7 of the most dreadful digital marketing mistakes to avoid in 2023.
If you are worried about making some digital marketing mistakes as a business owner, here are 7 of the most dreaded digital marketing mistakes to avoid in 2023 and beyond.
Beyond selling your products and services offline, you’ll need some digital marketing skills — these skills will help you reach a broader audience using an online presence. However, lots of SMEs make so many digital marketing mistakes and this consequently leads to less success.
You should understand that we’re now living in the age of the internet and technology, — and your business should also have a space in it. This is where digital marketing plays an important role.
With digital marketing, many believe that their businesses will have a 100% success rate. However, when digital marketing is done wrong, it may lead to failure in your business.
According to a study revealed by Ahrefs, about 90.63% of businesses do not receive organic traffic, — this alone is a sign of digital marketing error.
So, how do you avoid these errors and ensure you are doing the right thing with your digital marketing for your business?
Read also: Native Advertising: What The Heck Are Native Advertisements?
Let’s see the seven biggest digital marketing mistakes to avoid in 2023.
1. Not targeting the right audience
As a business owner, the most important thing is to get your business out there in front of those who need it. If you fail to achieve this, your business will not thrive. This has been the greatest mistake of many businesses. — they usually don’t target the right audience for their business.
The reason is simple — the majority try to target a too broad audience, thereby losing their important customers. They target almost anyone and everyone on the internet simply because they want to reach more people, and they end up losing everyone. This eventually discourages them – when people don’t buy their products or use their services.
In other cases, companies who think they know their audience also end up targeting the wrong audience, this can be attributed to the fact that they may have failed to carry out concise research and come up with a good customer avatar/persona. Go here to learn more about customer avatars and how to create one for your business.
When your marketing is targeting a broader audience, it simply means that you don’t have any specific in mind, and this will lead eventually hurt your business overall.
How to avoid digital marketing mistakes in your business.
Research your target audience and find out your real customers
Carry out a clear customer persona. This will help you know every detail about your customers, such as Demographics, interests, hobbies, buying habits, and more.
When you have a good and clear customer avatar, you will know exactly those who are interested in your business. You’ll also know when, and how, to reach them through your ad campaigns.
As a business owner, you can create more than one buyer persona or customer avatar to target a different audience. To read more about customer avatars and how to create one for your business, see this article.
2. Not having realistic digital marketing goals
Most businesses do not know what they want — this makes them set unrealistic digital marketing goals. If this fails, they become frustrated and give up. This is one of the biggest digital marketing mistakes to avoid in 2023 and beyond. Having an unfocused marketing campaign will have a negative impact on your business and lead to a huge loss. Your business will be heading for failure if you don’t set realistic goals.
You need to set goals for every aspect of your business, and this includes marketing campaign goals. Setting goals, such as ads expenditures, leads acquired, email campaign expenses, time frame, etc. will give you an insight into how your campaign is performing, whether good or bad. It will also help you know when you are achieving your goals and get a good return on ads spent. (ROARS).
When you set unrealistic digital marketing goals, no matter how hard you try to achieve them, you will never, because no matter how well you carry out your implementation, there will always be a loophole. Plus, you can’t possibly optimize your digital marketing strategy when you are not specific.
Also, since the goal is not well-defined from the onset, you will find it difficult to track your successes and failures. If you failed, you won’t know the reason why, and if you succeed, the same thing applies. This means you won’t even know what areas you need to work on improving.
How to avoid this digital marketing mistake
Always ensure you have a SMART goal set up before you start your marketing campaign. Below is how to set up a SMART goal for your business.
SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-sensitive.
Specific: Set goals that are aimed at achieving a precise action, such as leads, awareness, or clicks.
Measurable: Your goals should be trackable and measurable. This can be determined with relevant data and metrics during the campaign.
Achievable: The most important thing is that the goals must be achievable. The objectives of your digital marketing campaigns can be achieved.
Realistic: Is the goal realistic and within your budget? Don’t set a goal that eats deep into your financial capacity and takes more resources from you. Remember, it is better to start from a small realistic goal and scale than otherwise.
Time-sensitive: To succeed in business, you need to be time conscious. This means your goals need to be time sensitive as well. Set deadlines for every digital marketing campaign. This will keep you and the team on track and focused. Find out the best key performance indicators (KPIs) that best suites your digital marketing goals, — and use Google Analytics to keep track of your KPIs throughout your whole campaign.
The KPIs are an important tool that will help you measure the return on investment (ROI) of your digital marketing campaign.
3. Neglecting your website design
For your business to thrive online, you need a good design, responsive, user-friendly website. This is a common digital mistake that most business owners make in their digital marketing. As a business owner, you need a user-friendly website that’s easy to use and provides valuable information.
Your competitors may already have an online presence that’s well-optimized and user-friendly and if you are not doing the same for your business, you’ll be lagging behind and losing valuable customers.
How to avoid this digital marketing mistake
To avoid this digital marketing mistake, you need to have a website for your business, and ensure it is well-optimized and user-friendly.
Your website should have the following attributes:
Responsive: Ensure it is responsive both on mobile, tablet, desktop, and laptop. All elements on your page should be scalable, this includes texts, images, etc., so they fit your visitor’s screen no matter the device.
Quick to load: For your business, you need a website that loads super fast. All elements with large file sizes should be compressed.
Easy to navigate: Users should find it easy to navigate your website.
4. Not Having a Blog
Blogs are great ways for you to connect with your audience and build your brand identity and authority. However, lots of businesses don’t have a blog, and even with their website, they don’t have a blog session, which is a huge blunder. Those who tried it abandoned it, probably due to a lack of zeal or because they feel it was not worth the effort.
The purpose of blogging is to drive traffic to your website, improve your site’s ranking and SEO, and establish yourself as an authority. Also, when you create a blog post, it adds another indexed page to your site, when you have more indexed pages, this will eventually lead to your site appearing on search engine result pages (SERP) like Google and Bing. And when you don’t utilize a blog on your website, you’ll miss all the opportunities blogging offers for helping your business grow online.
How to avoid this digital marketing mistake
Create a blog for your business and incorporate it with your site.
Create rich and quality content regularly.
Write original and SEO content that resonates with your audience.
Blog consistently and interact with the readers of your blog
5. Forgetting about search engine optimization (SEO)
In the session above, I mentioned SEO, however; I did not talk about what SEO is. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a way of optimizing your digital content such as blog posts, product descriptions, or images so that it appears on Google or Bing search results.
When you apply SEO to your digital marketing, you make it easy for customers to find your business online through search results. These search results are what drive organic traffic to businesses. Companies and business owners neglect this part a lot, — which is a huge digital marketing mistake. Don’t expect all your customers to come from digital ads. With proper SEO in place, you can acquire organic leads for your business.
If you neglect SEO in your digital marketing strategy, you’ll be losing valuable traffic to competitors. Remember, SEO takes time to develop, it is important to carry out a proper SEO on your site/blog and be patient while it develops. It requires proper implementation and patience to see the result of SEO on search engines.
How to avoid this digital marketing mistake
If you don’t know about SEO and how to implement it on your blog posts/site, you can hire a professional to carry out a complete SEO on your site.
You need to carry out keyword research to find out what your target audience is searching for.
Use these keywords to write original content for your blog or add them to your product description pages.
Always plan and write your content based on the keywords your audience is searching for. — This will help you reach your relevant audience and acquire rich leads.
Find out the type of questions your audience is asking by interacting with your customer service team and researching your competitors and industry.
Other things you need to do to ensure good SEO practices include:
- Delivering original, high-quality, and targeted content
- Optimizing your site’s load time to deliver information fast
- Optimizing your title tags
6. Neglecting Remarketing
Remarketing is very vital for every business’s growth. This is a big digital marketing mistake that most businesses make, and it also has its consequences. If a lead has shown interest in your business and is not ready to buy yet, it does not mean that they won’t buy in the future. And the only way to ensure that the lead finally makes a purchase is when you remarket to them.
It is easier to sell to your old leads than trying to acquire new leads, but most companies and businesses always put more of their attention in getting new leads, — which may not even convert. All your old leads will need may just be a simple reminder and the deal is closed.
While you focus on acquiring new leads, ensure that you don’t neglect the ones, try to find a balance between both, — this is will help you grow your business better.
How to avoid this digital marketing mistake
Here are a few things you can do if you want to avoid this digital marketing mistake.
Try to develop a remarketing strategy that will work for your business.
You can do this by creating an email marketing campaign. During your first marketing campaign, find a way to collect the emails of every new lead generated. Use that email to develop a remarketing strategy that will work for your business.
For example, you can use emails to remind users of an offer or a product they viewed previously – while on the mail, try to offer a special discount) or remind them about an abandoned cart to give them another nudge to convert.
7. Neglecting social media
Social media have become a great tool for businesses to engage with their target audience. As a business owner, your business should definitely have a space on social media. This is because most of your audience lives on social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, etc.
Don’t make the mistake of not having a social media presence for your business. It is a great digital marketing blunder. And you’ll be missing out on lots of marketing opportunities that could help you build relationships, trust, and brand loyalty for your business as well as increase your business reach.
Did you know? On average, a user spends about 28% of their internet time on social media. When you add social media presence to your business, you increase your brand awareness and improve your chances of getting more rewards, such as
- More leads and conversions
- Saving money spent on traditional marketing
- Improving customer experience
How to avoid this digital marketing mistake
To avoid this type of digital marketing blunder, simply take your business to the next level by adding your social media presence.
If you are not sure how to do this, you can hire the help of a professional social media manager, but ensure it is within your budget.
The Power of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing has proven to be an effective way for businesses and companies to grow their business. Whether your business is online or offline, adding a digital marketing strategy is a proven way to increase your brand awareness, stay ahead of your competitors and increase revenue.
As a business tool in today’s world, digital marketing opens you up to endless opportunities for learning and growing your business. Fix your digital marketing strategy, target the right leads, and optimize your website to maximize your business’ potential.
Read Also: The Pricing and Conversions of Social Media Ads: Facebook Vs Instagram Vs Twitter
Final Note
The digital age has opened lots of opportunities, especially for businesses and companies. Digital marketing is one of the opportunities that we have in this era, and as a business owner, you should not neglect its importance in the growth of your business.
Over 90% of your target audience already lives on the internet, which makes it easy for you to know where they live. All you need is the proper digital marketing strategy, and you are sure to get your audience’s attention.
So, ensure you are applying the right digital marketing strategy to your business and as you do, try as much as possible to avoid all the digital marketing mistakes listed in this post.