Frustrated with low conversion rates despite your sincere digital marketing efforts? It’s about time you discovered the reason and did something about it.
But before that, let us tell you that you are not the only one. Most startups and small businesses fail to implement a successful digital marketing strategy that helps turn mere website visitors into potential customers.
From connecting with the right audience to using the right digital channels, there are plenty of factors you need to remember to do digital marketing correctly. Fret not; this article discusses why your digital marketing is failing and what you can do to increase sales.
So, without further ado, let’s jump straight to the good part.
Top 7 Digital Marketing Mistakes That You Should Avoid Making
These are the top seven digital marketing mistakes that you should ditch right now:
1. Not Utilising A Well-Defined Strategy
Perhaps, the worst digital marketing mistake you can make is not having a clear strategy for marketing. You might think having a digital marketing strategy means using a little bit of SEO, posting content occasionally, and making Facebook posts now and then. But unfortunately, that will not work every time, at least not in the long run.
That’s why you need to focus on long-term planning and projection by giving more priority to strategy than tactics. You don’t need to be available on every social media platform or communication channel; focus on the appropriate platforms for your business. This way, you will be able to bring better results.
We strongly recommend documenting your strategy to ensure the steps you will take down the road. This will ensure that you are goal-driven and consistent with your digital marketing tactics.
Also, create a pragmatic marketing budget as a part of your marketing strategy. Always remember that a decent and realistic digital marketing budget is crucial to ensure you have the resources to achieve the desired results.
Long story short, effective digital and content marketing strategies could help create a marketing machine that could bring a higher return on investment and sustained organic growth.
2. Not Delivering Content At Each Stage Of The Customer Journey
One of the most common digital marketing mistakes that many marketers often make is that they don’t deliver content at each stage of the customer journey. Believe it or not, there are several stages that your website visitors go through before they become a customer; the different stages are:
Let’s learn about these stages in detail:
a) Awareness Stage
This is the first step of the customer journey, where people realise that they have a problem and look for different ways to solve it. They seek to read blog articles and eBooks that might assist them in narrowing down their general inquiries into something more focused.
b) Consideration Stage
Next comes the consideration stage, where people have figured out their exact problem and want to find a real solution. In this stage, they look for multiple resolutions (including the one you offer). So, ensure that you provide content that establishes your product or service as the finest available of the lot.
c) Buying Stage
As far as the buying stage is concerned, it is where the customer has made their mind to purchase something. Thanks to the content you created for the consideration stage, you have been established as an option. You must ensure that your buying pages provide the solution as quickly and effectively as possible.
d) Retention Stage
Talking about the retention stage is where you want to ensure that you can provide a long-term solution to the customer. The goal is to maintain a relationship with them so that they keep using your services from time to time. You must delight them consistently by expressing your support for them and offering services that would help make their lives smoother.
Social media platforms, newsletters and emails allow you to engage with the customers and customise your content and interactions.
e) Advocacy Stage
Last but not least, there is the advocacy stage, where you want to ensure that all the existing customers turn into loyal advocates for your business. For this, you need to keep nurturing the relationship with them by creating informational videos and articles that can help them make the most out of your service or product.
Don’t concentrate on creating just one kind of content, as all of these stages are part of your broader digital marketing strategy. Remember that every piece of content you make – videos or articles – needs to appeal to a specific stage of the customer journey funnel.
Furthermore, you must ensure that you target the content to the right audience for effective results. This means curating the website content while keeping the customer journey map in mind, which is an absolute must. You could also use paid search ads.
Users at different stages of the customer journey funnel often use different phrases while looking for what they want. Hence, we highly recommend that you do keyword research for every stage and be sure to target those keywords in your PPC (pay per click) strategy.
Long story short, you need to know your target audience and what they search for at every step of the marketing funnel. You can ensure a better conversion rate by serving the right type of content at the right time.
3. Not Utilising Automation Tools
Not realising the scale of the task is one of the worst blunders you can make in digital marketing. More often than not, when digital marketers try to do everything on their own, they run out of time and fail to deliver on their promises. This leads to them continually playing catch-up instead of being ahead of their competitors, resulting in many missed opportunities to win customers and new leads. A great solution to this is a marketing automation platform.
According to Martech Today, expenses made on purchasing marketing automation tools are forecasted to reach $25.1 billion annually by 2023. Here are the reasons:
a) Double The Number Of Leads
Digital marketers who use marketing automation tools generate double the number of leads than those digital marketers that rely on blast emails.
b) Faster Results
Believe it or not, nearly two-thirds of digital marketers claim to have witnessed the many benefits of marketing automation tools in less than six months of execution.
c) Popularity
According to a report by Salesforce, 81% of marketing organisations use a marketing automation tool. So this means it is pretty popular, and businesses are investing hefty amounts in these tools.
d) Increase In Revenue
Most businesses using marketing automation tools for over three years are known to perform well. Also, companies that automate lead management will likely see at least a 10% increase in revenue in less than nine months.
So, which automation tool should you invest in? We suggest starting with something like HubSpot and Zapier; these are easy to use and allow you to automate almost everything. HubSpot is, in fact, one of the most popular and commonly used automation software on the market.
Other tools like Google Analytics deliver the latest statistics on your content marketing performance. It provides insights that you may act on to take your digital marketing campaign to the next level.
4. You Don’t Promote Your Content
Another reason your digital marketing campaigns are failing is poor or no promotion. You are making a massive blunder if you just put out the pieces of content on the website and do nothing after that to promote them.
Let’s face it, until and unless you have a hugely popular site, people will most likely not care to visit it. Therefore, make sure that you are promoting your content on different channels so that people get to know about the business.
To ensure your content gets seen on the right channel by the right people, you must invest money and time into owned, earned and paid media. But you can start small by using social media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to share your content and build influence. Don’t depend too much on organic posts; consider investing in paid social media.
A report by Social Media Examiner suggests that Facebook is the most commonly used platform for social media marketing, including paid content promotion. Believe it or not, a whopping 84% of B2B content marketers utilise Facebook ads to constantly drive traffic to their content pieces.
Social media marketing is highly profitable as you don’t need to spend a fortune on it. And the best part is that it has excellent targeting capabilities. You can ensure conversions by getting your pieces of content in front of the right audience and getting the best value for the money spent.
5. You Don’t Split-Test
In this day and age, data is precious as it has the power to reveal the truth, and it’s no different when it comes to digital marketing. More often than not, people reasonably new to digital marketing assume that the paid ads, landing pages and the website are already performing optimally. But unfortunately, that’s far from the truth.
You need to test new ideas constantly and find out which works better; this is where split-testing enters the scenario. We strongly recommend split testing for email marketing, web design, landing pages, PPC ads and many more. However, be sure not to use too many variations simultaneously. The idea is to keep the variations simple, for instance:
After that, you need to run both versions simultaneously to find out which is performing better through the data provided by Google Analytics. If you find out that the second variation (variation B) brings more engagements and traffic than the first variation (variation A), use Variation B.
As you can tell, AB testing is an excellent way of optimising conversion rate.
6. Not Following The Latest Trend
Trends rule the digital world, and you can take over only if you know how to use trends to the company’s advantage. Many digital marketing plans fail because many marketers don’t understand trends’ significance while putting their marketing efforts into practice. So, be sure to keep yourself updated with the latest trends.
7. Not Considering The Mobile Experience
According to a report published in 2019, more than 50% of the traffic happens on mobile phones. Clunky checkout processes and slow websites are bound to alleviate those visitors that access your website and content solely through mobile phones, which could result in a poor ROI. Therefore, you must ensure that your website is optimised for mobile phones.
You can also consider developing an app for mobile phone users that they would want to download and use.
Stay On Top Of Your Digital Marketing
With that, we have come to the end of our informational guide. Hopefully, you have learned how to run a successful digital marketing campaign and fulfil your digital marketing goals. If you have any questions about your digital marketing strategy, Google Ads, or SEO, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Before we wrap up, here’s our last advice: never give up, especially if you are new to digital marketing. Your ROIs may not increase in weeks or even months, but results are bound to come if you keep implementing the above-mentioned digital marketing strategies. So, be patient.
That’s all for today. Until next time, see you!
Danny Mahoney
Danny is head of web design at sitecentre® and uses user-behaviour metrics to improve UX/UI and accelerate conversions. Using his unique combination of skills, Danny can deliver award-winning websites to SMBs quicker whilst delivering better results.
Find them on their website: sitecentre®, Facebook and LinkedIn.
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