No one reaches perfection without learning from a few, sometimes costly, mistakes. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the top marketing mistakes people make. Let’s dive deep into the most common digital marketing mistakes that could ruin your online business.
1. Neglecting Mobile Users
More than 80% of internet users use smartphones. If your marketing approach is neglecting the mobile experience, you’re only focusing on 20% of your potential market and losing 80% of mobile users that can boost your business with countless leads.
Poor mobile user experience on your website leads to a high bounce rate that indirectly affects your online visibility. Websites with poor mobile experience have a high bounce rate, low returning users, and little to no conversion rate.
Creating a mobile application isn’t feasible for every business owner, but building a fluid & responsive design can work wonders. Responsive websites can smooth the mobile experience, but moreover, take advantage of it. Mobile-first Indexing is one of the top-ranking factors in Google’s search. Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of your website for indexing and ranking. Historically, the index primarily used the desktop version of a page’s content when evaluating a page’s relevance to a user’s query.
2. No Blogs
Consistent blog posts are the most effective ways to build brand awareness while providing relevant and useful content to your target audience.
A website without a blog looks like a static website with no frequently updated content for visitors. Adding blogs on your website updates your website’s content repeatedly and will give people a reason to visit your site. Whether they are brand new visitors or loyal returning users, the more people engage with and gain knowledge about your brand; the more likely these visits are to convert into sales.
New blog posts on regular intervals also invite search crawlers to crawl new content, including all interlinked URLs. Not everyone knows the tactics of internal link building and building authority to your website, but it is an important tactic that should be taken advantage of. Blog posts on your website give you the competitive edge to interlink your website’s other pages. Hence, it boosts your website’s “crawlability” and helps in improving rankings.
Blogs also allow readers to share their views through comments. It boosts user engagement on your website, increasing user time on the page, and decreasing the bounce rate.
Remember, responding to user comments is another great opportunity to bind them with your website and increase user engagement.
Sharing your blogs on social platforms gives added value to your content writing efforts and promotes your business to reach social channels.
3. Ignoring Social Media
Today, social media has become a powerful weapon in your marketing arsenal to engage with your customers and build a healthy relationship.
Creating a business page on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and other popular social platforms is easy. Business pages on the different social media platforms can help you promote your business and connect with your potential customers. You’ll find out about the other options available that are designed explicitly for all-sizes business operations on this page. So, you can entirely rely on social channels and create your business profile to start promoting your services/products online.
4. Not Calculating Your ROI
You’re putting in long hours to achieve your goals, but how many of you are getting the expected results from every channel? Keep track of all marketing channels and analyze which one is delivering effectively, and why. Investing continuously in ineffective channels will put a burden on your digital marketing budget.
There are various analytics tools available to calculate ROI where you can check metrics like Traffic, New Visitors, Repeating Visitors, Bounce Rate, Customer Flow, Clicks, Impressions, Click-through Rates, etc. It would be best if you considered the following ROI metrics:
- Cost Per Lead (CPL)
- Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
- Lead-to-Close Ratio (LTCR)
These three metrics can give you a clear picture of how the time, money, and effort you put into your digital marketing efforts give your business fruitful results.
5. Targeting Everyone, Without Knowing Your Audience:
Don’t make assumptions about the demographics of your customer base. By understanding your potential customers’ demographics, you’ll be able to focus your marketing efforts and get new customers efficiently.
Working with the right audience is essential for selling your products/services at the right time. Investing in irrelevant audiences will cost you valuable time and money.
So, check different insights, evaluate your website’s or social profile visitors, and make a comprehensive list of prospective customers.
6. Sloth-Like Websites
Sloths are great. But let’s not forget that they travel 41 yards per day. Similarly, many websites look great but don’t load in time for most people to see them. Remember, you’re usually paying for clicks, if the user doesn’t wait around for your site to load, that’s on you.
A slow website can badly impact your conversions. It is next to disaster for businesses investing significant amounts on various marketing channels.
There can be several reasons for the slow speed of a website, like unoptimized images, JavaScript issues, lousy hosting, and so much more.
According to the stats, a website loading within 3 seconds is the benchmark to hit.
Improving the speed of desktop and mobile versions of your website is easy. So, don’t let this fixable mistake ruin your marketing efforts.
7. Using Spam Content
Gone are the days when digital marketers follow content spinning methods, and a single piece of content used on multiple websites. Post Panda update, Google has become strict and penalizes websites using spam content. Content spinning is another form of spamming your website, which is equally punishable.
By following such techniques, your website will be removed from Google indexing, losing your total organic traffic, and it will be difficult to re-enter SERP after the manual penalty for spamming. If you are one of those businesses still dependent on duplicate content or spun content, it’s time to change.
What Defines Quality Content?
There isn’t any specific definition of good-quality content. Instead, any content which is Educational, Informative, Authoritative, and Relevant is considered as good quality. Google Medic update (released in May 2018) affected medical, educational, finance websites that lacked quality content.
8. Not Running Detailed SEO Audit
SEO auditing of your website is the initial digital marketing process that notifies you of errors and warnings. Consider it a website health check-up. A timely checkup is essential to maintain your website’s health by removing on-page issues. It also helps in the backlink profile improvement and keeps it clean as soon as a spam link is encountered. Many spam or irrelevant links can harm your website’s ranking and affect its online visibility. Negligence towards malicious links degrades your trust flow and reputation, causing loss of organic rankings.
Keep track of the website’s Domain Authority (DA), Page Authority (PA), new links, referring domain, etc., to ensure everything is working appropriately. Google Web Search Console is a free tool that lets you check referring domains periodically. You can also opt for tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Cognitive SEO, etc., which give you an entire link tree with regular crawling.
9. Buying Email Databases
Many business owners take advantage of email marketing by purchasing emails from third party websites and using them for advertising. However, this is an aged tactic that won’t deliver you any meaningful results. Instead, you must use authentic and genuine options to collect visitor emails.
Fact: In 2023, global email users are expected to reach 4.3 billion.
These are a few yet common digital marketing mistakes that have threatened businesses worldwide and have affected countless well-established brands.
Conclusion:
Be smart and skip all these mistakes when marketing your website in the digital world. Always avoid harmful techniques or shortcut methods that can ruin your efforts and result in little conversions. For better marketing results or consistent business growth, hiring a professional digital marketing agency is a wise choice. You can also take the help of expert digital marketing consultants who can help you to identify the most effective ways of advertising or marketing products or services using various digital channels.
Above all, learn from the mistakes other business owners have made. The more you know, the less you repeat these mistakes, and the more your business will thrive.