Have you tried digital marketing and it did not work for you? Have outsourced it to someone but you were not satisfied with the results? Have you stopped investing in digital as it does not get you the results you need? Well, read this blog and you might find the digital marketing mistakes that you would have probably made. Those might be the mistakes which lead to failure of your campaigns.
If you are yet to start, here is how to be pro-active and avoid all the common mistakes that can become a reason for the failure with digital.
Let’s consider the fact that digital marketing is not the silver bullet you have been looking for to solve all your business problems. However, it is surely going to be one of those important steps which would lead to your success.
The most important thing to understand about making a digital campaign successful is to avoid common mistakes that are well known and can be avoided. You can get carried away with the excitement and start doing or implementing something that is not required and that would not actually fetch any results.
This post is going to be about those common mistakes that most of the business owners or startups make that leads to failure or rather unsuccessful attempts with digital marketing.
1) Having no clarity of objectives & KPIs
You need to be super sure what do you want to achieve from digital and above that what to actually expect from which channel. All you should do is define your objectives or goals aligning them with your business objectives. A lot of you might put engaging your audience as a goal or objective. That’s great but you focus on something which can’t guarantee if people are meaningfully engaging with you. Just getting likes is not the criteria for anything.
Always focus on the real engagement, getting people to call or message or share their queries or give you feedback, just pressing like button is the side effect of thumbing they keep doing every day.
2) No understanding of the target audience and targeting the wrong people
This should not be the scenario usually, but with most of the cases, people make this mistake. When I say this should not be the scenario, I feel every business owner or business manager, or sales manager or marketing manager always understands who is their target audience, so why should they not target them right on digital channels? Assuming every business understands where is the acceptance of their products and services, they should first create their target audience.
Once they have the demographic and psychographic analysis of their target audience, they can know better which channels to target and how to target on social media channels. When you don’t do it, there is a higher possibility of your campaigns being failed or not being accepted by the audience, because you are not showing your ads to the right people.
Follow this post to learn more about targeting and creating target personas: http://bit.ly/SMMSuccess7Steps
3) No competitor data or analysis to compare or benchmark
We love to live in a bubble of our own assumptions and hypothesis. And that my friends become a parasite for the business. Not doing research and not looking at the moves your competitors can be really dangerous for the business.
Thinking of what we are doing would work, without checking if the competitors already tried, succeeded or failed. Whereas you know what has worked, what did not work in the same domain you can craft your campaign or strategy accordingly.
Most of the first-timers with digital, don’t actually do it and when they fail, they blame the medium. I blame them!
4) Neglecting your campaign insights, analytics etc
You have set your objectives, you have done your homework with your target audience, you are sure this campaign would work but what if you are not tracking it properly. Everything can be right and just because of not tracking the insights of a campaign can lead to another failure.
It is always recommended to monitor your campaigns closely, keep monitoring which ads are performing better, which types of posts are getting more engagement, from which platform you are receiving most of your leads etc. Look at as many aspects as you can and then decide how to move forward.
You can’t just set the campaign “Live” and forget about it. It needs optimization based on the results you get. If you don’t understand the details, hire someone who can do it for you but don’t let it unattended.
5) Jumping on new trends without having a clear goal or objective
Facebook launched blah blah blah or x y z, you jump your focus to the new tech when you actually have clarity if it is for you or not. The new trend could be in social behaviour, social media usage, social media technology or anything. If you jump your focus their, you need to be super sure of what you are doing, if not just wait for the right time.
People jump to one thing from another, they start to do everything, whereas it takes time to get something established.
6) Lack of Planning & Synchronization
If the campaigned is not planned and timed well, it does not translate great results. If you want to achieve great results from your campaign you should have patience. It would require lots of planning about everything involved in the campaign.
What has happened before and what is coming next is really important. You can’t just do a one-time thing. Your planning should be in sync with what you di earlier. It would help you to get better results.
7) Not paying attention to online consumer behaviour
We talk about it, we put it in the presentations, but when it comes to actual implementation most of the digital campaigns are literal translations of their offline campaigns. To win digital, you need to think digitally all the time. Sometimes which works offline might as well work online but that will not be the case always.
You need to understand how consumers behave online, what they like, what they dislike, how they interact with content online, how they make purchase decisions. When you consider all these parameters during the planning process, you would definitely come up with a better plan.
For God sake, stop considering Social Media as just another medium to distribute your ads!
8) Doing Things in Isolation
One of the most important factors that affect your online campaign is not to synchronize it with each of your team members. Everybody should participate actively, this should not happen that half of the people in your team do not even know about it. You need to get everybody in sync and launch it with a bang.
Marketing or digital marketing team should bring all the other departments onboard and then execute the campaign. It not only gives you a morale boost but also helps you building employee advocacy which helps in translating better results from the overall campaign.
9) Neglecting/Underestimating the Importance of Social Media Platforms & Mobile
I clubbed two important reasons in one. Because somehow they are related to each other. Let’s talk about the first one first. If you don’t value social media in your overall digital campaigns. You are surely going to lose a huge amount of money that social could have saved for you. The CPC (cost per click), the CPL (cost per lead) is way cheaper than the other digital channels. Above all social media gives you the opportunity to put yourself as a brand and connect with your audience meaningfully.
You are likely to lose the battle when social media is not given a priority.
There are people who value digital and they understand the worth of social too but their focus is never mobile. The entire world is using mobile devices to surf the internet and if you are not focused on mobile then who are you talking to? When you don’t plan your campaigns and creatives according to mobile devices it won’t lead to great results.
10) Not Spending Money Wisely
There are people who don’t invest a dime and yet say the digital channels suck. I am not talking to those people at all. Let them first taste the water and then will talk about the nectar. I am talking to those people who have spent huge money on digital and still struggling to find the value.
There are hundreds of factors that affect the selection of medium and then the budget of the campaign. One thing you should always keep in mind that you need to have a balance in your spend on Branding Vs Sales. You can’t just go sales sales sales always neither going only for branding would help your business to grow.
When I say you need to have a balance, you need to spend wisely on every campaign. Sales should always be a focus of your tactical activities. However, ongoing spend on social media helps you build a brand presence which one should not ignore. As mentioned in the previous post, even for lead generation social media is giving amazing results, for even highly targeted niche.
11) Not Utilizing Influencer Marketing Wisely
Influencer marketing is a great way to bring word of mouth online. People who have authority in their domain by creating content and gaining followers can help you reach out to a larger group of people without spending hugely on advertising. When considering Influencer marketing, don’t rush to celebrities. Look for micro influencers (10k to 30k followers). They have sufficient followers to help you spread your reach and limited attitude not to ruin your campaign.
Select the right people to work with, and plan your activity well in advance with the influencers too. Don’t just invite them to attend your events, have them try your product or services, let them experience and talk about it accordingly. You can follow one of my previous posts on Influencer marketing here: http://bit.ly/InfluencerMarketingKnowHows
Be reasonable with everything you do!
If you want to get amazing results from your digital campaigns, you need to be reasonable with all the factors. You can’t be biased about the channels, you need to look at the data and see how your audience is going to perceive this campaign. Use common sense and invest time & money wisely on the right channels. Learn from the mistakes of others, don’t get carried away with every trend and always make wise decisions.
Hope you enjoyed reading this post, let me know in comments what you think about the failures in digital marketing and how to tackle them.