Today, digital marketing holds a strong contribution to the success of any business online. It has the potential to generate a stream of targeted audience to the business website, and eventually make conversions and sales. And probably, this is what is compelling 28% of marketers to reduce their traditional advertising budget to fund digital marketing activities. However, it works best only if it is implemented in the right way.
So, no wonder, you develop a digital marketing strategy, and it fails. This may probably occur because there are some shortcomings in your digital marketing strategy. Read further to know what are the common mistakes in a digital marketing strategy that leads to disappointments.
1. Getting Traffic But No Conversions
One of the most occurring issues for digital marketers is that they fail to convert the leads they get on the website. If this is the case with your business, you should be focusing on the following advice to avoid this.
How to improve it?
At first, know your market. You should know your customers’ preferences to develop a successful digital marketing strategy that brings conversions. You can do research to better understand your customers, their taste, preferences, and behavior. This helps you to develop a productive strategy to attract the right audience.
Another thing you should do is to write a copy that sells. If you want your website and social media post to look decent, improve the content quality. The content must engage the targeted audience with engaging blogs, descriptions, and marketing posts. The content has the potential to engage users via emails, landing pages, and social media sponsor posts. Failing to write proper content that doesn’t take the buyer’s journey into consideration may result in letting all your efforts down the drain.
To make your efforts pay off, you have to create consistency in your brand voice. Your messaging should be consistent because an unclear message across all your campaigns and marketing channels will appear incoherent and turn leads away from your website.
2. Setting Wrong KPI’s
If you evaluate your performance with the wrong Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), you won’t be able to improve your conversions despite putting a lot of effort into the areas where you should not.
How to improve it?
Put your focus on conversions rather than just rankings. Track valuable conversions like email link clicks, telephone calls, form fillings, downloads, and live chat, etc. evaluating these will let you know about the result-driven channels, and so you can allocate more budget to those channels.
Analyze your performance from qualitative data as well. Numbers do tell your success, but it is also worth to measure success through qualitative data. To do this, you can conduct interviews and surveys from your customers so you can evaluate how happy your customers are.
3. Developing Campaigns for the Wrong platform
Failing to know your audience could lead you to develop and run your digital marketing campaign on the wrong channels. So, if you do not invest in performing in-depth consumer research, you might fail with your marketing efforts no matter whichever clever strategy you choose to work.
How to improve it?
To avoid this problem, you simply have to understand your audience. There is no escape from it. To make your digital marketing campaigns a success, you need to do your customer research.
4. Tough SEO Competition
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can become very technical and challenging for your business, especially if you are in a highly competitive setting. If you are finding it hard to rank on the first page of Google SERPs, you can improve in the following ways.
How to Improve it?
Manage the unique identity of your business. Do something different from your competitors to fill in a gap and stand out from others.
Stay updated with SEO trends because algorithms change frequently. What else you should definitely do is to optimize your website properly. You may not be ranking above your competition because your on-page and off-page SEO are poorly optimized. Working with a reliable digital marketing agency enables you to detour this steep curve and get there.
5. Setting Unrealistic Expectations
You need to establish realistic expectations before you start any campaign, Lots of business owners make the mistake of working with limited or insufficient resources, yet they aim for striking results. This will only end up in disappointments, stopping campaigns too early, or investing efforts and money in the wrong campaigns.
How to Improve it?
Set SMART goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely. These goals can be achieved in a cost-effective and realistic manner. For instance, aim for rank on the first page of Google SERPs in a period of 1 year, or to acquire 200 newsletter subscribers in 4 months.
How to Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy?
In order to improve flaws in your strategy, and importantly, to keep staying in the industry with constantly increasing competition all around the market, marketers are required to work tirelessly and effectively. The following are some reliable ways companies can refine their digital marketing objectives and strategy to acquire their desired results and even more than that.
1. Set a Clear Objective
Nail down what exactly your objective is. Clearly define your business goals, including objective and mission. Then, develop a digital marketing objective that syncs with the greater objective of your company.
You can simply answer a simple question to strategize your digital marketing objective in a way that benefits your business goal. Answer to the question, what is the dominant objective that you want to achieve from your digital marketing efforts. For instance, if you are a mobile app development company, you can say you want to set your company as the go-to software solution provider in Dallas. You get your mission out of all your digital marketing efforts.
Afterward, set and analyze key performance indicators (KPIs). Identify the figures that you look forward to seeing from your business. Get specific with those and be accountable to achieve those figures in a given time. To do so, you need to set realistic goals and performance indicators. It’s better to analyze your past digital marketing efforts to check where you are standing and where you can reach in the given time. So that you aim for a realistic expectation while aiming for a positive increase on your existing results.
Go for a method that helps you evaluate your performance for each of your KPIs. You can use Google Analytics to measure your conversions, and tools like SEMrush to track engagement and social media analytics.
2. Focus on Conversions too, along with the Leads
Data is one of the most important contributors to a successful digital marketing strategy. Consequently, data and metrics need to be kept into account while making every action and decision regarding marketing.
Data reveals that at which online platform potential customers are spending their time, including websites and social media platforms. As a result, you can target the audience in the right place and time.
Conventionally, Business to Customer (B2C) marketing strategies are used to target a wide set of audiences, expecting to acquire the best from them. However, with the advances in big data, it has been made possible to target potential customers on an individual basis and enhance conversion rates.
After targeting particular demographics and audience segments with effective content, product recommendations, or incentives, marketers can use further strategies to let customers make a decision to purchase.
3. Set Strong Grounds for Long-Term Value
For digital marketers, fast results seem amazing. However, along with short-term wins, marketers should always focus on long-term rewards while developing digital marketing strategies. So, it is always wise to perform proper research to make a double check if the investment in a particular social media campaign will pay off the efforts in the long term or not.
Not only in campaigns but also while purchasing specific tools and solutions, marketers should make sure that the tool is specifically productive for acquiring their particular results. Make sure that acquiring those tools will help the marketing team in the long run and not just for the short-term objectives.
Moreover, it is not always necessary to line up a multi-year strategy for your business, but it is beneficial for your business to figure out the major objective for your business in the long run. This includes planning for how a certain tool will help you take your business to the desired destination in the future. Marketers should also make sure they understand where the brand best stands to benefit from the latest trends before making any decisions that may impact long-term progress.
4. Include Social, Mobile and Local Efforts in your Digital Marketing Strategy
To get the best out of your digital marketing efforts, you should work on maximizing your mobile, social, and local digital marketing. These are the popular channels where you can be acquiring amazing results in less time. According to a study, 90% of adults own mobile in the USA, among which 63% of the public owns a smartphone to use the internet. You should optimize your website for these users and design your local SEO strategies as per the analytics.
The power of Social media marketing is no longer a hidden tool, and the adoption of social media platforms is also going mainstream, changing the way people use search engines. Social adoption has gone far beyond having profiles on major social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, and Pinterest, but should include maintaining an active social media presence that results in engagement from targeted audiences. Social media platforms have the potential to deliver great social sharing advantages as per the requirements of your business.
5. Use a Multiple-Channel Digital Marketing Campaign
To increase results, you should plan your digital marketing strategy in a way that includes a results-driven campaign for reaching out to the targeted audience and generating favorable responses from them.
It is crucial for the success and survival of your business to connect and engage with targeted audiences. Therefore, you should build a strategy that covers a multi-channel campaign. To do so, you should integrate display, mobile, social, and video marketing into your digital marketing mix.
6. Use a functional Content Creation Strategy
Content holds a major contribution to the success of your online strategies. Therefore, you should focus on developing an effective content strategy for your digital marketing campaign. To stand out in a wide array of competitors, use content that actually engages your targeted audiences. If they like it, they will share it via their social media accounts and through word of mouth. This serves as an excellent organic marketing strategy for your business. Create content that has the potential to deliver the results you want. Well-Written and engaging content can deliver the following benefits to your business:
- Deeper engagement and higher conversions
- Twice as many readers in less time
- Increased traffic
- Produce hundreds of shares and visitors
- Potential to provide up to 200k page views in months
7. Add Value to Your Content with Videos, Images, and Links
Digital marketing revolves around the presentable and highly engaging content all set up to help the audience choose a product and make a purchase. This requires the content to be highly engaging up to the extent where it convinces users to make a decision. And users get better involved when the content is a mix of images, videos, source links, and other graphical elements. You can create short SMM videos for your digital marketing campaigns.
Content with visual elements will not only garner views but also produce increased engagement from targeted audiences. According to the SEO Ranking Factors and Rank Correlations 2014, content with more photos, videos, and graphical content is more likely to rank higher in search results.
8. Diversify Your Digital Marketing Strategies
Implementing a multifaceted digital marketing strategy will contribute to bringing favors to your business. Later on, developing and using a diversified channel strategy for digital marketing will bring improved results.
To acquire results that focus on bigger objectives, you cannot rely on only multi-channel social media marketing or other organic ways of digital marketing. Since the website traffic is a mix of multiple varieties of efforts, it is not sufficient to use only a few ways of digital marketing which focuses only on a limited audience. This might result in losing a lot of opportunities coming from multiple platforms for your business.
With the wide array of information channels available at fingertips, consumers are more empowered and have more freedom to choose their purchasing options. Most consumers today, do some research on their own before making a purchase. Generating targeted customer contact list or engaging through the online channels that the audience uses, gives a better chance for your business to produce the desired results.
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