Frequently-Made Digital Marketing Mistakes That Can Destroy Your Market Position

However, marketing experts suggest as much as 20% of the advertising budget is wasted by digital marketers on egoistic projects and common digital marketing blunders without considering metrics like the return on investment and customer engagement. A brief look at the most frequently-made digital marketing mistakes and how to eliminate them.

Pushing Your Product Instead of Pulling Customers
Despite what many people might think, good marketing is not about keeping on harping about your product. The most important thing is to offer your consumers something that they will find valuable so that they will give their business to you. Remember, most customers could not care less about the latest product even if it is very innovative if their essential concerns or requirements have not been addressed. Increasingly outbound marketing is becoming redundant in an environment where the focus is on customer satisfaction and in an age where everyone can research your company and its products and services with the click of a button. 

Inbound marketing adopts a diametrically opposite stance to the traditional outbound marketing. Inbound marketing revolves around interactive and two-way communication that prompts customers to reach out to you via social media and search engines rather than seeking out customers with print, radio or TV advertising or even cold calling on customers. In inbound marketing, the focus of marketers is to provide value while entertaining or educating customers whereas in traditional outbound marketing, little or no value is added and there is hardly any effort to educate or entertain customers.

Contemporary digital marketers should attempt to embrace inbound marketing and try to offer the maximum possible value to customers as they can. Finding out that information customers are trying to find out about you or your offerings is important as according to studies, 93% of the companies have been able to increase lead generation with inbound marketing techniques.

Letting Your Own Aspirations Mould Opinion about Buyer Personas
A very important component of inbound marketing is the creation of buyer personas; however, quite often marketers tend to get it wrong. It is vital to keep in mind that the customer is not who you think they are but real-life people transacting and using your products. Marketers should focus on creating customer personas based on the profile of existing customers and incorporate their requirements and aspirations to get on what the customer of the future is looking out for. The best way for creating accurate customer personas for marketers is to invest time and effort in finding out the details of customer spending behavior and what they are researching on. If the business is new and there is no existing base of customers, asking your target audience or the customers of your main competitors is an effective method of gathering information. It is important to get the customer personas right as the entire content management strategy can go completely awry otherwise.

Not Devoting Enough Time and Effort to Customization 
Most of the communication digital marketers send out to their target audiences do not elicit the desired response simply because they ignore the real needs of the customers. When the message is not customized to the needs and wants of the customer, any communication tends to be treated the same as a cold call by a salesman at the door.

Since genuine personalization can be exceedingly difficult requiring marketers to have a complete understanding of customer requirements and aspirations, it may not be possible for most of them to devote adequate attention and monetary resources required. However, even the smallest of efforts like addressing the communication by the name of the customer can often make a huge difference to the open rates of emails. The extent of customization of the entire shopping experience depends on how much information you are tracking of the customer and how much effort you are willing to put into building a genuine customer franchise. Many smart marketers are taking advantage of a digital marketing agency that can do the job on their behalf and allow marketers to focus on what they do best. 

Content Not Focused on Conversions 
The lifeblood of marketing is lead conversion so all the content on your website has to inspire readers to click to buy a product; else it will be termed as a failure. Content, even if it is written well, is only useful if it is productive and boosts your sales revenues. If you think you have great content but it is not producing the desired results, it could be because the focus may be on product attributes and not on the benefits, or may not have factored in objections of the consumers. Other factors that may be hindering the conversion may be that you are being too pushy about selling and failing to link the product to a relevant offer. It needs to be kept in mind that for content to produce results not only should it be focused on consumers but also be able to connect with them at the right time. The solution is to always keep your buyer personas in mind while producing content because only then you will be able to help them to extract the best value out of it. Great content should leave the readers satisfied and willing to come back for more.

Conclusion 
Digital marketing in the contemporary environment is extremely competitive and often you need to go all out just to make your mark or retain your market share. However, as with all marketing activities, you will need to put the investment under the scanner periodically and evaluate the return on investment. There are various aspects of marketing ROI and it is very easy to get it wrong. As you perform the analysis, you need to remember to include all the components of the digital marketing campaign and ensure that at the end of the day, marketing is an exercise that generates revenues and profits and does not end up being a cost center.