Digital marketing has become a crucial factor for the success of businesses. For any company, having an online presence and utilizing it to the best of your abilities is a great strategy to reach a wider customer base and promote your brand effectively.
However, not having the right knowledge can lead to a lot of fruitless efforts in digital marketing.
Content without views, an inactive social media profile, advertising randomly without a defined audience are some of the ways you lose out on potential customers by bad digital marketing. This leads to high bounce rates, which is something you need to absolutely avoid.
Reports say that digital marketing spend will reach $146 billion by 2023. A digital marketing expert can help businesses leverage the potential of digital marketing. What are these mistakes that beginners often make while trying out digital marketing?
Fear not. With the arrival of 2023, you can utilise the power of the digital to the maximum to help your business flourish. Here is a comprehensive list of 10 mistakes that you can avoid as a digital marketing expert:
1. Not Utilising Social Media
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At a time when people use social media to access entertainment and news, you are stumbling on your digital marketing goals by not tapping into this active user base.
If you need to engage with existing customers and also reach new ones at the same time, social media marketing is a great way to do this. Not only does this drive website traffic, it also builds your brand reputation and increases sales.
How to use Social Media for Digital Marketing?
- Maintain active profiles over a range of social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
- Engage with social media users through polls, surveys and comments.
- It’s best to learn about your audience directly from them when you can, rather than depending on third-party statistics.
- Always plan and post. Focus on consistent posting during proper timings to garner maximum views and engagement.
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2. Not Defining Your Audience
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With any new firm, the challenge is to identify an audience base that you can effectively tap into. A digital marketing blunder is trying to reach everybody at once – this is expensive and inefficient especially with limited spending capacity.
You need to tap into a limited audience who have a larger chance of visiting your business, checking out your products and purchasing. This is the only way you can increase conversion rates and boost sales.
How can you do this?
- Get to know the people who are your potential customers – this is the crux of defining your audience.
- Group your audience based on their buying habits. This can help you get to know expectations and any issues they face with respect to your brand. Solving these is the best way to ensure customer loyalty.
- Use social media to engage with them. This involves replying to comments and messages. Replying to Tweets can also be utilised as an effective marketing opportunity.
3. Sacrificing on Email Marketing Campaign
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Ignoring email marketing is one of the silliest mistakes you can make as a digital marketing expert. Email marketing is an easy system to effectively reach your customers and engage with them.
You can make them aware of new products, offers, changes in service etc. Not only do you promote your brand, you also keep customers engaged between purchases so that your company does not get thrown into a corner of their search history.
Acing this is important to build a loyal business-consumer relationship.
How can you ace Email Marketing?
- Set up a proper email marketing goal with your marketing team.
- Structure emails that share news, offer your customers benefits and engage with them.
- Incentivize customer loyalty. A discount on signing up for your newsletter, free shipping on a second order and exclusive coupon codes are great ways to keep the customer hooked on to your email marketing.
- Avoid spamming at all costs. By signing up, the customer has trusted you with their email address. Flooding their inbox with promotional material will make them want to unsubscribe.
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4. Ignoring SEO Basics
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Google currently holds 92.21% of the total worldwide search engine market share. This itself shows the impact that popular search engines have on influencing customer decisions.
Search engines can be a double-edged sword, both giving you an opportunity for visibility but also helping competitor websites access the same platform. This is why Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is important for your online marketing campaign.
How to get SEO right?
- Knowing and using the right keywords can always help you stay ahead in the SEO race. It is important to use a digital marketer’s expertise and figure out keywords with the optimum search volume.
- Focus on getting quality content out there over quantity. It should also be relevant to your customers’ interests. Using rich images, videos and charts is also a great way to engage with readers.
- Having a clear and short URL with important keywords that define your page are also important for search engine results.
- Getting enough backlinks is also a great way to have search engine trust.
5. Failing the Mobile Users
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Today, the percentage of internet traffic is more for mobile users compared to desktop users. Customers use their phones for more than just calls – apps, social media and most of all, search engine use.
Mobile marketing is also an important aspect of digital marketing by which you can promote your content based on audience behaviour and location service.
This helps you design specific marketing campaigns based on your customers’ individual interests.
- Optimise your website for mobile-users.
- Mobile app marketing: Creating an app specifically for mobile users is also a way to help mobile-users and simultaneously, establish a direct relationship with them.
- It is also necessary to make sure customers can switch easily between devices without experiencing any difficulty. So, make content that is accessible across a range of devices.
- Explore the choices available in mobile marketing such that you have a budget-friendly, yet effective digital marketing strategy.
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6. Combining all Tasks with One Person
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This is one of the biggest digital marketing mistakes. It is impossible to focus on statistics, effectiveness and quality when being responsible for all aspects of marketing and advertising. Instead, it’s important for a business to hand over the digital marketing or social media part of its advertising to an expert.
How can you separate tasks?
- Have a social media and digital marketing team in your company that can monitor statistics and manage the audience online more carefully.
- You can alternatively find a marketing agency who can manage the digital marketing part of your business more efficiently.
- Separating different tasks helps you focus on other aspects of your business while making sure that you are not neglecting your digital presence.
7. Aimless Blogging
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Maintaining a keyword researched blog on your website obviously increases the chances of it getting discovered on a search engine. But without a strategy, blogging can never keep your customers engaged – they leave after that one visit to your website.
Vitor Peçanha, founder and CMO of leading content marketing agency Rock Content says, “We must create a journey that turns these one-time visitors into fans of our content and our brand”. Quality blogging helps businesses do just that by providing customers relevant and engaging content.
How can you ace your blog section?
- Make sure your content solves a problem that your customers face. This can be addressing frequently asked questions (FAQs), explaining about your product or service, and interacting with them in the comments section.
- Aim for specific blog topics rather than vague and pointless rambling. Customers only visit a blog if it provides value to them. Quality content addresses each topic in separate blogs instead of putting it all together in one encyclopaedia format.
- Make sure each post is useful! There are millions of blogs turning up on the internet everyday and for your blog to stand out, it should be search engine optimised and spectacular. Focus on one good blog every week instead of 5 mediocre ones every day.
Bonus Tip: Invest in a Digital Marketing Course
Whether you are a small-business entrepreneur planning to go digital in 2023, or a student passionate about helping businesses grow with the power of the digital, a carefully curated digital marketing course can be your solution.
You can learn more about Digital Marketing by enrolling in a digital marketing certification course that can kickstart your career as a digital marketing expert or simply profit your company.
Aditya Centre of Excellence (ACE) offers a short 6-month NSDC-qualified certification in Digital Marketing that prepares aspirants to take on the role of Digital Marketing Manager.
Learn about Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Website Planning, Designing & Creation and so much more in this all-encompassing certification.
The eligibility is any graduation, so you can apply to this course regardless of the subject background you come from.
Join now.