Online Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Plus, your chance to attend a virtual session later this month revealing some algorithm changes

Are your online or digital marketing efforts failing? Are your Google analytics in the dumps? You're not alone. We’ve seen many online marketers make the same mistakes over and over, so we put our heads together to come up with a managable list of five mistakes you can easily attack. And now, without further ado, here are our most commonly observed digital marketing mistakes and to either to fix them or avoid them. 

1.) Thinking Tactically, Not Strategically – Too many marketing decision-makers fall prey to “shiny object syndrome.” Without a strategy to give you solid tactical direction, the focus of your efforts will be directed by whichever social media channel is hot (Can you say TikTok?). Yogi Berra’s famous words, “If you don't know where you’re going, you'll probably end up somewhere else” are especially true for marketing. Create a solid brand strategy that includes targets, goals, and roles to help you determine the tactics that will get you where you need to go. That said, don’t avoid social media. Putting your content out on social is a terrific digital marketing tactic that improves interest, understanding, awareness and engagement for your brand and business.

2.) Lack of Consistant, Fresh Content – Websites with blogs have better traffic than those that don’t. You say you’ve developed a content calendar, assigned roles and everyone is pulling together to write authoratative, thought-provoking articles for your blog, but you're still not ranking. Do what you can to promote your blog posts so they receive shares and inbound links. This is what really increases traffic. Blogs help build relationships and trust with customers so put your PR stills to work. Start pitching and posting your blog content.

3.) Not Measuring Your Results – For centuries, marketers were unable to know for sure which of their efforts were directly responsible for the success or failure to meet their marketing and business goals. But after two decades of the measurability provided by digital marketing, many marketers still aren’t monitoring their metrics and making themselves accountable for meaningful results. If you don’t measure the return on investment, you won’t know how successful your strategy is. Measuring ROI isn’t as difficult as you might think. Take the financial gain from your investment and subtract the cost of your investment, then divide that number by the total cost of your investment. The difficult part is deciding how your ROI fits into your budget. In the end, we recommend that you measure EVERYTHING — traffic, leads, CTRs, conversions. Then do more of what’s working; stop or modify what isn’t.

4.) Ignoring Changing Customer Preferences – Assuming that their reality is the same as that of their target audience, lots of marketers let their own biases and fears get in the way of exploring the tools and tactics that research shows will reach their target audience with the brand experience they prefer. One of these is tactics is email. It’s not dead. If they are helpful, educational and relevant, emails often generate great response and usually have a good ROI. Be sure your marketing email is aimed where your audience is going to be, arriving with the UX they are expecting and delivered by the technology they trust. If you make certain your call-to-action is easy to see, clear and enticing, you just corrected another common digital marketing mistake.

5.) Not Thinking About Google – What’s the biggest mistake digital marketers make? Forgetting the big G is an important persona; try to do the stuff for which Google will reward you. There are more than 200 ranking factors in Google’s algorithm. Some are documented and well-known, some are controversial, and some are just speculation. None-the-less, make sure you realize this and optimize your site for search. Here’s an example: about 96 percent of all Americans have a cell phone at their side (Pew Research, June 2019) and use them to do more than make calls, obviously. That’s where Google steps in to require people have a good experience while using websites on phones. Having a website is not enough, Google insists you optimize your site for mobile devices or be penalized. Don’t ignore ranking factors. On your website, things like being mobile-friendly, having backlinks, offering a good user experience, page speed, security and content strategy (freshness, authority, accuracy, depth) are all important items for making digital marketing work for you.

Learn more. If you want to learn more about the pitfalls of digital marketing and how to climb out of them, tune in for our presentation, “Unwrapping Google’s Secrets to Rule the World” set for Aug. 19 at this year’s virtual Biz Expo. Trivera's EVP Christina Steder and Search Marketing Director Cassy Richardson, both certified Google partners, will tell you about the recent changes Google has made to search, algorithm updates and other new features. Anyone can register. See you online.

Photo: Adobe Stock

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