4 Digital Marketing Mistakes You Don’t Realize You’re Making

Digital marketing is one aspect of business that’s easy to streamline. But the problem with relying on automated tools and platforms for everything is they remove you from the equation and teach you to rely on methods of marketing that are ineffective and/or blatantly misguided. By refocusing your priorities, you can get back on track.

Don’t Make These 4 Mistakes Any Longer

According to Carey Balzer from MARION Marketing, “The problem with marketing mistakes is that you don’t always know you’re making them until someone else points them out. It’s easy to get stuck in your ways and continue making the same errors over and over again, which creates a cycle of diminishing returns.”

To save you from making the same costly errors that other marketers frequently succumb to, let’s highlight a few specific problem areas:

1. Not Differentiating Between Goals and Objectives

One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is a failure to understand the difference between setting marketing goals and objectives. And while this may seem like a very nuanced issue, it can create big problems down the road.

Goals tell you where you’re headed, rather than how to get there. Using the analogy of directions on a road trip, a goal is the address of the final destination. Objectives, on the other hand, are specific and measurable milestones that must be achieved along the way in order to reach the goal. In other words, they’re the specific mile markers that must be passed and turns that have to be made to reach the final destination.

Goals without objectives are nearly impossible to accomplish. As you set marketing goals, make sure you’re also setting good objectives. And the best way to describe a good objective is by using the popular SMART acronym, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timed.

If your goal is to sell more products on your website, a smart objective says: We need to increase website traffic by 50 percent between now and January and convert 25 percent of these visitors into transactions.

2. Not Zeroing in on a Specific Social Media Platform

You know that social media plays a significant role in digital marketing success, but don’t make the mistake of assuming that more platforms equals more mistakes. The truth is that the more you extend yourself across different social media platforms – such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Pinterest – the less time and resources you have to invest in building a quality presence on any one platform.

To overcome this mistake, spend your time focusing on one platform. You’re much better off dedicating 100 percent of your social strategy to a site like Facebook than to put forth 25 percent effort on four different ones. Once you feel like you have one platform under control, you can add a second one (and so on).

3. Failing to Use Video in Your Content Strategy

For years, marketers have been told that content is king. They’ve also been told that the key to content marketing success is to publish as many words and links as possible. But this advice isn’t necessarily true. Quality is better than quantity – and nothing says quality engagement quite like video content.

If you’re avoiding video content, you need to readjust your priorities. Video content has been shown to improve SEO, improve consumer attention, enhance engagement, produce higher retention rates, and create stronger emotional connections.

4. Not Tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

For all of the effort you pour into your digital marketing strategy, it’s a huge mistake not to track what’s happening on the back end. Thankfully you can correct this shortcoming by tracking key performance indicators – also known as KPIs.

Some of the KPIs you should be tracking include sales revenue, cost per lead, customer value, inbound marketing ROI, traffic-to-lead ratio, lead-to-consumer ratio, landing page conversion rates, organic traffic, social media traffic, and mobile traffic.

Put Your Digital Marketing on the Right Track

Mistakes are a part of life. If you’re in the marketing game long enough, you’ll eventually make your fair share of them. The goal isn’t to avoid mistakes altogether, but to limit the damage and continue repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

Hopefully this article has given you an idea of just how common mistakes are so you can be on the lookout for similar issues in your own life.