6 Marketing Mistakes You Should Avoid

by ​Raul Harman, Guest Contributor

When you take a look at how delicate the world of digital marketing actually is, it becomes clear how easy it is to misstep and send a wrong message to your audience. You might even end up harming your brand instead of benefiting it. 

1. Not having a blog
One of the best methods of learning is by emulating tactics used by top-dogs of your industry. Sure, you won’t be able to follow up (fiscally) with every decision they make, however, there are some universal truths of the business world that you simply must acknowledge. For instance, from giants like Coca-Cola and Apple to SMEs (small and medium enterprises) and startups, everyone has a blog. Sure, blogging at other people’s blogs may encourage people to look at your bio and even click at the link leading to your homepage but according to some surveys, about 70 percent of your traffic comes to your website through your blog.

2. Lack of consistent posting
The next major marketing mistake you may have been making is the lack of consistent posting. Sure, quality needs to stand above everything else but the only way to stay on everyone’s minds is to post consistently, yet, this is not a practice utilized by so many digital marketers out there. As an argument to defend this lack of consistent posting, they usually claim that they have nothing relevant to discuss. Nonetheless, this can be fixed by bringing in guest bloggers, contacting contributors or even re-uploading an old post that is now, once again, relevant.

3. Forgetting about the traditional marketing
Another thing you need to keep in mind is the fact that digital marketing doesn’t somehow make traditional marketing obsolete. Newspaper, radio and TV ads are still efficient, so is telemarketing. Apart from this, hiring a billboard is definitely not a waste of money some people want you to believe it is, nor is printing a logo of your company to the side of a corporate vehicle. Moreover, items like branded products can be easily incorporated into your digital marketing strategy in a way that gives a much better ROI than if you were to go with the online methods of persuasion exclusively.

4. Shameless self-promotion
Even though your agenda may be to talk about your product or service, you can’t do this 24/7. At the end of the day, people are always more concerned more with themselves than they are with you. In other words, if they want to know about your product, they want to see how it can help them resolve their problems, not how higher sales that come from it will help your company grow. In order to avoid being classified as someone who cares about nothing but their own brand, you might want to try posting five or six pieces that add value to your audience for every self-promotional post that you upload online.

5. Not being clear enough
As we stated in the previous section, you, as a company or a brand, have an agenda. You want people to buy your product, hire your services, subscribe to your newsletter or fill in your survey. In order to get them to act in this way, you need to be abundantly clear about what is it that you want. Therefore, you need to ensure that your CTA (call-to-action) button is transparent, self-describing and positioned so that a person sees it as soon as you finish introducing yourself (and your agenda). This kind of honesty and transparency is a foundation for the future trust.

6. Ignoring the importance of local SEO
Finally, a lot of brands make a false assumption that, in the age of e-commerce, global presence is more important than local SEO. However, these two things are closely intertwined. Apart from giving your overall SEO a boost, there is a statistic about 78 percent of all local mobile searches resulting with an offline purchase. In other words, sometimes, people are just visiting to see your prices or even your physical address in order to decide whether to drop by or not. Ignoring this can significantly hurt your sales.

Conclusion
At the end of the day, avoiding these six mistakes can help make your digital marketing campaign much more fail-proof. As you could see, two out of six mistakes are related to traditional marketing and offline sales, which is something that a lot of people fail to consider nowadays. Remember, a great online presence is just a means to an end, it is not an end goal on its own.
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