Digital marketing has become one of the fastest-growing, exciting, and innovative industries in the United States. Last year, 2015, was a particularly impressive year for the industry, with more than an estimated $170 billion being spent on digital marketing efforts worldwide? That trend is only set to increase significantly over at least the next few years. In addition, more than 71% of companies plan to increase their digital marketing budgets in the near-term, and close to 80% of companies now have teams that are dedicated solely or primarily to running their social media campaign.
With so much growth, it is particularly important for companies who are still getting their bearings in this emerging sector to avoid as many “rookie” mistakes as possible. By learning as much as you can from those who have come before you, you can close the advantage gap significantly and join the ranks of companies who are benefiting tremendously from effective digital marketing campaigns.
In order to help shorten your learning curve, we’ve come up this list of 5 common rookie digital marketing mistakes, in the hopes that you can avoid them, and start getting the many benefits of digital marketing as soon as possible.
Not optimizing your website
It’s easier than ever to create a good-looking website. Tools like WordPress (among others) help take the technical coding and programming expertise that used to be necessary for websites largely out of the equation. Google takes website optimization, and website loading times, very seriously. If you want your website at the top of the rankings, you need to optimize it!
Spending too much on advertising
Advertising can be a useful way to get quick results, but you need a robust digital marketing campaign to back it up for there to be a lasting impact — and lasting value. Instead of throwing money into a Pay-Per-Click campaign (or something else along those lines), instead invest in creating high-quality content — blog posts, white papers, infographics, etc. — for your audience. This type of content has a one-time cost, then can be shared indefinitely by your audience.
Not engaging enough with social media users
Social media is a fantastic tool which makes communicating with your customers, clients, and anyone else streamlined and simple. It provides near-instantaneous feedback on proposals or news from your company, including positive or negative firsthand information about your products or services. You can also use social media to ask questions, much like a focus group — all without spending additional resources on an outside PR agency!
Make use of your social media users. They’ll appreciate it, and you’ll get a lot of value from it as well.
Focusing too heavily on keywords
While having an understanding of keywords is certainly important, you don’t want to focus too heavily on them. Instead, take a look at the broad keywords that are relevant to your industry or niche, and then create content that directly relates to those keywords without trying to “stuff” the content with them.
Thinking that digital marketing strategy is static
Digital marketing is still a very young and rapidly-growing industry. As a result, what is true in one year, or even in one quarter, might not necessarily be true in the future. While it’s important to come up with a robust digital marketing strategy, you need to be willing to change and evolve along with the rest of the industry. This requires an inward focus — you should constantly be checking to see what is working and what isn’t within your strategy; and just because something works one month doesn’t mean it will keep working.
This isn’t cause for alarm, but is instead an opportunity to constantly grow your understanding of your industry, your customers, and your company.
Ultimately, digital marketing requires some level of trial and error. Don’t be afraid to try new things — the worst that can happen is you just try something else. But the more likely outcome is that you’ll start finding things that work and generate some traction that results in more sales. Be ready for an increased call volume with our customized answering service for small businesses.
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