10 Digital Marketing Mistakes You Need To Avoid Making

The online world is constantly evolving, so it’s never a good idea to compare it with the offline world. Therefore, it just makes sense to employ creative and unique marketing techniques that will attract your audience and potential customers. Does your digital marketing strategy effective at producing a good ROI? Are you sure you’re not wasting your money? Let’s explore some digital marketing mistakes you need to avoid – just in case.

Not Doing More to Promote Your Website

Having a website is important for any business, but having it alone is not enough if you don’t make enough effort to promote it and share it across cyberspace. The internet has reached its saturation point, at this time, there are already a whooping 1.5 billion websites hosted on the world wide web. If you don’t promote your website, you cannot expect your target audiences to just stumble upon your site.

Drive traffic to your website by developing high-quality content and investing in SEO & SEM. You can also advertise in search engines to get more exposure. For more ways on how to drive traffic to your website, read: 

• Driving More Traffic Into Your Blog or Website
• More Ways to Increase Website Traffic

Targeting the Wrong Audience

This is one of the biggest digital marketing mistakes a business can make. Some companies target a very broad audience because they want to reach more people, then end up discouraged when they don’t get the response they expected. Other companies think they know their audience, but then end up targeting the wrong people.

If your metrics tell you that your landing pages have increased their number of visitors, identify whether those visitors are your target audience. 

Avoid this digital marketing blunder by researching your target audience. Find the right target market by researching and testing. Start by creating marketing personas based on your previous and existing buyers. These buyer personas are fictional profiles that represent your ideal customer based on the data about your target audience such as demographics, interests, buying habits, and more. 

You can generate more than one buyer persona if your brand caters to a variety of audiences. After establishing these personas, try targeting people with the same traits. Test whether targeting a broader audience or a specific and narrower market provides more returns. When you have narrowed down your target market, your digital marketing campaigns will get more relevant leads and will surely be more successful.

Neglecting Website Design

Another mistake businesses make is neglecting their website. The number one priority in designing your website is to put the user’s experience first in mind. Being a user-friendly website is a necessity in this digital age. Your website should be fast-loading, easy to use, and provides valuable content. 

Put more effort into optimizing and improving your website to provide a positive user experience. Make sure your website is mobile-responsive, quick to load, and easy to navigate. 

Not Having a Blog for Your Website

Having a blog is one of the best ways to build and grow your brand identity and authority in your field. But many businesses neglect this aspect. Some abandon their blogging efforts, thinking it’s not working enough, while others don’t attempt to make one at all.

Blogging helps you in several ways like driving more traffic to your website, improve your site rank and SEO, build a relationship with potential clients, and establish you as an authority in your field. 

Not Using Social Media

Most people live on social media today, and if your target audience does and you’re not using it, then this is a mistake you need to correct. Not using social media will cause you to miss opportunities such as interacting and building relationships with your potential customers, reaching out to new audiences, increasing brand awareness, and generating new leads.  

Take advantage of social media marketing. Determine the right social media platform for your business. Focus on the platforms where your audiences congregate. Know when your target audiences spend time on that platform and post engaging content in those times. 

To take your game to the next level, you can opt to invest in social media ads (like on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter). The best thing about social media is it’s inexpensive compared to other marketing avenues. Creating social media accounts will cost you nothing, although you will have to spend if you buy advertisements, it is still less expensive than traditional marketing.

Not Using Videos

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter – these are the first things that come to most people’s minds when they hear the words social media. But you are forgetting YouTube. It may not seem like it, but your business needs a YouTube page as well. Make use of this free website to upload your videos and you can then link them to your other digital marketing platforms.

Videos are not limited to Youtube, they also exist on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Videos are fun to watch, they are engaging and they capture the audience’s attention. Apparently, video marketing is a thing now, and it is a great strategy to get people to check out your business.

Learn more about video marketing here: Tips for Video Marketing

Using Clickbait

To boost traffic and customer engagement, some marketers tend to use clickbait content. Clickbait is a type of content that spins words in its heading in order to sound more appealing to customers, without really holding any real value for them. A common example is a post that is titled “You’ll Never Believe What Happened Next!” even when the content is very much just the average thing. This is using clickbait to lure audiences into your page without really giving them valuable content, and this will hurt your credibility and reputation.

Avoid this digital marketing mistake at all costs! Instead of using clickbait, focus on making high-quality content that delivers value to your target market. Your headline should tell the audience exactly what they can expect. This way, your follower won’t ever be disappointed with the actual content of your article.

Splurging only on Paid Advertisements

Most digital marketers only spend their marketing budget on paid advertisements. What about other digital marketing techniques that are possibly more effective? As a digital marketer, spending on paid advertisements should only be done if you are aiming for more visibility and awareness for your brand. If your brand already has a relevant number of followers and is gradually increasing, it might be better for you to invest in other forms of digital marketing. Maybe you could look into developing more high-quality content or improving your website or landing pages.

Spamming

Do not, I repeat, DO NOT spam your customers. This should not even be an issue today, but some people are spamming their audience without even knowing it. Now, how do you determine if you are spamming? Look at your emails and ask yourself if these emails are helpful, relevant, informative, and/or educational. Your emails need to be relevant to your recipients because the last thing you want is for them to unsubscribe to your email list.

Give your subscribers options when they sign up to receive your emails. Do they want monthly or weekly content? If your customers choose to only receive your emails once a month, make sure not to contact them every day. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself losing your precious subscribers.

Ignoring Customer Emails

When a customer has feedback on your business, they will find a way to send you a message. When you do get these emails, it’s highly important to respond to them all the time. If you ignore these emails, there’s a probability that you will lose potential customers. 

No business is perfect, so don’t be discouraged if you have done any of the mistakes above. The first thing to do is acknowledge the things you’ve been doing incorrectly and when you’ve identified these digital marketing mistakes, take actions that will correct your errors. 

10 of the Best Productivity Tools for your Startup Business

Having a startup is gonna get you busy and while that’s a good thing, you’ll need to make that busy-ness into productiveness that will meet your vision and goals. If you are looking for the best productivity tools to help you out, you’re in the right spot.

There are plenty of great tools available to help you manage your business and reasonably priced as well. The challenge is to find those that will fit and work well for you.

To save you time from scouring the internet for these, we’ve rounded up a list of 10 of the best productivity tools for your startup business. Check them out below.

10 of the Best Productivity Tools

Asana

This tool will help your team manage projects, brainstorm ideas, and more without flooding your team with unnecessary emails and follow-up calls. It has templates and built-in to-do lists that you can readily use, and you can assign tasks and responsibilities to your colleagues. Asana has free plan offers for up to 15 team members while the premium (paid) version starts at $10 a month per team member.

Slack

This is a well-known app that’s widely used among businesses that have remote employees. Slack is mainly used for messaging and document sharing, a great alternative for email. This is definitely one of the best productivity tools out there.

Google Workspace (G Suite)

This is a great tool for digital enterprise management. Starting at just $5 a month, you can send emails, manage and collaborate on internal documents, share calendars, track website analytics, and more in one place. Whether you’ll be using your computer, tablet, or phone, Google Workspace can make your life so much easier.

Canva

Canva is an online graphic design tool that’s super helpful for startups to make their own marketing materials such as brochures, social media graphics, powerpoints, and other graphics-heavy documents. It’s available to use for free but the premium version offers more images and templates that will be helpful for your startup business.

Read: Using Canva for your business

Wunderlist

If you are the type of person who needs to jot down the important things that you need to do for the next day, Wunderlist is for you. This is a simple app to keep the daily to-do list that you can share with anybody else. It’s both available on Android and iOS.

Calendly

This is scheduling software that will help you manage your appointments. People use this tool to make coordinate meetings and connect business relationships. Calendly integrates, syncs, and aligns everything around the user’s meetings. Users just have to set their time of availability and choose what type of meeting they want. The app will then coordinate everything.

It also sends automatic follow-ups and reminders to make sure you don’t miss anything.

Upwork

When you own a business, you should know that it’s just not possible to handle everything by yourself. To become more productive and milk your time as much as you can, you’ll need to delegate tasks. If you need to outsource workloads, Upwork is the biggest freelancers platform that you can sign up in to find other people to help you out.

Upwork connects companies to freelancers of any field, depending on your needs. If you need a designer, a writer, a bookkeeper, a developer, or anything else, this website can match you up with prospects.

Hootsuite

This tool will help you manage your social media accounts, whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, or whatever. Hootsuite is a helpful tool to manage your content planning, build your brand’s social media engagements, track your analytics, and keep your brand’s online presence alive.

Expensify

To manage your finances, Expensify is a helpful tool to manage your company expenses. This tool will make it easy to upload receipts track expenses on your credit card purchases.

HARO (Help A Reporter Out)

This is a helpful daily email that will let you establish yourself an authority in your industry. When you sign up with HARO as a source, you’ll specify your specialty and area of expertise, and journalists will contact you when they need your thoughts and insights for a story.

Once you find the right productivity tools that work for you, you’ll get to focus more on running your startup business. So hopefully, this list will help you through.