The 7 Biggest Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Excellent sales, exposure, and overall growth require an excellent marketing strategy, plain and simple. What isn’t as straightforward is how to pull together the various parts of a killer digital marketing strategy. That takes some trial and error, along with knowing your market, aligning your brand, and meeting the needs of your customers. While you tinker with the details to master your digital marketing, do your best to steer clear of these mistakes to save yourself some headaches.

1) Not Understanding Your Audience

If you don’t take the time to get to know the gap that you are filling in the marketplace, what problem you can solve for your customers, or what other products or services that they use, you are going to have a very difficult time knowing how to get them to buy what you’re selling. Know thy audience!

2) Losing Your Focus

Forgetting your end game will result in it getting further and further out of your reach. Write out an analysis of your strengths, weaknesses, needs, and goals. Stick with industry benchmarks that can be measured over a period of months. Keep your eye on the long-term prize.

3) Setting Unrealistic Expectations

Expecting that you are going to achieve marketing greatness straight out of the gate will leave you feeling disappointed and disillusioned. Realize that social media, SEO, and pay-per-click campaigns can take months to kick in, so don’t beat yourself up when you don’t rake in a boatload of sales right off the bat. Digital marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.

4) Not Sticking to Your Budget

Spreading yourself thin financially with digital marketing costs will keep you in the red. Hold off on investing in high-priced tools that aren’t needed at the start, and spend your money wisely with known success strategies. The advice that a penny saved is a penny earned is an oldie, but a goodie.

5) Overdoing Social Media

Jack of all trades, master of none is especially true in the realm of social media marketing. Do your homework and know which platforms are used the most by your prospects and focus on those. It’s better to pour more time (and money) into the platforms where you know that you will be seen by your prospects than to spread yourself unnecessarily thin over all of the available platforms, just to be on them.

6) Skipping Content

Content is the cornerstone of any successful marketing plan. Without engaging your audience with relevant and insightful content, you will soon lose their interest. You should make use of written, graphic, and video content to help convert periodic site visitors into long-term customers.

7) Ignoring the Need for a Mobile Site

Last year, the number of those using mobile devices to surf the web exceeded the number of those that use desktop computers for the first time in the history of the Internet. If you don’t offer visitors a sleek, easy to use mobile version of your site, you are losing out on a vital part of a successful digital marketing plan.

Have your own digital marketing mistakes that you have learned from? Share them in the comments section below! And for an extra hand on nailing down your strategy and growing your business, drop us a line!