In the grand scheme of things, digital marketing is relatively new. Gone are the days when it was enough to get a large ad put in your local phone book and newspapers, and then just wait for the phone calls to come in. The world now makes more and more searches online, with search engines presenting the most relevant and up to date information instantly to anyone who wishes to look for it. Previously, businesses could manage their marketing output quite effectively themselves. All you needed to do was contact the relevant publications for your ad, and you were ready to go. Digital marketing requires a whole other set of skills (and knowledge) though, so those managing their own could be making some big mistakes without even realising it…
#1 – You’re Not Tracking Results
In the pre-digital days, you didn’t need to track things as much. Sure, you could ask your customers about where they’d found about you in order to get a better idea of how well your different avenues were performing, but there so many fewer to consider that there was much less incentive to do so.
Now though, there are so many places your website traffic could be coming from that you’d be foolish not to track it. Whether your users come primarily from organic search, paid search, backlinks, social media (or a host of other platforms), will help you decide how best to precede with your digital marketing strategy.
You can’t just set up Google Analytics and assume that it’s covered though. You need to use the data to get a better idea of how well your current strategy is working, what needs further improvement, and where your money is best spent.
#2 – You Don’t Have A Proper Strategy
Of course, the reason you may not be tracking your results is because you have no digital marketing strategy in place. In an increasingly competitive market, you need a strategy in order to keep up the good results you’ve been receiving, or to build upon them.
“I want more people to visit my website.” is not a viable marketing strategy either. You need to plan how you’re going to achieve this, what channels the traffic should be coming from, and how much time and money you’re going to spend on improving each of these.
In it’s simplest form, strategies need to include “SMART” goals:
- Specific – What pages are the most important? Do you value traffic or conversions more? Where should the traffic come from?
- Measurable – How many users do you want to visit your website? How much money are you aiming to generate? How many enquiries?
- Achievable – Is this strategy actually possible? Do you have the resources available to make your strategy a viable proposition.
- Relevant – Why is this strategy important to your digital marketing? How will it help you?
- Timed – What time period do you hope to achieve this goal within?
Once you have a clear strategy in place, you can use your tracking to start evaluating how successful you’ve been.
#3 – No Social Media Presence
I regularly stumble across business Facebook pages that haven’t been updated for the last couple of years. You know what I do in that case? I find another company. This isn’t me being a marketing snob, unwilling to work with companies that don’t market themselves properly, or me making up a story to convince you that social media is essential. I click off because, honestly, an inactive social media profile implies that the business is no longer active.
In the new digital age, without a social media presence, your business basically doesn’t exist to a large number of people. And an inactive social media profile is even worse, for the reason given above.
In addition to being a great way of keeping your loyal customers up to date on what you’re doing, social media is now one of the most important customer service tools available, and it’s free! Make sure you’re catering to your customers’ needs, and you’ll start to see a positive impact. We promise.
#4 – SEO Is More Than Keywords
I’ve spoken to a lot of companies previously who claim to already have done SEO, but to no avail. When we look into the strategies they’ve been implementing, it’s clear that by saying they’ve “done SEO”, they mean they’ve updated the onpage elements throughout their website. Unfortunately, this is no longer enough.
Despite being a relatively new industry, SEO (and digital marketing in general) has changed so much, and so quickly, that even solid practices from a couple of weeks ago could be no longer relevant to you, reading this now.
Whilst it’s true that one of the most important factors of a successful SEO campaign used to be onsite optimisations of your keyword, this is no longer the case. They’re still important, but now there are dozens of other factors that are just as, if not more, important. There’s now over 200 ranking factors for Google’s organic search algorithm, and you need to ensure that your website is optimised effectively for as many of these as possible before you can start ranking well.
#5 – Allocating Your Digital Marketing To The Wrong Person
There are a lot of businesses that have realised the importance of digital marketing, but are unsure about how to implement an effective strategy. We’ve seen lots of companies before that have allocated their digital marketing strategies to someone with no qualifications, or absolutely no idea what they’re doing.
Whether it’s handing your website over to the I.T. department to implement SEO, or asking the VP’s nephew to take a look at running your PPC campaign, incorrectly optimised campaigns can have absolutely catastrophic effects for your company. We’ve seen businesses lose large amounts of money on PPC campaigns that weren’t regularly monitored or tweaked, and companies lose all of their customers from an improperly optimised website.
The best thing to do is approach a reputable digital agency (like Fifteen), or hire someone who is actually qualified to manage a digital marketing campaign. Whoever you choose, make sure they have experience or knowledge specifically geared towards digital marketing, as unfortunately knowledge of traditional marketing is a completely different thing.