Did you know that worldwide spending on digital marketing is expected to go up to $146 billion by 2023? It is no surprise that businesses invest in digital marketing for one reason only – it works.
However, that is not always the case. Sometimes, businesses make common but major mistakes that keep them from optimizing their website traffic, lead generation, and ROI (Return on Investment).
In this article, we will discuss the digital marketing mistakes that businesses are most vulnerable to and how you can avoid those mistakes.
1) Not Having a Clearly-Defined Audience:
Often, businesspeople – especially new entrepreneurs – believe that the wider they cast their net, the better it is for the business. They feel that targeting everyone will allow them to spread the word and reach out to a larger number of customers.
In reality, though, only a handful of particular groups will fetch the large majority of revenue for any business. Therefore, a ‘target everyone’ marketing strategy will just cause the businesses to chase fickle possibilities while ignoring their primary revenue-generating groups.
If that is not enough, implementing such a shallow approach keeps businesses from learning more about their main prospects’ behavior patterns, pain points, and interests and requirements.
An in-depth customer understanding is the key to establishing a successful digital marketing strategy, which means that you need to define and know your target market.
According to 63% of marketers, the best way to understand your prospective customers is through a buyer persona. This involves dividing your market into two or three specific ‘customer types’. For each customer type, identify the demographics, expectations, pain points, and any objections or resistance that the customers might have toward your offering.
In addition to that, you can use social media to interact with your prospects. Create interactive opportunities through posts and comments, poll forums, and surveys. Nobody will be better able to tell you about your potential buyers than the potential buyers themselves.
2) Ignoring Mobile Users:
Today, almost everyone owns a phone. Today, almost everyone uses their phone for so much more than making calls or sending messages.
While having a commercial website is a good step, it is not enough. You must make your website mobile-friendly.
Did you know that 50% of customers will turn away from a company if its website is not mobile-optimized – even if they are a fan of the brand?
These customers feel that any company without a mobile-optimized website simply does not care for its business.
In other words, a mobile-unfriendly website can cause you to miss out on approximately half of your potential revenue.
If feasible, you should also certainly consider developing a mobile application for your business. Considering that an app offers a much better experience for mobile customers, your business might be able to benefit from it.
However, regardless of whether you go for an app or not, not having a mobile-friendly website is certainly NOT an option these days.
3) Poor SEO Approach:
According to the Search Engine Journal, 93% of all online experiences start with search engines.
Did you know that the internet receives more than two billion new blogs on a daily basis? In such a situation, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is your best bet to obtaining online visibility and attracting greater traffic.
The world of SEO is dynamic and you must always stay on your toes if you want to ensure that you are not lagging behind the pack.
Having said that, there are a few timeless SEO tactics and techniques that are always bound to help you become more visible in search engine results, regardless of what else changes.
Some of the all-important elements of an SEO strategy include:
- Keywords (not just the keywords that you want to rank for, but also those that your potential customers are likely to use)
- Quality content
- Backlinks
- Mobile-friendliness
- Image optimization
- Clear and short URLs
4) Not Offering Promotional Prices or Discounts:
Rewarding your customers is a great way to induce repeat purchases, as well as attract new customers.
Discounts can increase traffic to your web pages as well as physical stores. Promotions, too, can play a key role in boosting sales.
Just make sure that you advertise any promotions or discounts very clearly so that your audience can get the message.
Also, remember that offering discounted or promotional prices on certain products does not mean that your customers will not purchase the other products listed at regular prices.
Sure, they will be more inclined to buy the cheaper items.
However, if they end up liking something from the ‘regular price’ rack, they might be more inclined to buy that because they have already gotten a sweet deal on the other items.
Offering coupons is also an effective way to retain your customers: 91% of buyers claim that, if a retailer offers them a coupon, they will return to the same retailer even after they have redeemed their coupon.
So, all in all, discounts and promotions can help increase sales, while coupons establish customer loyalty.
5) Ignoring the ROI:
One of the worst things that you can do is to spend money on digital marketing without calculating the returns that you are getting.
Without measuring your digital marketing ROI, you will not be able to assess the degree of your strategy’s success.
And, without knowing what is working or not, you might continue to employ unsuccessful campaigns and burn unnecessary holes in your pocket.
You can use a wide range of metrics to calculate your ROI.
Many people believe that the ROI calculation is extremely complex; thankfully, those people are quite wrong.
You need to start by knowing what you are measuring, such as:
- Traffic
- Conversions
- Leads
- CTRs (Click-through rates)
Once you have determined your digital marketing objective, you can use the following formula to calculate the ROI:
ROI = (Financial benefits derived from digital marketing investment-total amount invested in digital marketing/total amount invested in digital marketing)
The final answer would be your ROI.
If you had not been calculating your campaign ROIs so far, make sure to not repeat this mistake moving forward. After all, ROI calculations are the only way that you can see if your strategy is bearing fruit or not.
6) Not Having a Website Blog:
Website blogs go a long way in increasing traffic.
Businesses having blogs have almost twice as many inbound links as businesses that do not have blogs. More inbound links also help to boost traffic.
In addition, blogs provide tremendous opportunities for interaction, which, like we mentioned, is key to understanding your target market and developing a strong relationship with it.
Not only should you publish regular blogs, you should also allow readers to comment on them. These comments can help you get some valuable feedback pertaining to your offering or the business as a whole.
You can also share your blogs on your social media channels. Not only will this help keep your social media pages, handles, and accounts active, but it can also make sure that you do not have to worry about coming up with new social media content every day.
7) Having a Slow Website:
All of the above tips will help you lure people to your website. But, if your website is slow and lagging, all these efforts will be for nothing.
In the day and age of the internet, 4G, and 5G, people do not like to wait, especially if a much easier option for them is to simply turn to their competitor.
In other words, buyers will abandon your site if it does not load swiftly.
Even if your website takes just a couple of seconds more to load than your competitor’s, it could create a significant adverse impact on your business’s bottom line.
So, it is vital to address your website’s loading times, even if you have to spend money to do it – the increased traffic, conversions, and sales will more than compensate for it in the long run.
If you feel that your web host is not good enough, do not be shy in shopping around and finding a new one. Page loading times are extremely crucial, and you simply cannot afford to endure mediocre service at the expense of your revenue.
When it comes to website loading time, every second is crucial.
Final Word:
We hope that this guide helped you learn about the most common mistakes in the world of digital marketing and how you can steer clear of these mistakes. To learn more about the best digital marketing practices, feel free to check out some of the other blogs on our website.
The post 7 Digital Marketing Mistakes You Must Avoid appeared first on MEGAstream Media.
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