The saying by Mark Twain, “it ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so” applies to quite a few of the digital marketing mistakes the team at The Good Marketer have encountered.
Marketers/business owners (mainly the latter) often make these mistakes when they’re in a rush to get their marketing going and for sales to come rolling in.
Taking action is great but you need to think (just a bit) before you go all in and waste your money on ads that aren’t pre-planned or optimized for your objective.
In this article, the team at The Good Marketer have pooled our knowledge to collate the 3 digital marketing mistakes that we’ve seen where people have been sure that what they were doing was right!
1. Spending Money Without Researching Your Audience
The number of business owners who think they know their target audience just from intuition compared to those who carry out research and let the data guide their thinking is probably anywhere from 3:1 to a 5:1 ratio from our personal experience.
- “I know my customers like the back of my hand.”
- “I don’t need data to tell me who my target audience, I’ve been in this business for years.”
- “I follow my gut on these sorts of decisions, just plow some money into it and see what happens.”
Even if you have been in the industry, you are a customer yourself of the product/service you are selling or you use your gut feeling with every decision you make in life, you need to research your target audience and find out as much information as you can about them.
Fortunately or unfortunately (depending on how you look at it), we have more data on people than ever before, which is why you should be using it to your advantage before people start with-holding the information they are providing companies so freely at this moment in time.
To start spending money on advertising without looking at the stats is high-risk and unless you’re running a test campaign to find out who your audience is, it could be lethal to your business.
How Do You Research Your Audience?
There are a few ways:
- Audience Insights – shows you data about your target audience
- Google Analytics – a web analytics service that tracks and reports website traffic
- Google Search Console – check indexing status and optimize visibility of the website
Don’t have anything set up yet and want to learn who your audience is?
There’s one great way to do this…
COMPETITORS.
Look at them and take inspiration or even just brands that you like yourself and find out how they are positioning themselves online in the marketplace.
2. Not Having A Blog For Your Website
Content is probably the best way to improve your SEO for your site.
If you are selling a product/service then we’re presuming you know more about your industry that your customers or at least the bulk of your audience.
What does this mean?
You have answers to their most pressing questions and you should produce content that answers these questions for your audience so that you show up first on Google when they search for an answer to the question.
The stats show this with marketers who prioritize blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see a positive ROI according to Hubspot.
The main focus of the content is the word “value”.
Before you even begin to write or create a piece of content, think about the value that this piece of content is providing your audience and what they are going to get from it.
3. Trying To Be Successful In All Marketing Channels
It’s easy to get carried away the number of digital marketing channels that are now available to us that we often want to try them all to get maximum results.
This is the wrong approach to take when it comes to creating a sustainable marketing strategy because you’re stretching yourself too thin and you’re not doing your due diligence.
If your audience is retirees, why would you want to spend all your time and money on Instagram, a platform where the audience is half the age? Just because ‘everybody else is’ doesn’t mean you should.
Again, do your research and use the data available to you to make a decision whether it’s using Google Analytics to find out where your traffic is coming from or looking at where your competitors are most active.
You should also consider what your goals are when thinking about what marketing channel to use. For example, if your goal is to generate sales then a good channel to focus on is Facebook Advertising.