Whether you run a website that sells handmade, eco-friendly art to a tiny audience or an online casino with millions of customers, managing digital marketing effectively can be a challenge.
It makes sense to learn from the mistakes of others so that you can avoid them, so here are a few of the most egregious digital marketing foibles to steer clear of in your own campaigns.
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Cutting Corners With Content
Even if you have the most carefully targeted plan for pushing your next product and service, it can all fall flat if the content you use to promote it is subpar.
This problem is exacerbated because of the way that digital marketing has diversified in the face of social media’s explosion as a means of connecting with prospective customers.
Content is no longer solely reliant on well written copy, although this remains a priority. You also have to consider multimedia content as essential, especially if you are aiming to engage with users on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.
Likewise your approach to content should also include considerations for how it will be adapted to suit the varied platforms on which it will appear. Phone-friendly videos with embedded subtitles, for example, have become more potent as a digital marketing tool. The fact that the entire music industry is adapting to this trend is a sure indicator of the way the tide is turning.
Ignoring Your Niche
In all but a handful of cases, your digital marketing efforts will need to target a specific audience because of the nature of the product or service that you have to sell. Even so, this does not stop plenty of brands from taking a blanket approach to online promotion, which can end up costing a lot of cash without delivering justifiable results.
Instead it pays to be far more precise in the way you create campaigns, craft content and market your brand online. This means getting to know your audience and using what you learn to inform your decisions.
Age is also a factor, particularly when picking between platforms. Instagram skews young, as does Snapchat, while Facebook and LinkedIn have older and more affluent audiences to tap into.
Equally you should not be trying to tailor your marketing to a generic demographic. Instead your aim should be to appeal to real people who occupy a specific niche, which is something that can be achieved by delving into the data as well as seeing how successful competitors go about it.
Failing To Be Flexible
The digital marketing tools that are at the disposal of every business, brand and individual today are incredibly powerful because of the agility they offer. If you find that a particular tactic is not giving you the desired results, you can swiftly shift away and try a new approach.
Of course you need to pay attention to the numbers to see whether a change is necessary, or whether you can keep on your current path. With reams of information available via the baked-in analytics offered by every digital marketing and social media platform worth its salt today, this should be simpler than ever.
Miscalculating Digital Marketing Budgets
While a lot of the tools available to marketers today are either free or very inexpensive to harness, that does not mean that you can get by on a shoestring budget. Indeed balancing out spending effectively is very tricky and plenty of brands get this wrong, overreaching in one area while ignoring others.
If, for example, you invest large sums in a website which has all the latest bells and whistles, your efforts will be wasted if no one visits it because you did not factor in marketing costs.
Digital marketing is a massive $100 billion industry today, showing that this is not an area that any business can afford to skimp, even if budgets can scale to match the size of the project in question.