“Content is fire; social media is gasoline.” –Jay Baer, Bestselling Author, Marketing Expert and Founder of Convince & Convert

Our world is propelled by technology, and savvier digital marketing modes have surpassed the traditional channels of marketing. With users regularly turning to the internet for every question they have, it is no rocket science to understand why tactful digital marketing can result in everything or nothing for a business. Without it, any company will be between a rock and a hard place.

Let’s face it: Digital marketing is a complicated business that calls for detailed strategies like search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, and paid advertising. Apart from implementing savvy digital marketing techniques marketers also need to be cautious of what pitfalls to avoid ahead of time. We have collected a small yet powerful list of digital marketing mistakes that threaten to sabotage your brand faster than a mouse click.

1. Set Clear and Realistic Goals
“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” – Benjamin Franklin

If you don’t set goals, it is very likely that you won’t know what’s going on with your campaign. Your campaign will lack focus, and you won’t have any inkling of whether you will achieve your goals or if you’re achieving them within the acceptable time frame.
Merely setting up social media accounts on different platforms and adding random hashtags without clear goals will neither generate traffic nor help to gain potential leads.

Fix This – SET SMART GOALS

Specific: The objective of the goals must be to achieve a precise action – clicks or leads.
Measurable: Set trackable goals. Use metrics and relevant data to understand the relevance.
Achievable: Think about what you want to achieve and where you want to be at the end. Set practical milestones that are workable to achieve.
Realistic: While drafting digital marketing goals, stay within the means of your budget and resources. Don’t try and bite off more than your resources or your team can handle.
Time-sensitive: Set deadlines to keep your team and resources on track and motivated.

2. Understand Your Audience’s Needs
“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him.” – Mahatma Gandhi

Your customers are the lifeblood of your business, so failing to understand their needs will make all digital marketing efforts futile.
Many companies try targeting too large and broad of an audience. In a bid to reach more people, they try to target anyone and everyone. Even the most catchy and well-thought-out campaigns will fall flat if it doesn’t reverberate with your intended consumer group, or worse, misses the target audience altogether.

Fix this
Take care of the use of language in content and assess how the hypothetical customer uses digital media to factor into your brand’s marketing approach. Take the time to dig into your audience analysis and find out about their demographics, interests, hobbies, buying habits, and more to motivate them and gain more from digital marketing efforts.

3. Forgetting about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
“On a broad scale, I see SEO becoming a normalized marketing tactic, the same way TV, radio, and print are traditionally thought of as marketing tactics.” – Duane Forrester, Senior Product Manager, Bing
Search engine optimization (SEO) is how your users locate your business on search engines, and the main way to find anything and everything on the internet. Neglecting SEO is another big marketing blunder.
If you haven’t incorporated SEO into your digital marketing strategy, your potential users will never find your website in their search results. You will end up losing new and valuable leads for your business and for that reason, you’re losing valuable traffic to competitors.

Fix this
The most important thing you need to know about implementing SEO is how to do keyword research and integrate these keywords into pages on your website, blogs and social media posts. Plan your content around the keywords that your audience uses, helps you to connect with valuable and relevant leads.
In addition to keyword research, you can also follow other SEO best practices like:
• Deliver top quality, targeted content
• Optimize your site’s load time to produce information fast
• Optimize your title tags

4. Overlooking Social Media
“Social Media puts the “public” into PR and the “market” into marketing.”- Chris Brogan, President of New Marketing Labs Chris Brogan

If your audience lives and breathes social media, and if your business is not using it, then you’re making a major digital marketing mistake. You may be missing out on an excellent opportunity to build a fruitful connection with your present and potential users and boost their kinship with your brand.
With an average user spending more than 30% of their internet time on social media, using social media for digital marketing will help you reach more people and reap impressive benefits like:
• Enhancing brand awareness and loyalty
• Propelling leads and conversions
• Achieve economies spent on traditional marketing
• Boosting customer experience

Fix this
Determine the right platform(s) for your business. Ideally, focus on platforms that are frequented by your target users. When you know where your target audience devotes most of their time, you can start focus and post content regularly to connect with them.
To take digital marketing on to the next level, invest in social media advertising. Social media advertising will ensure you show up in relevant users’ newsfeeds and purpose them with products or services that match their interests.