Most digital marketing mistakes relate to one of two scenarios: either the assumption that all campaigns and platforms are the same or that marketing is ‘easy’ and simply means replicating the same formula. The other is overcomplicating your approach to a marketing project and missing the bigger picture by focusing too much on granular results and metrics.
In this guide, the specialists at the Digital Marketing Jobs have collated all the mistakes we see most often, with tips and practical advice to help you get it right the first time.
1. Starting a Digital Marketing Campaign With No Quantifiable Goals
Every campaign, no matter the size of the budget, number of channels or promotions, or duration of the digital marketing plan, needs a strategy behind it to succeed.
Developing a vision or setting out the targets and goals you need to achieve can help shape every aspect of your campaign, where you have full oversight of all the parameters and variables, such as:
- Big picture aims: Do you want to increase sales revenues, engage with more customers, improve your brand reputation, or increase awareness of your business, product, or service offering?
- Competitors: The initial research that goes into a digital marketing strategy involves analyses of competitor activity, current digital marketing trends, and the wider sector – giving you knowledge of where your brand sits and the most viable ways to improve that brand positioning.
- Consumer demographics: Most brands have a rough idea of their core target audience, but often, that persona is subject to change, or the needs and priorities of loyal customers shift over time.
Creating a strategy shows where you are now, where you’d like to be, and the stepping stones along the way to get there. It also defines the tangible goals you’re trying to hit and the metrics and data points you’ll rely on to track and report on campaign outcomes.
2. Under-Targeting or Advertising to the Wrong Consumer Demographics
Many brands, even well-established multinationals, assume that reaching as many viewers as possible is the ideal – and, depending on your objectives and the type of brand or product you’re representing, that might be a solid approach.
However, more often, your digital marketing budget will have a far greater impact if you spend it wisely by fine-tuning your perception of your primary audience base and using precision targeting to reach those customer groups, ensuring all the leads you generate are far more likely to convert, and the audience you put your ads in front will be most likely to respond.
Relying on outdated consumer research can be equally disastrous, as you’re assuming that previous campaign targeting remains relevant. For example, if your brand has been in existence for ten years, the young adults you might have targeted at its inception might now be parents, professionals, and homeowners—their expectations and buying decisions will have grown and changed along the way.
Updated customer research can also uncover the right opportunities to meet that audience. For example, it can review the social media platforms, print publications, online marketplaces, and physical locations your audience most often uses when buying similar products or services.
3. Developing Great Branding That’s Let Down By Your Website or Customer Support
Amazing branding is undoubtedly a crucial part of the marketing mix, but if that isn’t supported by customers’ real-world experiences, it will commonly fall apart. Having an attractive, engaging brand might encourage viewers to respond, but if they find that the buying process is complex and frustrating or they can’t get a response to a question, they’ll likely turn elsewhere.
It’s also essential to consider your brand’s infrastructure and capacity before making major investments in digital marketing.
For example, if you have a winning brand formula and know your product is superb but also have limited production capacity, this may influence the way you position your branding, playing into the characteristics of scarcity, exclusivity, and rarity rather than trying to reach huge audiences whose orders you would not be able to fulfill.
Think about the basics.
- How good is your customer service?
- Is your website easy and fun to navigate?
- Can you answer queries via email, message, and social media quickly?
- How easily can a customer find information online, such as shipping times?
Even if you have 100% confidence that every buyer will be satisfied, you should also have a customer complaints policy and procedure and clarify how buyers can deal with returns and exchanges, pre-empting potential problems before they arise.
4. Skipping Key Elements: Including a Blog and Social Media Pages
Digital marketing does not exist in a silo; it is one cog in the bigger machine that is your brand marketing, sales functions, and service. Using high-impact digital marketing without putting the same effort into your social media presence, information sharing, and thought-leadership content can damage your results before you start.
That’s because today’s consumers make buying decisions based on more than product value and might select brands that they feel:
- Stand apart in a competitive sector and share thought-provoking content, ideas, and non-sales posts they can relate to and want to share.
- Represent innovation as credible, trusted industry experts who share useful, informative content that adds genuine value to the customer experience.
- Is there when they need them, whether a customer is searching your blogs and user guides for technical explainers, heading to your socials to find a video guide, or wants to raise a query through your online channels.
Creating cohesive brand content can contribute to higher SERP rankings, improve social proof and brand credibility, and position your business as a leader—all of which support your more promotional digital marketing campaigns and add to brand longevity.
5. Optimizing for Limited Devices
Although many brands focus on PPC and SEO, optimizing their website pages, blogs, and digital content with keywords and carefully selected phrases and using targeting to augment the returns on PPC advertising costs, they often miss an important element.
Many viewers who see your ads, view your socials or engage with your promotions will not be using a desktop or laptop.
Optimizing every piece of content and all the components of your digital marketing campaigns for mobiles and tablets is key, particularly because lagging, misformatted images or graphics that a viewer must scroll in or out to see rarely perform well.
Making sure that your website and all ads are created to be shown perfectly on a mobile device of any size, without slow loading times, can make a huge impact, particularly since around 50% of web traffic comes from mobile devices.
6. Ignoring SEO and Keyword Research
A less-common mistake, albeit a big one, is to think so much about creatives, imagery, and brand assets that you fail to optimize, with countless brands failing to recognize the collective importance of all those small details that contribute towards search engine rankings – these include:
- Keywords – including highly relevant and moderate-volume search terms, rather than just those with millions of searches that are very difficult to rank for.
- Meta titles, tags, and descriptions, clarifying what a piece of content is about and helping the search engines rank and index your content correctly.
- Rich snippets and other features, such as maps, location-based content, and added-value information, showcasing that your content is authentically useful and a good option to display in response to a search term.
Essentially, you can’t just conduct keyword research and leave your digital marketing campaign to run unsupervised. Digital marketers should monitor how their rankings evolve, see the traffic generated from each keyword, and keep adjusting and tweaking their content and promotions accordingly.
7. Not Following Up Leads or Monitoring Conversions
Each digital marketing campaign might have a defined objective, but many will aim to improve conversions, where casual viewers or interested consumers convert into followers, buyers, and engaged, loyal customers.
Tracking conversions and where they originate from is vital because even millions of website visitors aren’t particularly valuable if only a tiny number convert into customers. Rather than concentrating only on goal one – getting the viewer to visit your website – you need to think about how you turn that viewer into a customer.
Online leads can arise from keyword optimization, email marketing, link referral strategies, and social media campaigns – and by monitoring those sources and knowing where and how your campaigns are drawing in viewers, you can double down on those approaches that are working.
8. Relying on Customer Loyalty Without Incentives
Customers engage with and trust brands they like, who represent shared values, and who they consider more desirable than others, whether based on quality, value for money, positive experiences, or any other parameter.
However, a major error is assuming that customers will remain loyal and act as brand advocates, contributing to social proof through reviews, repeat purchases, and ratings.
Adding incentives or loyalty rewards, such as discounts, points systems, or offers, is a great way to recognize and reward customers who buy from you time and again and incentivize new buyers who aren’t fully committed to a purchase.
The happier your repeat customers are, the more case studies and background stories you can share, the better your social proof, and the more confidence new prospective customers will have when making those all-important buying decisions.
9. Concentrating Only on Your Campaigns Without Keeping an Eye on Competitors
Just as it’s important to revise and update your digital marketing based on responses, keyword performance, lead generation metrics, and campaign targeting success, brands should keep careful watch over their competitors, particularly in sectors where brands offer similar products or propositions.
Taking customers for granted will inevitably mean that when a competitor is more proactive about promoting offers, offering rewards and incentives, or differentiating their product or service from yours, your customer base will be tempted elsewhere.
Responding to good and bad feedback, revising and refreshing your offer, and updating digital marketing based on data-backed insights will keep your brand front and center, without letting your content and campaigns stagnate.
10. Taking on Too Much Without the Right Resources
Our final common mistake is trying to do too much, too soon, or all at once. We all know digital marketing can incorporate multiple channels, outlets, touchpoints, and strategies. Still, it’s far better to deploy one well-structured and well-researched campaign on one channel than trying to launch a multiplatform campaign that hasn’t been properly developed.
Having numerous strategies all working at once might mean you abandon or neglect some channels due to lack of time or don’t extract the returns available since you’re too busy running your business and monitoring other campaigns.
One powerful digital marketing strategy can maximize the impact of a limited budget, ensure precise performance oversight, and build on your returns in a sustainable and manageable way—without forgetting that the customer and their experience are always key.