8 Digital Marketing Mistakes To Avoid
Experienced marketers have recognized that digital marketing, like Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Social Media Marketing (SEO), is slowly taking over traditional marketing. From smartphones to social media, digital has become an integral element of how we operate day-to-day.
However, most companies in Singapore are still afraid of adopting this new way of marketing. They usually only allocate a small fraction of their marketing budget on web design and digital marketing and spent the rest on traditional media marketing. And when that digital marketing campaign did not achieve good results because of the low budget and other factors, they will then conclude digital marketing is not useful for their business.
We will like to share the common mistakes that most companies make on their digital marketing campaign.
1. Treating Digital Marketing As An Add On Only
To most companies, digital marketing is just a checkbox that needs to be ticked but is never the center of their marketing campaign. If you are outsourcing your digital marketing to a digital agency, be sure to include them in the initial stage of the planning so that they can advice how to tap on digital marketing to achieve better results.
2. Ignoring The Results
After investing in digital marketing campaigns to drive traffic to website or to get more fans on Facebook page, companies usually just stop there. They do not know how to leverage on these results. The company most probably spent a lot of money to get people there, so why not take the opportunity to continue the conversation by contacting them with the contact data received. They might turn into customers.
3. Not Focused
It’s common for marketing directors to cover all the possible digital platform and cover all available consumer touch points. So they end up with a website, Facebook page, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Vine, etc. Then they split their marketing budget across all the platforms and hope to get a good response. By scattering your budget for every digital platform, you will not be able to get any good results. Every company has a limited marketing budget and you will get better results if you only focus on a few platforms. For example, you may want to focus your budget on Google Adwords (to get sales leads from your website) and Facebook Ads (to increase fan base and awareness of your brand).
4. Not Having A Mobile Responsive Website
This can’t be an excuse anymore. By now, you should know how important it is to have a mobile friendly website. There are more people who use their smartphones than their desktops. You don’t want your visitors to click on your ads on their smartphones and get turned off with your non-responsive website. You should get this fixed before you consider any digital marketing campaign.
5. Buying Social Media Fans And Followers
It seems like the goal of the game is to get lots of followers and fans on your social media channels and if your company’s social media channels do not have many followers or fans, it means your company is not reputable or well-established. However, people are now more savvy about social media and can easily tell if you have bought fake followers or fans. Once your customers found out about this, they will mark your company as untrustworthy. So, you should focus on building a network of real people who might become your customers and constantly engage them on your social media channels by providing useful and interesting information.
6. Social Media Fan And Follower Count Is Irrelevant
Similar to our last point, there is no point having many fans and followers but get zero engagement.Which one is better – 20,000 Facebook fans with only 1 or 2 engagements per post or 1,000 Facebook fans with 100 to 200 engagements per post? Having an engaged audience consuming your content is more valuable than the raw number of your fan base. Quality over quantity.
7. No Communication Between The Marketing Team And The Sales Team
One of the mistakes for marketing team is not working closely with their sales team. You will need the sales team to input if the leads generated are useful or just wasting their time. Also, if the sales team has a direction to push a particular product’s sales, the marketing team needs to adjust their campaign accordingly. The good thing about digital marketing campaign is that changes can deploy anytime. Make sure you conduct at least 1 meeting every month between the marketing team and the sales team.
8. Unrealistic Expectations
Every company expects immediate results for their digital marketing efforts.Even when expectations have been clearly set, they will still demand for immediate results. For example, it will take months to optimize your website for SEO and reaching page 1 of Google search result pages, and it takes time to optimize your Adwords campaign by using the analytics and removing negative keywords. Digital doesn’t equal to instant results. In fact, digital campaign also takes time to be developed, optimized and improved to where you are seeing the results you are hoping for.
Conclusion
There are many other common mistakes as well but we think you get the point. Be sure to invest more time and effort in your digital marketing campaigns and be patient. Companies usually hop around various digital marketing approaches and never settle in to find out what really works and what doesn’t.