10 Common Digital Marketing Mistakes to Avoid in 2020
If you are earning the desired results from your digital marketing campaign, you are not alone. Even the most experienced professionals go through this phase where their campaigns do not yield the desired results.
Accordingly to Econsultancy, roughly 22 percent of the businesses are happy with conversion rate on their campaigns. Similarly, HubSpot’s State of Inbound (2017) report shows that the biggest marketing challenge for companies is generating leads & traffic (as per 63 percent of the marketers), and proving ROI of marketing activities (as per 40 percent of the marketers).
So, what’s the best way to attain desired results, generating leads for business, and proving ROI for your campaigns?
If we dig deeper and understand the reasons behind failure of the most campaigns, we can certainly find a number of simple but common mistakes that many marketers commit, and that lead disappointment.
Here in this piece, we’re going to identify top 10 marketing mistakes that most of the businesses make — and how you can avoid those.
1. Not Setting Clear Goals
One of the biggest marketing mistakes is on the planning side. Most of the people make the plans but don’t write it with clearer goals, deliverables, and KPIs. Dubbing such plans as ‘wish list’, experts argue that in order to ensure success of your campaigns, it’s vital to define targets, set KPIs (form submission, calls or sign ups etc.) and then set up analytics against those targets.
2. Not Following KYC Principle
The first rule of marketing is Know Your Customer (KYC principle), which essentially means understanding demographics and psychographics of the target audience.
Even if a business is creating mind-blowing content, it’ll lose a number of business opportunities if the marketing message is not in line with greater market needs, demands and psychographics. With the growing noise on the web, it’s vital to maximize ‘niche targeting’ to ensure your content gets noticed by the right audience.
You should develop user personas, place tracking pixels and cookies, and narrow down the interests/specifics in the audience selection, to ensure that your content and ads are reaching to the right people.
3. Not Putting Mobile First (Not Just Responsive Design)
Mobile is becoming the most dominant digital platform that people use today. Over 77 percent of adults (in USA) own a smartphone who consume 62 percent of digital content on mobile. If your digital strategy is missing mobile, it’s definitely a big issue. You can start the process by learning how your prospects are interacting with the brands and what’s their behavior towards you?
Remember, this is more than just making a mobile-friendly website. We’re talking about across the channel, mobile-first and mobile-driven strategy.
4. Not Augmenting Online with Traditional
If we look at the bigger picture (on the strategic level), many marketers make solo flight with digital channels, which may work in some industries but may not in the others. Take example of a consumer electronics product — you’re pushing it on through the web but are also marketing it via traditional channels. The launch events, print material, OOH advertising, TVCs and others are also doing the same.
Successful marketers reinforce their digital message via offline tools as well. They use branding material that makes their message more visible. For instance, if your goal is to gain more followers, consider distributing branded binders at a conference and include your social media addresses on the back cover.
5. Doing Impersonal Marketing
Personalization is the key thing in modern marketing. “Customer-centric” content and marketing messages that are enticing and tailored to their needs, likes/dislikes, and demographics. Many marketers just send “one message fits all” that does not go well with the prospects and majority bounces.
Conversely, if marketers could personalize the message according to the prospect’s journey, they can earn a considerably bigger amount of leads and business. Improper focus, lack of personalization, and miscalculated market positioning can be costly business decisions.
6. Writing off Email Marketing
“There is a lot of buzz surrounding marketing channels like mobile and social. However, neglecting email marketing is a costly mistake,” says Eric Stahl, senior vice president, product marketing, Salesforce Marketing Cloud. “As the lines between sales, service and marketing blur, email remains the customer journey’s connective tissue.
A survey from MarketingSherpa found that 91 percent of U.S. adults like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with. Of those, 86 percent would like monthly emails and 61 percent would like them at least weekly.
7. Not Integrating Sales with Marketing
One of the top marketing mistakes is not to aligning sales, business development, and marketing. As stated earlier, this leads to a distracted/distorted marketing message across the platform. Conversely, if sales efforts are backed by marketing, and augmented via same message being communicated on marketing channels, the chances of success turn higher.
For marketing, it is very important to meet and receive feedback from sales. This will ensure that they receive well-informed leads and can also help marketers understand the things their prospects like/dislike the most about their brand.
8. Not Setting the KPIs
When you are spending money and resources on marketing, you need to track the results of everything you do. If you are not getting any specific type of traction and results, you need to revise your marketing strategy. Many marketers do not set up analytics and KPIs to assess the performance of their campaign.
Always make sure that the efforts and money that you spend on the digital marketing campaigns are getting tracked in analytics tools and results are being measured. In addition to this, set up clear KPIs like clicks, forms submission, calls, sign ups, downloads, etc. to measure the ROI.
9. Ignoring What Competition is Up to
There are people who just start marketing without tracking what their competitors are doing. This costs in two ways: First, you miss a huge opportunity to find out what is working and what is not …. And secondly, your cost of ‘reinventing the wheel’ soars and eats your revenue. Therefore, be a smart marketer this year and commit to study your competition — and learn from their success/failures.
10. Not Upgrading Their Skills
Today’s marketing is not what it was 5 or 10 years ago. With all the strategic and technological changes, marketing is quite a complex job to handle now. In fact, HubSpot study finds that half of new marketing hires will require technical skills to ensure good performance on the job.
Therefore, make a list of top marketing skills in your industry — like analytics, SEO, digital advertising, content marketing, etc. and commit to upgrade your skills in the New Year. You can find new courses online, take subscription of Lynda (LinkedIn Learning) or maybe get enrolled for some course/degree. Just ensure to be better, smarter, and well-informed professional with every passing day, week, month, and year.
