Avoid these 6 common digital marketing blunders

After interviewing more than 40 of my clients, from small businesses to corporations, I noticed a pattern emerging with the types of problems or concerns they were having with their digital and social media activities.

Often, the mistakes they were having could have been remedied by being willing to invest in the right channels and strategies.

What stopped them from setting their business or marketing/digital/social strategies up properly?

I encountered a lot of confusion about what the right channels and strategies were, as well as fear of not seeing a return on investment for their marketing spend.

Unfortunately, businesses often end up spending a lot more money fixing these errors. Some examples include having to start over with a new website after employing a dodgy SEO practitioner or being locked into ongoing costs for maintaining a website set up through a certain channel or company.

If you don’t get the foundations right, you’ll find it very difficult to grow your business and achieve success with your marketing.

The six most common digital marketing mistakes businesses make are as follows:

1. Jumping straight to tactics

Business owners come to me starting a conversation with, “Kevin, we need to do [insert tactic]”. The issue here is that they often have not established if this tactic is the most appropriate for their objectives and the best way to attract an audience.

Jumping to tactics is dangerous. You need to first learn how to understand your objectives and your audience so you are able to ask the right questions.

This will help avoid either employing the wrong person to drive your marketing strategy or engaging the wrong agency that convinces you to adopt an approach that is unnecessary or irrelevant to your customers’ purchasing journey.

2. Attempting to build a website in-house

With the prevalence of Wix and similar DIY, template-ready websites, I’ve seen many people attempt to create their own websites or outsource to cheap companies.

These people often get burnt when it comes to things such as further development or capabilities of the site, design quality, hosting and support, domain ownership and a lack of support in understanding how to use the website as a business tool.

3. Wasting time and money purchasing ‘likes’ to supposedly gain a ‘better following’ on Facebook

When you understand the differences between buying ‘likes’ and building solid, quantitative campaigns that will yield a focused and dedicated audience, you will realise that buying ‘likes’ is not an effective strategy, merely a short-term fix.

Let me put it this way. Would you rather be in a room with 50 people who are genuinely interested in everything you have to say or would you rather be in front of 50,000 people, but only 50 of them are interested in what you have to say?

4. Engaging a foreign provider for SEO services

Many business owners tend to get somewhat concerned when discussing SEO (search engine optimisation). They become overwhelmed and confused about the variance in price and service offerings when going to multiple businesses for a quote.

The price conscious among them tend to engage an offshore agency, mainly for SEO. Where they go wrong is the fact that a lack of education and understanding from these suppliers means that they are unaware of the SEO techniques they are implementing, and instead of trying to build a content-rich, informative, authoritative website, these businesses employ game-like tactics to help the website ranking.

The end result here is that websites end up ranking lower or even being blacklisted by Google.

5. Engaging a family/friend/amateur to work on their creative material, usually to the detriment of the final outcome

Just because they are young and a ‘digital native’ doesn’t mean they know how to use Facebook or social media.

Without a formal strategy for everything from the inception and development of a brand through to a plan for the curation of content, an in-depth understanding of your target audience and the mechanics of successful social posting, the value behind the channel is quickly diminished.

Posting frequency is often inconsistent and content not always relevant, turning off your audience. A good marketing agency or in-house resource will provide ultimate customer and audience value.

They will take care of the important content, the regular posting, the key content strategies and, most importantly, the audience appeal. They will guide clients with their posting and their content curation to give the brand more personality.

6. Outsourcing Google AdWords or Facebook advertising to amateurs

To avoid the many mistakes and pitfalls lots of other business owners have made, arm your in-house or outsourced marketing team with the above information to ensure they too don’t employ, or intend to employ, these tactics.

Digital natives aren’t necessarily experts when it comes to the understanding and activation of digital marketing channels such as Google AdWords and Facebook.

As a business owner or manager, your digital and social media marketing is likely critical to your business. Taking shortcuts and not investing properly in this part of your business is a sure-fire way to limit your potential and even damage your business.

Engage a professional, either in-house or through a third-party agency, but as the owner, it is ultimately up to you to assess whether they are right for the job. Do your research and come armed with questions around their strategy and keep them accountable.

Kevin Spiteri is a digital marketer and author of I Just Want It to Work!