A lot of small business players have realized the importance of digital marketing in their marketing budget. Digital marketing puts your business online and therefore becomes an essential part of your online reputation. Can your customers find you in search results? Are you engaging with your customers? Are you gaining insights into customer behavior?
There is plenty to learn from your digital marketing efforts and get closer to your customers. However, many businessmen fail to rectify the flaws they are encountering in their pursuit. It is important to overcome your shortcomings and move ahead of competitors. This article will take a look at the major digital marketing flaws in the year gone-by and how you can mend them in 2015.
1. Mobile at the backburner
A growing number of customers are consuming your content through the comfort of their smartphone. Small business owners can’t afford to remain stuck with desktop website by publishing content including text, photos and video, which is inaccessible or illegible on mobile. Having a mobile-friendly website with a responsive design is a necessity in 2015.
The website needs to be published with just enough content that are easy to view on mobile. Furthermore, urban consumers prefer smartphone as their best friend while commuting to work. Tweaking your content into mobile-friendly form will enhance your reach. Push notifications feature for email and RSS feeds in mobile has long been used by digital marketers to share content with their target audience. Creating more mobile-friendly emails will further strengthen your effort.
2. Underutilization of Facebook page
It is easier to create a Facebook page but it is a blunder to leave it unutilized. An unutilized Facebook page will soon go into oblivion and users unlike it; and it is very difficult to get the lost customers again. It is important to utilize it for sharing the most interesting content with your customers.
Moreover, Facebook algorithm is changing in the way news feed works for the users and how businesses use their FB page. Use your FB page to know your audience. The main idea behind FB is to share content that is liked by your audience. So, shift your focus from selling on FB to posting engaging content. Let your employees support you in your initiative and respond to the customer queries.
3. Failure to form a content marketing strategy
Digital marketing content is scattered across company website, blogs, social media profiles, emails, YouTube and so many other digital mediums but have you failed to form a coherent strategy that resonates clearly in the minds of your audience? There has to be some connection between your content across the mediums so that people don’t get confused. There are already too many digital marketers out there to steal your customers.
Focus on quality content and use each medium as it is designed to be used. However, it does not mean that you can’t be resilient with your content strategy. The best way forward is to maintain a consistency of posting content, whatever medium(s) you choose. Experienced marketers have already realized the power of SEO with the right content.
4. Getting carried away by new trend
Digital marketing arena evolves rapidly and digital marketers are always in search for new tactics. While a new trend might look exciting, it might not work for every marketer. They need to understand their target audience and find out what their audience likes. While the basic approach towards your well-known audience need not change, you can try new tactics over new customers.
The idea is not to sway with the new trends. For instance, many big players indulge in flash sales and discounts to promote their products through social media but such a trend might turn into demise of a small player. Small players need to remember to play smart and fill in the gaps left by the bigger players.
5. Stuffing keywords to your disadvantage
Google keeps changing its algorithm to be more just to original content providers. Keyword is an essential part of their algorithm. Digital marketers, in their bid to outsmart Google algorithm by stuffing keywords, relegate the quality of their content. On the other hand, Google makes sure that such unqualified content is not visible to the target audience.
It is one of the significant changes made by the search engine giant to prepare for 2015. Try to use synonyms that relate to your keywords. Use the long-tail list of keywords rather than the most common ones to be more specific. Google Analytics is a great tool that helps you to do that.
6. Failure to track your digital marketing initiatives
As we are already aware, digital marketing initiatives are speckled across various online mediums, it is quintessentially true that your customers too are varied and strewn across the internet. This brings us to pay importance to digital metrics that helps us to closely understand our audience. But, there is a caveat here. This exercise needs to be done precisely, else it might prove counter-productive.
Boo.com and Pets.com failed miserably after they miscalculated their CLTV (Customer Lifetime value) and CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost). This led them to overestimate the size of their market and make wrong presumptions. Tracking your metrics rightly will get you closer to your marketing goals and objectives. Infographic like this often serves as a guide for small business owners to understand key digital marketing metrics.
7. Irrelevant landing pages
It is irking for the customer who gets excited by your ad to land on an irrelevant page. Many marketers have done a slip-up to trap the customers into sign-up or pay a website visit by showing them an enticing product. Be clear with your call-to-action buttons to avoid turning-off your visitors. The customer acquisition cost is already running high as customers have become choosy and they are constantly bombarded with marketing messages from all sources.
Follow a consistent approach in getting your message across through correct landing page. If your ad link says “sign up for newsletter”, then your landing page needs to also say the same. It enhances user experience and increases conversion rate.
8. Writing unsearchable tweets
The tweets have a tendency to be precise due to its limited 140-character length. Marketers do realize this. What they don’t realize is how important it is going to become to phrase their tweet. Writing your tweets even more precisely is going to determine your prowess in 2015.
Twitter has been following Google’s footsteps lately. Twitter’s new search algorithm allows the users to search tweets through their content, links, hashtags and even images. Insert right set of keywords to demonstrate your cloud on Twitter and become more relevant for your Twitter audience by showing up in their search queries.
9. Poor social media strategy
Customers enjoy being there at social media as it is a place to relax and share information with their friends. A number of social media platforms are available and are being exploited by marketers to interact with their audience. But going rampantly and posting content on social media pages is not going to help you anymore.
If you want to achieve social media success, you need to have a social media marketing plan in place. Every social media, whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest etc., involves a different skillset, set of tools and tactics to achieve your target. Once you are aware of a plan, you can deploy your resources effectively, systematically pursue your social media goals and implement your strategy.
10. No experimentation
Despite the entire clamor made by digital marketers online, many are marred by lack of innovation and creativity while engaging with their customers. Marketers need to keep up a vigil on customers’ changing mood and constantly fight against customers’ ennui. It is a gospel truth that not everything works for everyone.
A/B testing is an interesting way to try new ideas on your customers and improve your marketing efforts. For instance, Charmin’s toilet paper Twitter campaign produced exemplary results through its Twitter feed “tweet from your seat”. A successful campaign emboldens the marketer to think differently and stay ahead in the race.
Conclusion
In the midst of tough competition from rivals, digital marketers are faced with a gargantuan task of appealing to their online customers. The ultimate desire is to get revenue stream from them. Bypassing all the previous year’s mistakes, you can confidently use the tactics and steps listed above as part of your digital marketing strategy.
