About 63% of leads who inquire about a business aren’t ready to convert for at least three months. In fact, 79% of leads will never convert into sales.
About 61% of marketers struggle to generate leads in the first place.
Without a strong digital marketing strategy, you could struggle to generate fresh leads. Without leads, you’ll never give your business the chance to grow! When marketing businesses online, however, it’s essential to have a plan.
Otherwise, you might end up making these common digital marketing errors.
Read on to discover the top marketing mistakes you need to avoid in 2022. Learning how to avoid these errors will set your campaigns up for success. Instead of allowing these mistakes to hinder your progress, you can get ahead in the new year.
Discover how to avoid costly mistakes throughout your digital marketing strategy with these tips today.
1. Failing to Establish Goals
Before developing your digital marketing strategy, it’s essential that you outline your goals. Distinct, measurable goals will help inform your overall strategy. You can determine what marketing services or tools you need for success.
When establishing your goals, try to keep them SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Results-Driven, Timely). Once you establish SMART goals, break them into smaller benchmarks. Then, you can track your progress along the way.
For example, you might start marketing businesses online to:
- Gain brand visibility
- Increase brand recognition
- Generate website traffic
- Gain leads
- Boost sales
- Establish your credibility
- Improve your ROI
Once you outline your goals, consider which digital marketing strategies you need to accomplish each one. For example, you might want to update your website’s design and development. An updated website can benefit other components of your digital marketing strategy.
If you want to gain brand visibility, consider using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and social media marketing.
To prove your credibility, consider creating thought leadership blog content. Use search engine optimization (SEO) to improve your rankings. SEO and higher rankings can boost web traffic and your credibility.
Brand trust could grow, allowing for repeat sales.
Once you outline your goals and the strategies you want to use, you can start marketing.
2. Never Tracking Campaigns
If you want to avoid these common digital marketing errors, make sure to track the progress of your campaigns.
First, establish a key performance indicator (KPI) for each SMART goal you create. For example, you can track:
- Unique website visitors
- Return website visitors
- Dwell times
- Bounce rate
- Clickthrough rate
- Search engine rankings
- Open rate
- Social shares
- Likes
- Comments
Tracking KPIs will help you determine if you’re meeting specific benchmarks. If you’re not, you might want to adjust your campaigns. Making immediate adjustments can help you avoid wasting time and money.
If you’re not tracking your campaigns, you might not realize there’s an issue until it’s too late.
3. Targeting All Consumers
One of the biggest mistakes that can hurt your digital marketing strategy is broad targeting.
Instead, consider who you’re trying to reach when marketing businesses online. If you have a large audience, break it into smaller buyer personas. You can define each group based on:
- Gender
- Location
- Age
- Buying behaviors
- Services
- Household income
- Pain points
- Interests
- Hobbies
- Language
- Education
- Marital status
For example, a law firm might create groups based on different legal needs. A clothing store might create groups for men, women, boys, and girls.
Segmenting your target audience will allow you to personalize your content and marketing messages. Other three-fourths of online consumers get annoyed when content doesn’t align with their interests.
Personalization, on the other hand, can help you generate more leads and sales.
In fact, 90% of businesses notice a measurable lift in results after personalizing messages. About 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands personalize.
Personalizing your messages could deliver eight times the ROI on your marketing spend, too.
Personalization will help you better appeal to consumers, allowing you to generate more leads and sales.
4. Neglecting Trends
Once you create a digital marketing strategy, it’s important to make sure it’s up-to-date. Don’t make the mistake of neglecting the latest marketing trends.
For example, Google’s search engine algorithm updates regularly. Each update causes new SEO trends to emerge. Lately, voice searches and video content have become more popular.
AR and VR video content is becoming more popular, too.
Today, more businesses are adding video content to their social media marketing strategies as a result.
Keeping up with the latest trends will allow you to remain relevant. Consumers will realize you’re informed and up-to-date. If you neglect these trends, they might think you’re behind the times.
They might choose to do business with one of your competitors instead.
5. Abusing Social Media
Don’t make common digital marketing errors like neglecting or abusing social media.
Some businesses avoid using social media altogether. Avoiding social media marketing might impact your ability to reach customers online. Consumers might question the legitimacy of your business if they can’t find you, too.
However, it’s also important not to post on social media too often. If you post too often, it might bother your followers. They might decide to unfollow you, impacting your ability to reach them in the future.
Consider adding a mix of different social media platforms to your digital marketing strategy. You can reach people at different touchpoints to create a cohesive experience.
6. Forgetting to Update Your Site
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is neglecting your website.
Consider investing in business website design this year. A slow, outdated website can impact your ability to reach customers. An upcoming, innovative website will impress your customers.
If your website isn’t fast, secure, or mobile-friendly, your website ranking could drop. Lower rankings will impact your ability to reach customers online. You might struggle to generate brand awareness and website traffic.
If your website isn’t optimized for smaller screens, visitors might leave. Your bounce rate will rise, which can also hurt your rankings.
Instead, make sure your website is up-to-date with the latest user experience (UX) design trends. UX web design will ensure your site is easy to navigate and use. Visitors might decide to linger, increasing your dwell times.
Higher dwell times could help your search engine rankings improve.
7. Failing to Retarget
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising allows you to create digital text and display ads. These ads can appear on search engines, social media, and other websites. You can use PPC ads to generate brand awareness, web traffic, and leads.
As part of your PPC strategy, don’t forget to retarget.
Retargeting allows you to reappear in front of people who previously visited your website. You can get a second chance to convert those visitors into sales.
You can even use display ads to show consumers the exact products they abandoned in their carts.
Retargeting can improve your PPC advertising ROI. You can increase conversions and avoid losing potential customers. Meanwhile, you’ll have an easier time remaining top-of-mind, too.
8. Overlooking Email Marketing
As you work to avoid these common digital marketing errors, consider your email marketing strategy.
Email marketing is another means of remaining top-of-mind. You can inform potential customers about your:
- Industry
- Business
- Accomplishments
- Products/services
- Blog posts
- Deals/coupons
You can keep consumers up-to-date throughout the year. You might even entice them to return to your site for exclusive content. Offering deals and coupons can lead to an increase in sales, too.
Make sure to add an email subscription form to your website. Then, create an email drip campaign. You can send regular updates while automating your digital marketing strategy.
Automation can save you valuable time and effort. You can boost leads and sales without wasting time on email creation.
9. Not Developing Omnichannel Approaches
Before marketing businesses online, consider your overall digital marketing strategy. Make sure you’re appearing at multiple touchpoints. An omnichannel approach will allow you to remain top-of-mind.
You’ll have an easier time generating brand awareness and recognition as consumers continue viewing your brand. You’ll also have more than one opportunity to convert leads into sales.
About 70% of all online experiences start on a search engine. You can use SEO and PPC to reach those customers online. Your blog content will demonstrate your experience and expertise in the industry, too.
Then, you can use PPC advertising and social media marketing to help consumers learn about your products and services. Social media marketing is a great way to keep people interested and engaged.
Guest blogging will allow you to market your offerings on other websites.
You can even partner with influencers to expand your reach.
An omnichannel approach can help set your entire strategy up for success.
10. Never Hiring an Agency
If you want to avoid these costly mistakes, consider hiring a digital marketing agency this year.
They can help develop your omnichannel marketing strategy. They’ll ensure you avoid mistakes that can hurt your ROI. Instead, they’ll help you generate more leads and sales throughout the year.
Major Mistakes: 10 Common Digital Marketing Errors to Avoid
Don’t let these common digital marketing errors hurt your business. Instead, consider developing an omnichannel digital marketing strategy. You can work with an experienced agency to avoid costly mistakes in the future, too.
With their help, you can reach more customers online and set your business up to grow.
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