For digital marketing professionals heading into 2022, it’s important to stay on top of the ever-changing landscape of the field. Are your strategies up-to-date? Are you reaching the most people you can? Whether you’re new to the industry or a seasoned pro ready to learn some new tricks, knowing what common digital marketing errors to avoid can help ensure you’re on the best path for promoting your business.
Not Knowing Your Target Audience
Defining and understanding your target audience is one of the most important elements of digital marketing. In order to build any kind of digital marketing strategy, including what kind of content to make and what kinds of campaigns to focus on, you first need to identify your target audience.
With billions of people using the internet daily, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. Remember that you don’t need to reach everyone, just the ones you think will be the most excited to receive your offering. Knowing who your typical customer is, where they live, how old they are, their gender, interests, occupation, education, and other demographic details can help you develop a savvy digital marketing strategy across whichever channels you choose. How well you know your audience directly correlates with how well your business succeeds. Not sure where to start? Check out hashtags, influencers, or events that have to do with your industry or business. Click through the websites and social media profiles of the people who are interested in products or services or brands like yours. Digging deep into your target audience will help your strategy both right away and long term.
Not Defining Your Goals
The first step to a successful marketing strategy is deciding what you want out of it. Joining a specific platform, writing a blog, or building a website because you “should” or “because everyone else is doing it” isn’t a sustainable marketing plan. What are your larger goals? Do you want to drive traffic to your website? Create an online marketplace to sell your products directly to customers? Gain more followers? Establish a brand identity online? Share content so people can see and engage with your services? If the reasons aren’t financial, perhaps you simply want to inspire and connect with an audience.
Regardless of the goal, not having clear reasoning and a plan when starting will quickly lead you off track. It’s imperative to have defined goals to stay on top of your strategy. Not defining them could affect your ability to connect with your (hopefully well-defined!) target audience—and even your bottom line.
Creating Too Much Content Without Enough Purpose
While it’s important to be consistent and stay relevant, it’s more important to share quality content. With so many digital marketing channels to choose from, it can be easy for businesses to spread themselves thin trying to utilize every single one without really creating anything with purpose. Experts recommend focusing on a few channels to get a message across, rather than bombarding users with content anywhere and everywhere. Although the channels within the digital marketing field are interconnected, it’s not necessary to create and share content in every single one. And even when focusing on certain channels, creating content specific to your niche shows your expertise within your lane. Producing resonant, meaningful content is an integral part of any digital marketing strategy.
Not Using the Right Tools to Understand Your Data
Social media analytics tools are your friends. They’re there for the taking (often for free!) and involve collecting, tracking, and analyzing user data on various platforms, all of which can help strengthen your strategy. The most well-known and widely-used analytics tool is Google Analytics (or GA). GA collects and tracks user data, compiles it into useful reports, and provides valuable insights to improve your website and/or app’s performance.
The more information you have the better, and the more tools to help you understand the demographic data, the more chances for your business to succeed. Understanding the data helps you glean crucial information on both positive and negative engagement, which you can then use to improve or change your strategy. Having access to this data allows you to better focus on future marketing efforts, ultimately saving time and money. You’re only hurting yourself and your business by not taking advantage of them.
Spending Too Much on Paid Ads
Before you start blowing your budget on paid advertising, slow down and make sure that your ads are being shown to the right people, at the right time. Do your due diligence in terms of defining your target audience and your goals. Next up: be sure to do some A/B testing when it comes to ads so you’re not paying for something that doesn’t resonate. See what works in terms of individual ads as well as campaigns and once you have a former idea, then spend more. Even better, think about exhausting all your organic strategies first, before tackling paid advertising.
Expecting Fast Results
As hard as it is to wait, patients is key when it comes to digital marketing strategy. Expecting overnight results will only lead to frustration and demotivation. Don’t worry if you don’t find instant success. Digital strategy takes time. It takes patience to wait for results—which can sometimes take months! Stay true to your goals and keep looking for and connecting with your target audience. You may not immediately see what’s working and what isn’t. But once you have all the elements in place, you can continue to refine your strategy until you’re satisfied.
Learn Digital Marketing with Noble Desktop
If you’re ready to learn more ways to improve your digital marketing strategy, take a look at Noble Desktop’s digital marketing courses. Depending on your location, you may be able to find digital marketing courses, bootcamps, and certificate programs in your area using Noble Desktop’s Classes Near Me tool.
For a more comprehensive learning experience, check out Noble’s Digital Marketing Strategies bootcamp. The bootcamp is a 12-hour course that delves into the important role digital marketing strategy plays in a company’s overall success. The bootcamp is also offered as part of the 78-hour Digital Marketing Certificate, which goes deeper into each aspect of digital marketing including developing an end-to-end marketing strategy through hands-on classes where you work on your business or company as a project. Students even have the chance to retake the course for free for one year!
Other digital marketing resources offered by Noble Desktop that can be useful to freelancers include a digital marketing blog that has detailed articles on topics across the board.