Original Article by TechSling Weblog:
Digital marketing is a revolutionary practice that has taken industries across the board by storm. With businesses of all sizes participating in this growing trend, you’re setting yourself up for trouble if your business isn’t investing in high-quality digital marketing or failing to identify and address problems.
Understanding common digital marketing mistakes
It’s crucial to not just build strategy—implementing and learning from it is just as important for your business’s success. Digital marketing, though based on data and analytics, is a process of trial and error.
You stand to benefit from the mistakes you make in your digital marketing strategy, improving on and covering up areas of weakness, rectifying errors, and learning what works for you and what doesn’t.
Think of it as a process of elimination. It’s a steep and slippery learning curve where you study trends and techniques, while also understanding, choosing, strategizing, implementing, and analyzing along the way. Sometimes the mistakes are less about the things you’re doing and more about the things you aren’t.
How can businesses in Washington identify digital marketing mistakes?
In this post, we will be walking through some preliminary mistakes that could be costing you. If you’re trying to improve your Washington-based business’s SEO and digital marketing strategy on the whole, here are the mistakes you need to look out for:
1. A lack of clear, distinct goals and direction
Not having a sense of direction is a recipe for disaster, especially when it comes to digital marketing. Yes, it’s a different world to conventional marketing, but the basic principles still apply.
You need to have a cohesive focus, strategy, and dedicated goals for your campaign. The goals you set need to be specific, attainable, and reflective of your overall business motto. They should be relevant, focused, and measurable, allowing you to achieve them within a certain optimal period for maximum effect. Launching a year-long marketing campaign only makes sense if you have enough ground to cover and goals that will take that long to fully accomplish. Clear deadlines give you definitive guidelines and objectives.
Are you trying to build your brand and credibility? Aim to increase conversions and boost revenue? Or are you seeking more organic, local traffic? Every campaign will have at least one of these goals, among others.
A great practice to set goals is to follow the SMART method that allows you to build a cohesive and complete campaign.
2. Audience opinions and feedback aren’t taken into account.
Your audience is the backbone of your business. They’re the people who’ll be potential customers and clients or they may already be returning clients. You need to create marketing content that reflects their needs and feedback.
If you delete or ignore mistakes, negative feedback, criticism, and comments on posts, Tweets, blogs, and inboxes, you’re doing more damage than you realize. People who complain expect to hear back, and at the very least, have their feedback acknowledged if not incorporated.
Brands that respond to and rectify issues highlighted in feedback are more likely to do well because it helps improve brand image and engagement—the latter being a valuable tool in social media and digital marketing.
3. You’re not targeting relevant audiences.
This might come as a surprise to some brands, but you cannot and should not target everyone. Identify and recognize who your relevant audience is and how you can best interact with them.
Look at demographic factors like age, location, race, gender, sexuality, in addition to interests, preferences, consumer behavior, and more.
This information will help you study, learn, and understand your target audience and their needs. How will you alter your campaigns and methods to reach and engage these audience members? Are you catering to their financial habits? Offering incentives and discounts?
Invest time and effort into establishing cohesive buyer personas for easier targeting over time and have the ability to go as broad or as narrow as you’d like.
4. There’s little to no focus on web-design.
If you’re not working on improving web-design, you could lose a lot of existing and potential customers. Non-user-friendly interface, messy design, navigation that is a nightmare, and pages that are extremely slow, are all some of the ways brands fail at web-design. Everything from the color scheme and aesthetics to the functionality and performance of your website plays into the impact of your web-design on users.
Improving design to keep it clean, crisp, informative, while reducing information overload and making it more user-friendly and accessible is the way forward.
This also includes optimizing your website and pages for different devices, including mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. A lack of optimization will drive users away faster than you realize. Clunky design and the inconvenience of having to switch devices to complete a transaction, subscription, or any other action can deter site visitors.
5. Social media absence and hiatus.
Some of us aren’t social media savvy, and that’s alright. But when it comes to business, you need an active presence across major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. With 3.6 billion social media users around the world, you have an entire fraction of the population waiting to engage with you.
Not responding to comments, sharing updated information, providing details, and being unavailable to answer queries are some of the biggest mistakes you could make as a business.
Social media is a very powerful tool and one that allows you to market effectively at a fraction of the cost. Spend time creating marketing content for your platforms and pages, including multimedia content like videos, photos, graphics, etc.
6. Not tracking conversions and ROI
It’s next to impossible to know about your performance unless you’re actively tracking it. Keeping tabs on your ROI lets you gauge the success of your measures and identify where your strategy is lacking.
As mentioned earlier, treat this as a process of elimination. Your ROI metrics will help you determine what’s worth sticking to and what needs to be done away with, giving you a chance to evaluate based on data, facts, and numbers.
Whether you’re offering services in Washington D.C. or focusing on specific regions or neighborhoods, you need to identify who you’re targeting and how best you can engage with them. Use the tools available to you and work closely with an SEO company in Washington DC, to improve your digital marketing strategy. SearchBerg offers a range of SEO services to clients in Washington D.C. and various other places, in addition to a wealth of information on how clients can improve their practices. You can consult them for more information.
The post first appeared on TechSling Weblog.
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