Top Digital Marketing Mistakes You Need to Avoid if you want to grow online

Top Digital Marketing Mistakes You Need to Avoid if you want to grow online

Digital marketing is frequently changing. And because of this purpose, most of us will surely commit some mistakes while doing digital marketing. Even staying aware of the recent trends is falling short to avoid these mistakes. However, as digital marketing is helping the local businesses a lot to grow, any person who wants to develop his or her business online properly should be aware of the mistakes most of the people make with digital marketing. Anyone who wants to grow their business online should avoid the common mistakes people make with digital marketing. In this article, we will talk about some of the most common mistakes people do with digital marketing in this article.

Check the list below to be aware of the top 25 mistakes people make with digital marketing.

1. Not defining your target audience: a career-defining blunder most of us do: Understanding your target is the basics of digital marketing. A lot of people who know a lot of customer data such as demographics and preferences, but they still fail to comprehend them. In digital marketing, you as a businessman should create fictional portrayers of your target buyers. This will go far past the surface properties. So you always have to define your target audience properly. To build up a perfect digital marketing plan, you have to understand your audience correctly first.
2. Creating a documented strategy: A documented strategy for any long-term plans is essential. Especially in Digital marketing, a documented strategy is a very important aspect that most of the people fail to create. According to inbound marketing, sales and service software called HubSpot, only 32% of B2B marketers have a documented strategy for marketing. Now irrespective the brand your business is, a vast majority of your competitors do not have a well-documented marketing strategy. And if you don’t have a proper marketing plan, then you are also walking on the same path rather than walking in the roads of improvement. This can become your biggest mistake in digital marketing. It is not only important to select your goals and the target audience, but you should also map out your activities clearly in this field. We can recommend you to focus on 2 to 3 digital strategies at one time. Make a small marketing team do so. Or you can also leverage a digital marketing agency to help you in creating a marketing strategy.
3. Posting on Social Media without an end goal: We all know about the post Mark Zuckerberg posted earlier in this year on Facebook regarding focusing on meaningful interaction. It later revealed how Facebook users would not see many posts from different brands and businesses. However, it will encourage one thing, that is more social interaction between people. Creating valuable content that purposely engages your audience is the new way to get in touch with your viewers. Although this post was officially shared in January, creating valuable content that intentionally engages with your audiences. However, the best practice for social media marketing to keep posting about your business. However, merely posting to post does not cut it. You have to connect with your post with an end goal of connecting with the followers of your business because that will add some value to your actions regarding Digital Marketing.
4. Not Honing Your SEO Strategy: Improving your SEO is the primary aspect we all should keep in mind. Improving SEO is one of the top tactics to increase visibility in search, and it will also help your business to grow. The good news for you is that there are time-tested SEO techniques that will continue helping the websites and the blogs that show up in a search engine. Some of these includes

• The primary keyword in the title tag
• A precise meta description
• URL
• Visual and interactive contents to improve the dwell-time
• Includes authoritative backlinks
• Algorithms will continuously be changing. It means what is working today may not work tomorrow. So you have to have a very well researched knowledge about Search Engine Optimisation if you want to be ahead of your competitors. But if you are not even bothered with the SEO marketing even now, you might be opting for the biggest mistakes people do with digital marketing.

1. Underutilizing Case Studies: A Case study is a compelling thing to upgrade or improve your Digital Marketing. In addition to performing an incredibly well for the decision stage content, the case studies can boost organic traffic. Case studies if adequately utilised, can also improve your website experience and can increase your lead conversions. You see, anything you want to sell nowadays, people opt for the ratings and reviews quickly nowadays. So yeah! Stories do sell. Let it be any business; your clients will always want to know how the company have helped people to know whether you are or not a good fit to meet their needs. These reviews or stories will help you to increase your reliability amongst your clients. However, there are a lot of people who are not adequately utilising their case studies even after so many benefits of their work. So start implementing the case studies while you are trying to improve your business with digital marketing. It will keep you miles ahead of your competitors.
2. Forgetting about mobile users: Look, everyone does not have a laptop or a pc. People do not always carry those devices with them too. However, everyone has a smartphone in their pocket nowadays. So you should not forget about your mobile-user customers. Having a website is not enough. You should keep your site optimised for the mobile-users and their devices too. Because a laggy or lousy user interface mobile experience may deduct from the numbers of your customers. And when you don’t have a good user experience from mobile users, the deduction can be much more significant. 50% of people have agreed in a study that, they are less likely to use a company that does not have a mobile-friendly interface, even if they like the brand. So, now you can easily understand how important it is for your business to create a mobile-friendly website. If you are still not convinced, then check out another fact. It says almost 48% of people think that if the business does not have a user-friendly mobile interface, then they believe that the company does not care about their business. Now the decision is yours.
3. Never offering discounts or promotions: This is the worst thing you can do while wanting to improve your business via digital marketing. Offering coupon codes, bonus, and discounts to your customers will give your clients a positive vibe about your business. Offering discounts and promotions will encourage buying more from your business. Great deals for the customers will keep customers attached to your business. Offering more discounts will provide more traffic to your webpage. You can now easily advertise your sales. Your promotions will also increase your sales pretty clearly. Besides, more sales will help you to promote your business with word-of-mouth. Plus, another great thing is when you are offering discounts to your products, does not mean your customers will only buy the products listed on the discount. Instead, they will keep surfing, and if they like any other product other than the ones listed on the discount list, chances are they will buy that one too. Coupons are meant to build strong relationships between the companies and the customers.
4. Not having a blog for your website: Having a blog for your website is one of the worst mistakes you can do because blogs increase the traffic. Doing business with blogs have helped companies with 97% more inbound links. This will help you to increase the traffic on your website. Besides, proper interactive blogs can help you to build a better relationship with the customers. It is a very creative way to interact with your customers to communicate with you. Enable the commenting option in your blog. The more people commenting on your blog is, the more people find your business appealing. You should also respond to those blogs appropriately to make sure you are an interacting business person. You can get some great places for you to get some feedback about your business. People are not restricted to voice their opinions in blogs. Besides, integrating your blog with social media can also be extremely fruitful for you. Sharing your blog articles on your social media page will increase the numbers of readers on your blog.
5. Avoiding Social media: This is a very big mistake that you cannot even afford to do if you are willing to increase your business via digital marketing. If you are willing to go upwards with your business using digital marketing, which is one of the best ways to interact with your customers, then your business needs social media platforms. Without social media platforms, you just cannot reach to your target audiences. Unlike the other marketing avenues, it is free to create a Facebook or a Twitter account in the name of your business. You can open an account, and then a page about your business. Now with the page, you can share your business-related posts. This way, a lot more people will be able to know about your business. This a very less expensive way compared to traditional marketing strategies. Besides, in this way, you can also end up on the beneficial end of the story. Moreover, most of your competitors are not properly using social media. This can also be an excellent benefit for your business.
6. Forgetting to use Videos: After reading the last 9 points, you may think you now know a lot about the different mistakes people make while trying to improve their business with digital marketing. But maybe you still lack some crucial points. Have you tried using videos to advertise your business digitally? We understand most of your competitors, and our readers have not tried it yet. But hey! YouTube too is a social networking website right!? So why not use it if we are getting such a fantastic chance to promote your business? Every minute There are 300 hours of videos getting uploaded to YouTube. There are 1,3000,000,00 users, and almost 30 million new visitors every day. With these three numbers, you may have already realised what a chance it could be for your business, and you were wasting it all these days. Your business should have a YouTube channel. You should also post your videos to Facebook too.
7. Measuring ROI: Not measuring the ROI is one of the blunders that most people make with digital marketing even today. What kind of investment are you spending on marketing strategies? What return are you getting from those investments? These are some of the most important aspects you should keep in mind while spending on digital marketing strategies. Most of us tend to think that spending good on marketing strategies will get you, great customers. However, it is not true always. Spending on marketing is good, but, you have to stop throwing away money at digital marketing strategies without measuring the ROI. If you do not measure your Return On Investment, you will never know if your strategy was a successful one or not. A lot of businesses have lost money just because they did not measure the ROI properly. So you should keep your ROI in check to become successful in digital marketing.
8. Not commenting on blogs: This is another widespread mistake that people make with digital marketing. Not commenting on your blogs is not a very good idea. If your customers are commenting on your blog, you should reply to their comments. This may develop your communication with subscribers. You should increase your communication with your subscribers. Plus enhance your SEO too. Communicating with your customers will also help you to engage users with your brands. Subscribers will be pleasantly surprised to get replies from you. However, some businesses spam via blog comments. So, you should keep two things in mind while commenting.

• You should comment in an appropriate and professional manner
• Don’t spam while commenting.
• Engaging more with your customers via blog comments, you can also subtly promote your brand with messages like “keep supporting us” and such other comments.

1. Keep your website fast enough: Is your website slow? Slow websites might become a big mistake for you in the long term. Digital marketing depends a lot on your webpage and contents. If you spend all the time money and efforts to drive people to your website, you should also make the interface fast. Because, if your website is too slow for the users, they will not stay on your website for long. In the internet, people want to get fast results. Never let your loading time kill all the interest you have grown amongst your clients for your website. If you spend money to make your web hosting service as fast as possible, do it. Do it because every single second will count with the impatient tech-savvy generation. Find a new web host if you are not happy with the current one.
2. Spamming: Never spam your customers. Spamming may make your customers get bored with your business. There are some businesses that spam their customers without even knowing that you are spamming. But how can you determine if you are a spam account? Well, there are some points you can check to know if you are a spamming account or not. At first, you have to look at what kind of emails you have sent to your customers in the past. Check if the mails were

• Educational
• Helpful or
• Relevant

Relevance is extremely important. If the sent mails are not relevant for your customers, they will mark your emails as spams and will not read them ever again. So, if you are sending a message to your customers, make sure it is relevant for all of them.

1. To push or to pull? This is a big question many businesses get confused in. Businesses, before digital marketing came in, were mainly promoting their products to their customers. However, ask yourself a simple question, that why you expect your customers to take a look at your latest innovations if you are not addressing their concerns? Outbound marketing in this age where everyone has a smartphone and internet connection in their pockets becoming irrelevant. Because, with the internet, customers will easily do the needed research about your business. So, you should start pulling clients towards your business rather than pushing your products. Embrace inbound content marketing and start offering as much value as you can.
2. Spending little more time on personalisation: Emails overflowing with unread spam. Press releases clogged up social media feeds. Can you sense a common theme here? Yes, you are right. Both of these methods completely ignores the needs of the customers. This is why both these methods go unacknowledged as well as the business. Don’t repeat the same mistake with your digital marketing strategy too. Without personalisation, you will just become another salesman hiding behind a corporate mask. However, personalising your website will increase the interest in your business in the minds of your customers. However, customising your website can take a lot of money from your monthly budget; it will be a one-time investment until you want to change that. However, you can also hire companies. You can make handmade thank you cards for your customers to add a personalised touch to your business.
3. Not Understanding your data: Understanding your data is one of the most important of digital marketing. There will be a lot of data available to you. You can spend days looking at the stats and the numbers. But if you are looking at the right data, you will know what to do with it. The right numbers and stats will help you to know what are the strategies that are helping your business to grow and what are the strategies that are not. Therefore now it will be much easier to work with these data. Data monitoring is a tough job and what harder is to find a universal answer to what accurate data monitoring is. It is up to you to understand what is right for your business and what is not.
4. Giving enough time to your marketing strategies: A widespread mistake most of us do is not giving proper time to the policies we make. Like we said, your customers on the internet are impatient, and they will not wait if your page loading time is too slow. However, we should give proper time to our marketing strategies if we want to be successful. As digital marketing is continually changing, business owners assume that their strategy is not perfect for the long run. Hence they keep changing their marketing strategies too. And when they do not get immediate results, they easily get spooked, and they will pull the plan out. Although Digital Marketing changes fast, your clients are humans. They will take some time to get truly engaged. Therefore, you should also give some time to your marketing strategies too.
5. Failing to talk about customers and their problems: Look, no matter how harsh it sounds, it is the truth that your customers do not care about your business or your products. They only care about how your products are helping them to make their life convenient. So stop talking about the product in the product description, and start describing how your product can help your customers. Instead, you can merge these two concepts and talk about the product and how it helps to make your customers’ lives convenient. Business is all about turning your customers from a “Before” state and take them to a much-desired “After” state. So, start talking more about the problems of your customers.
6. Being Unwilling to pay for traffic: This is a massive mistake that a lot of start-ups do. They don’t want to pay extra for traffic. There was a time when SEOs and social media were not so complicated. On those days, free traffic from Facebook and Google were very easily available. However, those days are now over. In today’s world, all the high quality, reliable business websites are spending a lot of money. So, if you want to go that far with your business, you have to spend some money on the traffic. No matter how much time you spend sharing your marketing related posts from your account or page, if you want to achieve the top spot, you have to start spending money on website trafficking to promote your website.
7. Building online-based audiences and customers entirely: Building your audiences from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram is an excellent idea. However, building 100% of your customers in the social networking website is something not recommendable for you. Because, all these websites, no matter how much they have helped you in taking your business online and increasing traffics, they will change their rules. These rules, however, will not be in your favour always. So you should also be building a media asset on your own. By this, we mean your email list particularly.
8. Focusing on the quantity of the contents instead of the quality: The truth is the internet don’t need the blog posts anymore. They don’t need a podcast, a content or yet another YouTube video too. There are a lot of materials, videos and other things on the internet. So, now, whatever you add, you should focus on the quality of your content over quantity. If you focus on the quantity and not the quality, your content will get lost between the remarkable contents on the internet. Instead of creating a new blog post every month, you should put your effort to create a remarkable read-worthy content to attract more customers towards your business. Hence, you should keep the quality in check before posting content on your webpage.
9. Not aligning marketing goals to the sales goals: This is another widespread mistake that people do with digital marketing. Aligning your marketing goals to the sales goals is an essential part of digital marketing. Ask any company owner about their marketing and sales department, and they will tell you how these two fight with one another. This competition, however, is inevitable as the marketing department thinks that it is all about drawing attention and awareness, whereas for sales department it is all about… well, sales. The key to fix this problem is to get both these departments on the same page. Both of these departments need to understand that they serve different positions in the office. However, they are on the same team. So, the goal is not awareness or sales; rather, it is happy and prosperous customers.
10. Allowing shiny objects to distract you: There is an old saying that says all that glitters is not gold. However, most of our entrepreneurs do this mistake with digital marketing. This is the mistake that demises more businesses than almost any other points on the list. New channels, new tools, and tactics spring up daily in this fast-moving industry, and the world. The best you can do is to ignore them. Digital marketing is mainly about marketing and not digital. So, instead of getting distracted by the new products, you should concentrate on what worked always. Get some customers and give them offers. Drag more customers with quality contents and with a sound strategy for more website traffic. Stay focused on improving your email and other measurements. This will help you to get the best service to your customers.
11. Failing to test: This is another very important aspect of digital marketing. If you have set a goal for your business and then completely forget about it, you are just creating one more way to fail. However, if you have set a goal and constantly monitoring it on a daily basis, you may have started walking on the path of success. So, start testing your goals and actions to achieve them on a daily basis, and keep a record of it as that will help you to go far.

Some bonus tips that might help you with digital marketing:

• Turning down the guest posts: A lot of people does this with their website. Guest posts may not seem so attractive at first glance; they are fruitful to help you grow with digital marketing. With these posts, you are not directly adding the contents to your website. It might become a turn-off for some people. But you should take a step further to analyse it deeply. With the guest posts, you may reach to a completely new set of audiences who may not even know about the existence of your website. Guest posts are fantastic chances to get some exposures for free. You can link your blog and website with these posts as well too.
• Not using lead validation: Lead validations will separate internet marketing sales leads from different conversions. See, your customers are coming from
• Solicitation
• Sales representatives
• Customer service inquiries
• Empty submission forms and
• Job applicants
• Do not just lump all the marketing analytics in a group and assume all the conversions came from the same place. Validate your leads properly, because, not doing that means overstating the success of your campaign. This miscalculation will affect ROI results.

So these are the most common 25 mistakes that most of the start-ups do with digital marketing. Now you know about the mistakes, you should try to avoid these mistakes. As far as possible. It will take some time, but you will eventually get the desired success — best of Luck.