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A lot of new businesses are investing and capitalizing on digital marketing, whilst a large portion of other business are failing to implement a sound digital marketing strategy at all. According to estimates, the size of the digital marketing industry is set to grow by 12.9% to £14bn in 2022, However, many businesses are still struggling with the digital marketing aspects of their operations.

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One thing is common among all businesses: the digital marketing pitfalls and mistakes that are hindering companies from enjoying the true potential marketing in business growth.

Everyone makes mistakes. Even the most seasoned marketers make mistakes and fail at campaigns. However, it is important to learn from the mistakes, fix them, and avoid such mistakes in the future.

In this blog, we will be talking about the most common digital marketing pitfalls and how you can avoid them easily to reach your business objectives.

1. Choosing the Wrong Target Audiences

Let’s start with the first thing you are supposed to do when creating your marketing strategy: choosing the target audience.

Many businesses fail to target the most qualified audience. They either choose a too large audience or go for people who have no potential to become customers. Let’s discuss each scenario.

When creating your digital marketing strategy, choosing a broader audience group might increase your website traffic, but you won’t be getting any real value or conversions. Businesses end up targeting the wrong audience because they’re not investing to do the target audience analysis.

The result is that users come to their website, find nothing relevant, abandon the website, and never return. It leaves the businesses in demise with no conversions.

How To Target The Right Audience?

Narrow down your audience, and don’t go after assumptions about the audience of your business. For instance, it’s a common assumption that more men are into home improvement, sporting goods, etc., niches. Whereas beauty and skincare is something inherent to women.

Here is the real surprise.

According to data, 68% of skin and body care influencers were men during the last six months. Not only this, 45% and 56% of searches against home improvement and sporting goods, respectively, were generated by women.

Therefore, you must start with consumer research and identify the most qualified audience. Common personas you must start will include demographics, hobbies, buying habits, and interests, narrowing down.

So the short answer here is:

Do everything by the book and perform every step required to choose the target audience. Do not go after myths and stereotypes because your investment is at risk if you do so.

2. Underutilising or Avoiding Keyword Research

Paid advertising and traffic are alluring, no doubt. But if you want your business to sustain itself in the long run, a proper approach to SEO through keyword research should be your first port of call.

According to statistics of AdvancedWebRanking, 67% of the clicks go to the first five organic results.

And what is the juice that helps you bring your website, webpages, or content in the top organic results? A clear and concise SEO Strategy.

Unfortunately, a lot of small businesses who have realized the importance of online presence are yet far away from implementing the dos and don’ts of digital marketing.

Keyword research is the starting point of your digital marketing. If you’re investing the right amount of time and money in keyword research, you can reap the benefits like:

  •       Getting sustainable organic traffic
  •       Being able to target the right keywords to people at different stages in the customer journey
  •       More conversions, leads, and competition

Many businesses are either not investing in keyword research or underutilizing the power of keyword research. It’s the reason why many businesses complain about not having sustainable traffic, leads, and conversions.

How to Capitalize On Keyword Research?

First things first, if you’ve not performed keyword research at all, it’s time to get started. You should start by checking your website ranking against different keywords. If your web page is ranking on the 3rd or 4th page against a keyword, you can further improve it to top results. After you’ve identified keyword opportunities, you could:

  • Perform competitor keyword analysis to see which keywords they are targeting and getting the most traffic against.
  • Explore keywords everywhere: social media, user platforms (Quora, Reddit), the People Also Ask section on Google, the Suggestion section, tools, and keyword explorer.
  • If you’re a small business not able to afford a full-time digital marketer to perform keyword research, you can hire professionals to do the job.

3. Writing Low-Quality Content

Content Is King!

However, many businesses ignore the importance of content. Having a well-planned content marketing strategy is the key to success. But the alarming figures state that only 32% of marketers create a content marketing strategy.

The truth is that blogging is still the most popular and proven way of building a rapport with your target audience. Tailor the content according to the search intent of different users.

But most marketers are failing to do it.

Outcome?

Overproducing content with no value or not being able to post content regularly. In worst cases, the bloggers end up stuffing their web pages with plagiarized content.

How To Focus On Your Content That Provides Value

creative content marketing strategy must be laid out properly in true spirit. Whether you’re writing ad copies, creating content for the homepage, or blog of your website, use keywords from keyword research and plan your content calendar.

Here are some tips to get you started:

  1. Address the most common concerns and pain points of the target audience, provide the content that delivers value and give information.
  2. Produce high quality content on a regular basis
  3. Find new topics and trends that your target audience might be interested to read about

4. Your Social Media Strategy

Around 4.62 billion people around the world are active social media users, with 424 million new users joining the race. On average, an individual spends 2 and half hours browsing social media.

Can you afford to ignore social media as a business?

It sounds impossible.

But the fact check is that most businesses do not create a practicable social media strategy to engage the social media audience and attract them to the website. Around 40% of small businesses do not capitalize on social media at all. Besides, several B2B businesses do not benefit from social media.

A lot of opportunities businesses are missing out on by not having a well-crafted social media strategy include:

  • To connect with the audience at a personal level
  • Improve loyalty, lead generation, conversions, and overall awareness of business
  • Providing round-the-clock customer service to improve the overall experience

How To Capitalise On Your Social Media Efforts?

Like search engines and websites, social media like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc., provide a lot of space for marketing yourself. You can capitalize on Facebook’s Meta and business suite to market yourself to the right set of audiences.

Facebook has the most active users, and you can just imagine the data they own. You can capitalize on the data of Facebook and do Facebook marketing. It will help you reach your audience, get conversions, and lead generation.

You can utilize other social media marketing tactics like giveaways, competitions, prize draws, etc.

5. Losing Track Of Leads

Lead generation is all about finding potential clients and nurturing them to convert into customers. A lot of businesses are enthusiastic about lead generation and conversion. They are able to generate, nurture, and convert a good number of leads.

It’s overwhelming.

But what about the leads that didn’t convert?

Have you tried to keep track of that?

Did you think about retargeting them?

An overwhelming 63% leads inquiring about your business won’t convert within the next 3 months.

By losing track of the leads that didn’t convert, marketers make a big mistake because the chances of converting a lead by follow-up are 9x higher.

How Do You Avoid This Digital Marketing Pitfall?

Every lead entering the funnel is valuable, and you cannot afford to lose it.

Therefore, marketers must strategize lead generation and nurturing strategies to cater to all the converted and unconverted leads. You must interact with your leads from multiple channels, help them through the process, deliver valuable content, etc.

6. Avoiding Competitor Analysis

Have you performed competitor analysis while crafting your digital marketing strategy?

Your competitor might be using every marketing tool or strategy you’re not applying. Competitor analysis is necessary for your business and digital marketing. Why?

You understand your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. Besides, you can identify several opportunities that you can capitalize on. It also gives you a chance to improve the areas where you’re lacking.

Your competitor is sharing an audience with you, and analysis of what competitors are doing gives you more information about your audience. You can also create defensive or offensive marketing strategies to cater to your competitor’s campaigns.

How To Correct This Pitfall?

The simple fix to this digital marketing pitfall is to perform a competitor analysis. Start with identifying the weaknesses and strengths of your competitors. Analyse your competitors’ keywords, what keywords they are ranking for, their website design, social media, marketing strategy, and every corner you can go into.

Pick at least 5 competitors and perform the competition analysis. Implement the findings in your own marketing strategy to harness the power of digital marketing.

7. Forgetting About Mobile Users

Haven’t you optimized your website and content for mobile users?

Are you still alive without a responsive web design?

Around 68% of the global website visits are generated from mobile, according to the data 2020. In 2021, only mobile devices generated around 55% of the global traffic on websites, excluding tablets.

What most marketers ignore is optimizing their website and content for mobile users. If your website is not mobile-friendly, it only requires a few seconds for the user to abandon it.

How To Fix This?

Simple answer: optimize your website and content for mobile users.

Work on improving the customer experience over mobile devices. You can launch your mobile application to bring more convenience to mobile users. The content, images, videos, graphics, etc., are showing up optimized on the mobile screens. Make sure that the loading speed of your website is good.

You cannot ignore the mobile users as it increases your risk of losing 50% of the potential customers.

To Summarise

Moving forward, you should not be ignoring these common digital marketing pitfalls if you want a sustainable marketing drive for your business. We have provided you with the fixes and avoidance paths.

However, if you need professional services to get you on the right track, RedCore Digital is right there to help you out. Work with our experienced and professional copywriters, website designers, paid advertising experts, and SEO experts to grow your business.

Dan Wiggins

Dan Wiggins is founder and director of RedCore Digital. Throughout Dan's 10 years working in digital marketing, he's managed SEO campaigns for businesses in various sectors, including finance, healthcare, retail & SaaS.