Winning Your Digital Battle: Top 7 Digital Marketing Mistakes You Need to Avoid

This guest contribution comes from Flexisource. Flexisource IT provides a gateway to top-caliber fully managed IT teams dedicated to servicing Australian businesses and startups to scale up and grow rapidly.

In this fast-paced digital era, digital marketing is a vital aspect of business. It enables your brand to reach out, engage with your audience, and convert them into paying customers.

However, there are common digital marketing mistakes that you might be committing right now. Keep reading to learn what they are and how you can remedy them.

Why is Digital Marketing Important?

Digital marketing enables your business to effectively reach your intended audience and promote your products or services. Unlike traditional marketing campaigns, where you have a broad audience, digital marketing allows you to precisely target your niche audience.

In addition, applying the latest digital marketing trends and an effective digital marketing strategy can be advantageous for your business. Here are a couple of ways that your business can benefit:

• Increased Visibility
• Better Customer Targeting
• Cost-Effective Marketing
• Improved Customer Engagement
• Data-Driven Insights

7 Common Digital Marketing Mistakes & Tips on How to Fix Them

Chances are you are committing a couple of common digital marketing mistakes. While it is not exactly a sin, this could harm your business. The best-case scenario would just be a decrease in visibility.

We listed below seven of the most common digital marketing mistakes that startups and small businesses usually commit. We also added tips in digital marketing to help remedy these mistakes.

Not Publishing Blogs

Digital marketing is not just about promoting your business. It also includes establishing yourself as a respected industry leader.

This can help increase credibility, increase brand trust, and improve the perception of your company. Publishing blogs can also drive more traffic to your business’s website and improve your search engine ranking.

How to Fix This:

1. Identify the topics that are most relevant and interesting to your audience.
2. Create blog articles that are high-quality, informative, and engaging.
3. Consistently publish the blogs and ensure they are optimized for search engine optimization (SEO).

Not On Social Media

It is a big mistake not to be on social media. Basically, you are denying yourself the opportunity to grow your customer base and, ultimately, your business.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and other social networking platforms enable you to reach potential customers and promote your business online. In addition, it is the easiest way to share your content and directly engage with your audience.

How to Fix This:

1. Create a social media account on the platforms that are more commonly used by your target audience. It is better if your account is verified and has the iconic blue check mark seen on most social media platforms.
2. Start posting easy-to-digest high-quality content on your channel. You can opt to reuse published blogs and break these into bite-sized versions.
3. Make sure to post consistently. In addition, make it a point to engage with your audience in the comment section, in direct messages, and even when they tag you directly.

Ignoring Mobile Users

Did you know that nearly half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices?

If you designed your business website without factoring this in during web development, then you have essentially ignored more than half of your potential customers.

With that said, non-mobile-friendly sites usually raise a red flag for most web users. This is because it can be frustrating and difficult to use for most mobile users. All these will negatively affect your business and even cause you to lose more profit.

How to fix this:

1. Use a responsive design. Make sure your website layout and content can to any screen, especially for mobile devices.
2. Redesign your website with fewer elements and a much more simplified style. In addition, optimized images that have a smaller file size to make sure it loads faster and use fonts that are easy to read on mobile devices.
3. Test your website on multiple devices. This is to ensure that it looks and functions correctly for different screen sizes.

Underutilizing Keyword Research

It is important to prioritize SEO if you really want your business to be visible and attract more customers. This means it is important to figure out the keywords that are relevant and important for your business.

To do this, you need to properly utilize keyword research. This can help you identify what keywords and key phrases to rank for, which will ultimately help increase website traffic and potentially increase the conversion rate.

How to fix this:

1. Start by identifying your business goals and objectives. This can help you pick out the keywords that are most relevant to your goals.
2. Use a keyword research tool like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs to identify the most relevant and frequently searched keywords related to your business.
3. Analyze your competitors to see what keywords they are targeting and how they are ranking for those keywords.
4. Use your selected keywords to optimize your website content, including page titles, meta descriptions, headers, and body text.
5. Regularly monitor your keyword rankings, traffic, and conversion rates to see how your keyword strategy is performing. Then, just refine your strategy as needed.

Targeting a Broad Audience

One of the most common self-inflicted digital marketing challenges that startups and small businesses face is targeting a broad audience.

First of all, it is simply not a smart move since this requires a really big marketing budget. In addition, the assumption that targeting a broad audience will gain you more customers are not exactly true.

In fact, targeting a specific audience or niche can help your business reach people who are more likely to become paying customers.

How to fix this:

1. Identify your ideal customer. You can conduct market research and create a customer persona to pinpoint your ideal customer’s demographics and psychographics, and consumer behavior.
2. Tailor-fit your digital marketing strategy. This means being active on social media channels to approach your target audience and make the necessary edits in your content to effectively resonate with them.

No Social Proof

Social proof is a great way to show how happy your customers are with your product or service. It can be done by sharing testimonials, case studies, and success stories. The point is to let your audience know that other people have had a positive experience with your business.

With that said, if you do not have any form of social proof, then it will be hard to build trust and credibility with potential customers. This is especially challenging if your business is fairly new and not that well known.

How to fix this:

1. Reach out to satisfied customers. You can reach out on social media, email, or even via their mobile number, if they shared these, and then ask them for their feedback.
2. Create case studies that showcase how your customer resolved an issue or achieved success with the help of your product or services.
3. After making a sale, make sure to ask your customers to leave a review on your website, social media, and even other review platforms like Google.

Lacking a Clear Digital Marketing Strategy

A clear digital marketing strategy can help you avoid wasting precious resources such as time, money, and effort.

In addition, having a clear plan can help you effectively and efficiently target your audience, pinpoint the tactics that would produce the necessary results, and keep track of your business’s progress.

How to fix this:

1. Set SMART (specific, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals that align with your overall business objectives.
2. Conduct SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis to determine what area to focus on. This will make it much easier to determine your business’s unique value proposition.
3. Develop a content strategy for each marketing channel that you use. You can reuse and tweak each content you have created to fit the channel that you will be posting it on. 

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, digital marketing is meant to help your business become more visible and grow into a trusted thought leader in your respective industry.

However, digital marketing can be confusing since a strategy that works for Brand A might not work as well for Brand B. In addition, there are still some common mistakes that most startups and small businesses are prone to committing.

To minimize committing these mistakes, it is important to educate yourself on digital marketing and stay updated with the latest digital marketing trends.

Your turn…

Is there something missing from this list? Share your own insight and personal experiences in the comments below!

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