There are hundreds of ways to grow a business, but it’s nearly impossible to generate meaningful results without an emphasis on digital marketing. And while most businesses invest something in digital marketing, many brands make costly mistakes that suppress results and/or damage the brand.
Don’t Make These 5 Mistakes
If you want to give your business every chance to be successful, you have to get digital marketing basics right. That means avoiding the following costly, common blunders:
1. No Brand Voice
One way you can do this is by creating brand guidelines that are kept in a centralized location. A digital asset management solution keeps all the elements that are relevant to your brands, such as your brand story (mission, vision, and core values), logo and design guidelines, color palette, tone, the spelling of specific words, and best practices in one place, ensuring that the most updated versions of everything are easily accessible to anyone who may need them.
As designer Colette Pomerleau explains, “Brand voice is the way you talk to your customers and is defined by your brand’s style of communication. Your brand voice is directed to your target audience, and it can have any style, as long as it feels true to your brand values and persona—be it authoritative, playful, intellectual, ominous, kind of fun.”
The key is to hone in on that voice and use it consistently across the board. View your brand as a person. While your brand can say different things, you should be careful to not let it deviate too much in terms of how you say things. Tone, word choice, and other stylistic elements should remain consistent.
2. Targeting the Wrong Audience
Improper audience targeting is, according to a top Long Island digital marketing company, one of the most common mistakes brands make in the digital age. And if you leave this article with only one takeaway, it should be the need to zero in on the right customers.
Lack of proper audience targeting will render your content and design efforts useless. You might end up with a pretty website that looks great and features compelling copy, but you’re going to come up empty in the categories that matter most.
Not sure how to find your target audience? Social media is a great place to start. Your website analytics can prove helpful, too. Whatever you do, don’t make assumptions. Let data drive your targeting (and let targeting drive your design and content choices).
3. Lack of KPIs and Goal Tracking
You can’t be successful with digital marketing if you aren’t setting goals and tracking your progress with specific data points and analytics.
To understand how you’re doing with your marketing, you must establish a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) and track your progress against these measurements month after month.
At first, the data won’t make much sense. But as you collect more and more data, you’ll start to identify baseline figures and trends. Armed with these insights, you can make informed tweaks and decisions.
4. Neglecting Content
Content is king. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the business of selling ad space or shiny widgets, your digital marketing strategy will never be complete without an emphasis on high-quality content creation.
Content creation looks different for every brand, but it’s ultimately the gasoline to your marketing engine. If you don’t have it, you’re not going to make it very far. For the best results, you need to create both onsite and offsite content. The latter is designed to drive traffic to your website, while the former is intended to engage, educate, and convert visitors into customers.
5. No Social Strategy
Many small businesses and brands neglect social media because they’re overwhelmed. But here’s the deal: You don’t need to be an expert at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube. Quality matters far more than quantity.
Pick one platform and channel all of your social media energy into that one platform. Focus on building up an audience of raving fans on that platform. Then, if/when you feel comfortable, you can add another platform (using your audience from the other one to jumpstart your success).
Set Your Business Up for Success
There’s no scientific formula for digital marketing success. There are, however, tried and true growth principles that will set you on the right path.