The digital marketing landscape is constantly changing, that is the only thing any digital marketing professional can be sure of. So as time marches on it is critical for every digital marketing effort you undertake to be reassessed. If you do not you could risk falling behind and not keeping up with the trends. Or worse it could lead to fundamental issues coming up in your digital marketing strategies. Therefore today, I am going to give you my top 3 digital marketing mistakes to avoid.

Not Having Clear Goals

Any successful digital marketing campaign needs a benchmark set. Otherwise, how will we be able to know we did what we set out to do? Not having goals at all is not helpful but also having vague goals can devalue your work and make it difficult to demonstrate the impact of your digital activities. Clients will often say things like “I need to dominate every social media channel” and I will respond with “why?” they often do not have an answer. If they muster an answer it usually along the lines of “this is what everyone else is doing” or “because we think it works”.

Understanding what your company or client provides and then synchronizing that with a platform is going to produce better results than having a loose approach across too many social media channels. Clear key performance indicators can help you to better choose the right social media platform for your business. You might decide that a Facebook marketing campaign will help you reach a younger audience, or perhaps after visiting the Visual Objects website, you may discover that finding a company to help you develop a company app is the best way for you to interact with your existing audience. By understanding how you can get the most out of your online efforts, you will be able to maximize efficiency and begin to see the results you want to see.

Not Knowing your Demographic

We all have our hunches about who will love our product or service, while this can be a great starting point for investigation, it can end up costing you without more research. It is more common then you would think though.

There is so much data available for those looking to make waves in the social media space so there is not any excuse for not knowing who your demographic is. There is an insane amount of information out there that can tell you what customers want, where they are looking for it and why. Most of these tools are free as well. So, take advantage of all this information available to you to ensure that you can make informed demographic decisions that will be ideal for your product or services. For example, if you were going to want to make the military one of your key target audiences you might want to use a site like https://www.sheerid.com/business/identity-marketing-platform/solutions/verification/military/. This is a good target audience option because it has been shown that 85% of the military strongly identify with being part of the military community. As a result of this, any personalized offers that you create will emotionally engage the military because they recognize its part of their identity. Obviously not every product is going to have a military target audience, so discover the demographic that you can personalize your marketing campaign towards.

Not Giving Your Marketing Campaigns Time

There are many business owners that will assume that because the development of digital technology changes so frequently that the digital marketing efforts should produce results at a similar rate. If they do not see these quick results, they lose faith and back out.

Thanks to this rapidly developing technology, from interactive video to social media, we are used to quick results. But unfortunately, these ideas do not translate to influencing audiences. It takes some time for audiences to become familiar with your brand. For example, those people who use Google on a regular basis may only come across your business if you have incorporated an effective Google Ads Management strategy into your campaign, and companies like Linear (learn more here) can help you to achieve the results that you want to see with as much ease as possible. If it’s not there, then it will be hard to make that connection. Human beings need time to become engaged. They require repetitive stimulation to your product or service so their mind can is more open to what your company has to say in its marketing material. Familiarity with your brand will breed engagement.

Therefore, consistency is key to successful marketing in general. If you are constantly changing up your approach your audience does not have time to gel with what you are putting out there. Creating those multiple points of exposure to your brand on a thought-through customer journey will generate this positive familiar association.

To conclude, getting the fundamentals right with any digital marketing campaign will improve your odds of success. If you do not know who you are marketing too and where they are you will often be wasting your time. Not understanding what you are setting out to do will also hurt your odds of finding any success. With the right goals, target audience and time you will see the results you want for your product or service.