marketing, you can segment your target audience and design a strategy that appeals specifically to them. Personalization is important to the modern consumer, so you’re not going to achieve the results you’re looking for if your approach is too general.

Plus, you’re more likely to overspend – especially on pay per click campaigns – if you haven’t taken the time to identify and segment your primary audience.

3. Missing Opportunities with Mobile Consumers

About half of all internet traffic is coming from mobile devices, and this is a number that’s expected to continue on an upwards trend. During the typical customer journey, a person is going to visit your website and engage with your brand online from multiple types of devices. A major mistake that many businesses make is not tailoring their marketing strategy to appeal to the mobile consumer.

Having a mobile responsive website is important but your efforts shouldn’t stop there. Consider the importance of local SEO for attracting the mobile audience and create content that is easily accessed and digested on smartphones and other mobile devices.

4. Ignoring Analytics

It would be great to develop a marketing strategy and be so sure of its success and longevity that you could just set it and forget it. Unfortunately, this isn’t the way it works in the real world and too many businesses fail to take advantage of the analytics and metrics that can help them boost the success of their campaign.

Measuring, tracking and analyzing the performance of your digital strategy after it has been implemented is just as important as all the effort you put in to get it off the ground. It’s important that businesses use marketing analytical tools to measure their campaign’s success or that they work with a digital agency that will do the heavy lifting and make sure they’re continuously focused in the right direction.

5. Becoming Too Impatient

Knowing when to make changes to a marketing strategy isn’t always intuitive. There’s a sweet spot that exists between giving a low performing strategy too much time and becoming impatient and not giving a strategy the time it needs to produce results.

Many businesses tend to fall on the side of being too impatient. Depending on the type of marketing strategy you implement, you might not see instantaneous results. For instance, SEO can take weeks to produce a surge in traffic. Even faster moving tactics like paid ads can take some time to build up some traction. It’s more important to keep your eyes on the general trend of your strategy rather than if you’re seeing immediate results.

Avoid the Common Mistakes and Work with a Digital Agency That Produces Results

There are so many moving parts with digital marketing that the only sure way to avoid the most common mistakes is by working with Boston branding agency that knows the ins and outs of digital strategies like the back of their hand.

GoingClear is an innovator in digital growth strategies. We provide full marketing services, from strategy to implementation. Contact GoingClear and let us help you maximize your digital presence through strategic marketing and our small business website design packages.