7 Digital Marketing Mistakes You Might Be Making (& How to Avoid Them)

By 2023, the global digital marketing spend will reach $146 billion, according to a Forrester report. Brands are increasing their investment in digital marketing solutions because they work.

But not always!

Many businesses’ digital marketing falls short. Why? Because most of them are making these common marketing mistakes. Don’t be one of them – boost your brand growth by reading more!

1. Not having a clear growth marketing strategy

Clearly defined digital marketing strategy

Figure 1: 49 percent of organizations don’t have a defined marketing strategy. Source: Smart Insights

One of the biggest digital marketing mistakes a business can make is running an unfocused campaign. A recent market survey found that only 34 percent of organizations have a clearly defined digital marketing strategy. The rest go about their business without a defined plan for connecting with their target audience through digital means.

Without setting goals and articulating what you will do to achieve them within certain periods, your campaigns will lack focus. You will not know when you attain your goals or if you’ve gotten there in the right time frame.

The solution to this is to document your strategy. Know your goals and the timeframes for achieving them. It’s also important to define your audience to ensure you’re not marketing to the wrong people. By clearly defining your digital marketing plan, you will map out the activities you will do to achieve your marketing goals. You will also quickly discover what’s not working and make the needed adjustments to drive the desired results.

2. Neglecting automation

Another mistake businesses make is neglecting automation. Marketing campaigns place huge demands on an organization’s resources. By choosing not to automate, brands spend a lot of time and resources on tasks that software technologies can easily handle.

Automation takes care of the core communication and marketing tasks, allowing your team members’ expertise to be used on important issues such as business strategy and client interaction.

But you should note that marketing automation isn’t just about emails. You can also use marketing automation solutions for social media management, mobile management, market research, and even ad campaigns. For marketing purposes, automation leads to better efficiency and increased productivity for your business. Brands that have used it have witnessed an increase in their leads and sales, recording a 14 percent jump in sales productivity and a 12 percent reduction in marketing overheads, as stated by Adobe.

By tracking and analyzing customer behavior, marketing automation software allows brands to create 1-to-1 brand journeys that lead to a personalized experience for the user. This boosts the efficiency of the sales journey, quickly converting a wide group of leads into happy customers through various tactics. For your marketing automation needs, we recommend HubSpot CRM.

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3. Not segmenting your audience into different stages

Your audience doesn’t all want the same content. You have people with different qualities and interests. It would help if you divided them into appropriate groups to ensure you provide them with the right marketing content.

Many organizations don’t segment their audience into smaller, targeted groups. They instead treat audience members the same way, providing them with the same content on the same platforms. The problem with this act is that the marketing content becomes irrelevant to some people because it hasn’t been tailored to their needs. Therefore, the number of people a brand can attract is limited since the marketing content appeals to just a few people.

This is why it’s important to segment your audience to ensure you’re reaching them with the right marketing mix. Know your target market and what they are looking for, and ensure your marketing efforts reflect this. Use location, interests, lifestyle, and income levels to optimize your marketing efforts to segment your users into appropriate groups.

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4. Publishing content and leaving it at that

Content is at the heart of any digital marketing campaign. It helps brands educate their customers about their products and how they solve their problems. Many companies have a content marketing strategy that informs the content they will publish and the publishing schedule.

Their articles are well researched to ensure they solve the users’ problems, but once they are published, that’s it. Nothing happens after this. The brands don’t try to promote the blogs, hoping that people will find and read the content miraculously.

This is a wrong move and one of brands’ biggest digital marketing mistakes. Unless you’re very popular, this won’t do anything for you. Your great content will receive very little attention, limiting your ability to reach more people and let them know about your brand.

For this reason, you need to promote your content after publishing. Use social media to get it out there. Promote the posts on social media to reach a wider audience at a more defined level. Share the links of your blog posts in the online communities where your target users spend most of their time to reach a more targeted audience. These actions will ensure more people read your content, giving your brand more visibility.

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5. Forgetting to test, test, and test again

Data is your friend, and you need to use it to ensure you’re presenting the best possible experience for your audience. Business decisions made using accurate, comprehensive data will enable your company to run ultra-efficient marketing campaigns.

When running a campaign, don’t just blindly implement a certain ad version. Test multiple ad versions to determine which of the variants is effective. Keep your versions simple to easily learn what works best. Run both versions side by side on Google Analytics to find the best options.

For example, you can display two versions of ad creatives that only differ in the design of a single element. Then, measure how the designs perform to determine their efficiency. The version with the best performance gets adopted for your marketing campaign.

Such kind of testing is time-consuming and requires careful preparation and professionalism. Get the help of a growth marketing agency that will help you run the test and develop a comprehensive plan based on the test results.

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6. Not tracking your performance

How do you know your campaigns are working if you’re not tracking them?

Neglecting to track your performance is one of the worst sins in marketing, yet many businesses make this mistake. They pour time and money into different marketing campaigns, and they are happy as long as the web traffic grows or remains the same.

Implementing marketing strategies without measuring the return on investment is a terrible way to spend your money. It means you’re not in control, and your business is bound to fail.

You need to take charge of your marketing, starting with figuring out what data is important. This is determined by your goals, which you’ll then turn into KPIs. There’s no universal law to the right data sets to track since it varies for each business. However, some of the KPIs you need to pay attention to for your data-driven marketing initiatives include new leads/prospects, sales revenue, cost per lead, and the customer lifetime value.

We have defined each of these KPIs and how to calculate them on our blog, 10 Common KPIs You Need to Watch in Your Marketing.

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7. Wanting results too quickly

Business owners often get demotivated when they don’t see immediate results from their marketing efforts. But digital marketing takes time.

It takes approximately 3 to 6 months for a new blog to gain traction in search engines. That’s assuming you create high-quality content consistently and build backlinks to those blog posts.

Google Ads and Facebook Ads bring a quick ROI, but you still need time to set it up properly. You will have to research your audience and segment it into several subgroups based on their age, location, interests, and even income levels.

Next, you’ll have to run A/B testing and try several campaigns with different ad formats to see which provides the best results. All this takes time, and it’ll be some time before you achieve the desired marketing outcome.

A well-made SEO campaign may take a year to generate high-quality traffic. It doesn’t matter how skilled you are in SEO, this waiting period is consistent with every site, and you must go through it.

With digital marketing, consistency and trying different methods to reach your target users are the only thing that guarantees you results.

We have highlighted the best growth marketing strategies you can start using today to bring in more customers on our blog, 11 Marketing Strategies for Startups and SMEs.

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Good growth marketing takes skill

Creating an excellent growth marketing strategy doesn’t come easy. Fortunately, with the right tips and tricks, you can get exponential growth for your business from end-to-end. Our guide, What is Growth Marketing? Your Complete Guide to Business Growth, will help you take your marketing to the next level.


Running a successful marketing campaign isn’t that difficult. All you have to do is adhere to what works and avoid the common marketing mistakes. Working with the growth marketing experts at Growth Marketing Genie will help you avoid these mistakes and propel your business up the success ladder in no time.

Want to attract more customers for your products? Let our team help you today!

 

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