The ever-changing digital landscape can make it quite tricky for businesses to formulate and execute effective digital marketing strategies, especially those with smaller teams and limited resources.
With essentially every man and their dog now ‘online’ in some form – whether that be posting daily on social media or simply having an email account – it’s now more important than ever for businesses to come up with unique and creative ways to cut through the noise and resonate with their audiences.
However, the thing about digital marketing that many people seem to forget is that it’s a slow burner. Aside from a few posts here and there that you see go viral overnight, it often takes months for marketing efforts to pay off.
This means that you can be doing all the right things – posting to social media, spending money on digital advertising and sending out EDMs – but still not achieve the results you’re looking for.
So how do you ensure a return on your investment of time and money? Let’s explore the common mistakes businesses make online and how you can best avoid them.
1. You don’t give your website enough attention
Whether your business exists online, offline or both, having a website has become just as much a necessity as having a contact phone number.
But with more than 1.85 billion websites on the world wide web today, the internet has reached somewhat of a saturation point, meaning you can’t expect customers to just simply stumble upon your website unless you promote it.
To drive traffic to your website that will hopefully convert to revenue, it’s advisable that you invest in SEO, SEM and the production of high-quality content. If you don’t have much knowledge of these topics, we’ve compiled a list of 10 simple ways to immediately improve your website’s SEO.
2. You don’t understand your target audience
Understanding your target audience and demographics is crucial to understanding the best ways of reaching them. When you make assumptions about who you’re promoting your business to, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
Paying to advertise your business online will likely net you an increase in traffic to your website, but what will you really gain from an increase in visitors if they aren’t the audience you’re trying to target?
To get the best out of your digital marketing efforts, you need to deep dive into your business and compile all the information you can on your target audience – factors such as gender, age, interests, salary and location are good places to start – and how to strengthen your connection with them.
3. Your goals are unrealistic
To achieve success through digital marketing it’s important that you develop strategies that will help you accomplish short, medium and long-term goals. However, the difference between perceived success and failure could come down to how realistic and attainable your goals actually are.
Overestimating the potential of your digital strategies and developing unrealistic goals is dangerous as it creates doubt in your mind when you inevitably fail to achieve them.
The solution’s simple: start small and set goals that you can realistically achieve. Achieving these smaller goals will not only build your confidence, but will also set a benchmark of what’s possible moving forward.
4. You consider clickbait an effective strategy
To boost engagement, clicks and views, many digital marketers resort to using clickbait. Clickbait is content that sounds very appealing, but when the user clicks on it, it’s actually anything but what was promised.
Here’s a common line that devious digital marketers like to use: you won’t believe what happens next! Alas, you click on the link expecting something amazing, but are often greeted with something that’s actually very much believable. You’ve just fallen victim to clickbait.
Clickbait tarnishes your brand’s reputation and credibility and should be avoided at all costs. You should instead focus on creating content that provides value and letting your audience know exactly what they’re going to get inside of the article.
5. You only spend money on paid advertisements
It’s easy to post content to social media, pay some money to boost the post to get it seen by more people, then repeat the process the next time you have something to post.
But spending the majority or all of your budget on paid advertisements leaves little to no remaining money for you to spend on possibly more effective digital marketing strategies.
Instead of putting all your eggs into the one paid advertising basket, consider whether some of that money could be better spent on other aspects of your digital marketing strategy such as a new website, new design templates or the creation of high-quality content.
6. You’re not patient enough
As we touched on earlier, digital marketing is a slow burner. But people are too often in a rush to get immediate sales that they give up on any new strategy after only a few weeks because they haven’t gotten quick results.
The best results from digital marketing come from a combination of patience, persistence and making smart, calculated decisions.
So, while your competitors are getting frustrated and changing their marketing strategies every second week, why not back yourself and stick with what you’re currently doing for a bit longer than usual? You might just surprise yourself with what you achieve.
Need help with your digital marketing?
Coming up with effective digital marketing campaigns can be tricky, so why not enlist the help of professionals? Orion Creative has the copywriters to produce engaging content, graphic designers to make your brand pop and digital marketing specialists to plan and implement successful strategies that actually get results.
Whether you want to reinforce customer loyalty, encourage repeat business and referrals, sell a specific offering or acquire new customers for your organisation, digital marketing is a terrific way of doing this, so contact us today to learn how we can help.
