9 Major Marketing Mistakes That You Might Not Realize You’re Making
You invest a great deal of time and money into your marketing campaign, so why isn’t it working?
The internet is no mystery. There are data sets for just about anything you care to see, and those who find success online often do a good job of documenting their journies. Still, many of us find no success when it comes to marketing ourselves.
The problem might not be things that you’re forgetting to do, but rather things you’re doing that are holding you back. It’s easy to make marketing mistakes that bottleneck your whole operation.
We’re going to look at some digital marketing mistakes to avoid, giving you a little insight into where you might want to take your campaign in the future. Hopefully, the ideas below help to straighten your course and start drawing more traffic to your site.
Table of Contents
1. Pushing Data Aside
As we noted above, almost everything you want to know is documented online. Whether your hosting platform tracks site metrics or you dig into Google to find what you’re looking for, the data is there.
The same is true for social media platforms, market research, audience analysis, and so much more. If you use all of the data at your disposal, your campaign will be more effective.
It’s as simple as that, but that doesn’t mean that it’s always easy. Things get simpler once you find a number of preferred interfaces to use in the gathering process.
There are a lot of digital tools that gather and interpret data for you so that you don’t have to. Once you get a read on all of those avenues, your job gets a whole lot easier.
The main thing, though, is to avoid shying away from data just because it’s overwhelming. Some of us don’t like numbers, and some of us hate spending an afternoon sifting through web tools. In any case, though, going through that process will help your marketing campaign.
2. Forgetting Your Target Audience
It’s essential that you sculpt an ideal “target customer.” There’s a hypothetical perfect person for you to market to, and individuals in the same categories as your perfect person are the ones that end up engaging with your site.
The trick is figuring out who that person is. You can develop a rough sketch of the target individual by looking at market data, analyzing businesses similar to yours to see who they’re marketing to, and landing on the type of person that would be most receptive to your content.
The person and the group are out there. There is a target market that would be most receptive to your business. If you find that market and you gear your campaign toward it, you will be more successful.
Many businesses forget about the target market when they go through their day-to-day marketing duties. The less you think about the target customer, the bigger the disadvantage you create for yourself.
So, make sure that you know who your target customer is. Next, make sure that your target is at the front of your mind as you work through your marketing campaign.
3. Over-Optimization
Search engine optimization is an excellent marketing tool. Great SEO makes for successful sites.
That said, Google’s goal isn’t to reward the websites that are optimized the best. Google’s goal is to provide value to its users. Optimizing too much or creating content just for the sake of web traffic often leads to penalties from Google.
Take an extreme example called keyword stuffing. If you stuff keywords, you’re jamming a bunch of unnatural target keywords into web copy. This makes the content less valuable to the ready because the writing isn’t targeted at serving a purpose.
Some sites even lay the keyword into the background of the page with the same color as the background itself. The idea is the more keywords you use on a page, the more Google associates it with the keyword phrase.
In reality, though, Google’s AI is smart enough to know the difference. When you’re caught, you lose a number of spaces in the rankings.
4. Leaving Your Site Unattended
A big part of digital marketing is the website through which all of your traffic flows. The exciting parts of marketing come in the form of content, PPC ads, social media followers, and everything you see on the page.
At the same time, your site won’t do well if it’s not managed. This is important for a couple of reasons.
First, Google looks to things like dead links, 404 errors, poorly arranged content, and site speed before it examines things like the quality of your content. A poor site restricts itself from good rankings.
Second, those issues make it a lot harder for the user to engage with your website. User experience suffers when your links don’t work and it’s hard to use your site. That pushes people away, which then filters back into the metrics that Google looks for in your SEO.
Before you invest time and money into on-page marketing and PPC ads, make sure that your site lives up to Google’s best practices and works well.
5. Working With Little Content
You can’t ride on one or two successful pieces of content. It’s not enough to invest a lot of time into a single blog post and base all of your optimizations on that one page.
Successful sites work with a content creation program that yields multiple posts every week. You need a steady stream of content to keep up with keyword trends and stay fresh in the eyes of Google.
One ranking factor is the age of your content, and while you’re good for a year or so, things start to lose their standing after that point. Also, a single post won’t harness the type of content needed to generate a lot of interest in your website.
So, make sure that you’re producing a regular amount of blog content or web content of some kind.
6. Relying On The Search Engine
It feels like we should be able to drop a line and attract millions of users if we work our marketing well enough. People think of online success as a secret formula that exists within the confines of Google and social media.
While success is very possible online, all of the magic doesn’t happen there. Part of the process is reaching out to people in your niche. Whether that means other businesses, customers, journalists, or any other recipient with some pull.
There are a lot of PR outreach tools that help a great deal when it comes to finding your audience. Use them, and see how much your metrics jump when you do.
7. Neglecting Your Email Lists
Email seems like an archaic digital marketing tool, but it’s very effective. People still use email on a daily basis in a lot of cases, and that fact doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.
The trick is generating a substantial mailing list. You can increase mailing list subscribers by adding calls to action into your content, including a button to subscribe to the mailing list in more of your web copy, and more.
Once you’re sending regular emails, there’s an art to crafting something that people will actually open. Strategies vary depending on your niche. That said, there’s a lot of potential in those subscriber lists, and you’d do yourself a disservice if you ignored them.
8. Underestimating Social Media
A social media site appears to be something like a local hangout. It’s a place where people post personal videos, pictures, statuses, and more about themselves to connect with their friends, right?
If you’re a business, social media is a very fertile marketing ground. You have myriad opportunities to market your brand on social media, and a lot of that opportunity is free.
Explore your market research to see where your target audience is spending time online and make sure that you invest in their preferred social media platforms.
9. Taking It On Alone
Many of the primary marketing strategy mistakes stem from the fact that people try to do everything themselves. Know that there are a lot of professionals out there who are willing to take on your marketing responsibilities and do an excellent job.
There’s a lot involved in a good marketing strategy. Most of the things aren’t ones that normal business owners think about on a day-to-day basis. In fact, many of the deeper digital marketing concepts are things that many people never think of.
It’s unrealistic to expect that you would be a master of marketing just because you’ve got some experience running a personal social media account. So, it’s never a bad idea to hire someone to do the whole thing for you.
Most of the time, it’s an investment that brings a significant return.
Want to Learn More Digital Marketing Mistakes to Avoid?
Hopefully, the marketing mistakes above aren’t ones that you’re making. If some of those ideas look familiar, though, make sure to take some time and assess your plan forward.
There’s a lot more to learn and we’re here to help. Explore our site for more ideas on digital marketing, social media success, technology, and more.