It’s no secret: best practices constantly evolve within the field of digital marketing. The savviest professional marketers relish in industry updates, keeping their customers abreast of new tactics. If you’re a digital marketing professional, you need to stay knowledgeable to be successful. If you’re thinking of executing digital marketing tactics for your business, you also need to be cognizant of best practices–and which marketing mistakes to avoid.
However, what’s even more critical than marketing strategy is knowing which marketing strategies to avoid at all costs. Here are seven of the biggest marketing blunders to avoid in 2019.
1. Not Using A.I. or Any Form of Automation are Major Online Marketing Mistakes
The future is now, friends. Unless you’re entirely new to digital marketing, chances are you’ve heard about the importance AI now plays. Google, Bing, and DSP use for programmatic advertising; it’s how they function. Also, it doesn’t stop with paid search and display: Chatbots are taking over many roles.
Many businesses utilize bots on their websites, in Facebook messenger, and other mediums. Nearly 1.5 billion users interact with chatbots–and, for a good reason. Not only are chatbots more accurate with details, but they also help businesses save billions of dollars. Moreover, unlike humans, they’re available 24/7.
However, there’s an even better tactic you can’t forget. If you’re doing digital marketing, you need to automate nearly every part of your paid media campaigns.
2. Focusing Strictly on Single-Channel Marketing Tactics
Strategically approaching digital marketing requires an in-depth knowledge of marketing channels. Most of the time, those new to digital marketing have a minimal understanding of how a marketing stack works. Successful digital marketing is more than just setting up an Ads account–or boosting an event (or post) on Facebook. The best play is finding a mix of what works and what doesn’t. You need to have a blend of channels to enhance your customer experience (CX). Single-channel tactics are marketing mistakes to avoid.
Should I use Facebook/Instagram?
–Yes
Should I use paid search?
–Yes
What about a display campaign?
–It depends on your goals, but most likely, yes.
You need to allocate your resources and develop either a multichannel or omnichannel approach to digital marketing. Think about it this way: not all of your buyers engage with your ads at the same time, on the same device, or even on the same platform. So it makes sense to utilize as many channels as you can to market your product(s) to the consumer. Social media, paid search, display across the web and mobile–all are great options.
However, you must be strategic about how you approach these tactics, which brings up the next point.
3. Developing Content Without A Content Strategy
Regardless of how stellar your channel allocation might be, all your effort will fall on deaf ears if you can’t segment your market. Your best bet is to study your audience. Put yourself inside the mind of your ideal buyer. Ask yourself what kind of information they’ll need to make a purchasing decision. Ask yourself where your buyers will most likely engage with your ads.
Are you promoting a new product or brand? Perhaps using display will help you accomplish your goals. If you design the right strategy before you launch your campaigns, the marketing will work. Bottom line, content strategy determines whether or not your campaigns will succeed or fail.
4. Assuming that “SEO Is Dead.”
For some incredibly-ignorant reason, there is a list of professionals who want to convince you that SEO no longer plays a vital role in marketing. Moreover, for some equally-odd reason, there is the belief that just by “including some keywords” on your website will automatically let your business dominate the SERPs. Let’s cut to the chase: SEO is and forever will be one of the most critical strategies any company should have if they wish to claim an online presence.
However, SEO is becoming more sophisticated. Long gone are the days of over-injecting websites with keyphrases. Google and other SERP spiders crawl sites to figure out many things. Also, one of the most important aspects they determine is whether or not a site is what it claims to be. Google and Bing favor sites that are informative, well-written, and useful.
It’s also true that adopting SEO best practices for voice search is a smart tactic. There are quite a few SEO trends that employ different rules than traditional SEO. However, you still must ensure your site meets classic standards.
5. Not investing in UI/UX Professionals are Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
If SEO is the “make or break” tactic for your site to have any sort of web presence, then employing UI/UX best practices is the same for enhancing conversions. It doesn’t matter what your company defines as a conversion. What is more important is ensuring your site, your ads, and all of your tactics highlight user experience (UX) best practices.
Many conversion rate optimization professionals agree that having a strong UX component is guaranteed to bring lifts in your conversions. As an emerging sect of digital marketing, UI/UX Development isn’t just a trend–it’s a necessity. You wouldn’t hire someone to build you a house without having architectural blueprints, right? The same logic applies when building websites, designing ads, or creating marketing collateral without a UI/UX guru.
6. Creating Awful Content
It should go without saying that if you’re going to do something, you need to do it right. However, you’d be surprised to learn how many dumb and expensive mistakes marketers make by not spending the time to develop quality content. If you’re not careful and precise, your lazy writing or video editing could end up costing you.
And if you think that “no publicity is bad publicity,” ask the executives at Pepsi. Empowering Kendall Jenner to solve America’s political and social issues with a can of cola left a bad taste in viewers’ mouths (worse than Aspartame). It also took PepsiCo over a year to recoup their financial loss. In fact, it was the cola giant’s worst financial performance in nearly a decade.
7. Not Having a Healthy Marketing Spend
Digital marketing is expensive, bottom line. However, there are cost-effective ways to approach your strategies. You can even leverage less expensive channels to get your product in front of customers. It honestly depends on what your goals are.
If you want to succeed in paid search advertising, be prepared to spend a lot of your budget. The same goes with display and remarketing tactics. You’re utilizing programmatic advertising to get your ads in front of many people as possible. These tactics cost lots of money, and there is no way around that–especially if you outsource your digital marketing to an agency. Alternatively, and better yet, if you entrust a paid media automation platform to do your work. Before you get too deep into the woods, make sure you have the right budget for your goals.
Also, if you don’t have a significant spend, there are other avenues you can take. Invest your dollars in building a stellar website. Or even promote your products on social media platforms–Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and others are all cost-effective ways to raise awareness and increase conversions. Whatever route you choose, select your budget wisely and allocate it strategically, optimizing the best channels for your needs.
Conclusion
There are many ways to approach digital marketing. Also, there are multiple roads you can navigate; they’ll help you become successful. The most important tactic is not to make any of the (business-killing) mistakes listed above. Whatever path you choose, we hope it works for you. What are other digital marketing mistakes to avoid? Drop us a line at contactus@finch.com.
Or, to make digital marketing simpler, give us a try.
