7 Digital Marketing Fails to Avoid When You’ve Just Started a Business

Oct 14, 2016

Usually, when you’ve just started a business, you would want to get more exposure and create an image for your brand. To do this, you can use digital marketing as an important tool. More often than not, entrepreneurs end up feeling disappointed with digital marketing when it fails to yield desired results, demeriting the medium itself.

With the knowledge and proper use of digital platforms, many companies have improved their bottom-line. If you too want to leverage digital marketing to grow your business, avoid making these errors.

1. Not focusing on mobile devices

An area often neglected is optimization of campaigns to suit various devices, especially mobile phones. Many companies are now optimizing their websites for mobile, ensuring that they are viewable on all devices like desktops, tablets, and smartphones.

You should also consider the use of mobile apps to grow your business. People want to fit their world in their pockets and use of apps has made life extremely simple. Statistics shows that using apps as a way to build your brand will have a wider reach.

According to Com Score, mobiles have become the dominant platform that consumers use in the digital world, now accounting for 62% all digital time. Mobile applications account for more than 50% of that total time.

2. Outsourcing without involvement

Outsourcing your digital marketing campaigns is a great idea but without your involvement, it can turn into a recipe for disaster. If you want to outsource your work, you should take the time to educate yourself about the latest trends and find out what digital marketing techniques can do well for your company.

A common mistake that some companies make is not investing sufficient time in developing the brief. If you do not take the time to explain your end goals and bring your agency up to speed with your objectives, it’s unlikely that your campaign will be successful. You must brainstorm with your agency on the different techniques that could be used and decide on those that would be most suited to meet your company’s goals.

For example, for someone whose target audience is not present on a platform like LinkedIn, any marketing campaign launched on such a medium is bound to fail.

Similarly, when you know your target audience is very active on Facebook, you must invest in that medium to leverage your brand. It is essential to keep an on-going dialogue with your agency to help them stay focused on results.

3. Relying solely on your digital marketing agency

While your agency is on a higher ground by virtue of knowing the medium, leaving everything on them is also dangerous. After all, no one understands your business better than you do. Get your all your key departments involved in defining your strategy – take inputs from your sales team to understand the effectiveness of your campaign, keep in touch with your product development team to stay informed of upcoming changes, and engage with your employees on social media to build a healthy employer image.

Your employees can also help generate positive exposure and raise awareness for your brand. This way, a part of your audience base is already engaging with the brand and creating the desired image. There are several employee advocacy tools to manage these efforts. Using these tools will not only help streamline your employee advocacy campaigns but will also help boost the productivity of your marketing team/agency.

4. Digital marketing without a strategy

It is important to understand digital marketing trends and create a digital marketing strategy because not all digital channels are effective for all companies. Start by defining your company’s goals, the idea that you want to sell and the one image that you want to communicate to your audience. Remember, in digital marketing, one clear idea is often more effective than a clutter of ideas. Think of all the jingles/taglines you have heard on the radio – the most powerful brands today have one clear message that we all remember.

The next step would be to identify your target audience and communicate the same to your agency. You could also consult with your agency in case you need assistance in this regard. Digital marketing is most effective when the target audience is specific and well defined. Your campaigns will then be more cost effective too.

5. Buying fake followers on Twitter

One of the objectives of building a Twitter presence is to make yourself reachable to an interested audience. Buying likes and followers to hype your image is unethical and builds a false demand for your business. This may boost your rankings, or improve visibility in the short term, but will do little to improve engagement in the long run.

For example, Steven J Wilson of Highpoweredseo.com created a fake Twitter account to run an experiment. He bought followers to see if that would help boost his Twitter presence. But, within 6 weeks of buying those followers, he had lost 35% of them. And the number of followers on his account continued to dip through the 7th week.
Even of your fake followers don’t ‘unfollow’ you eventually; you’re not going to be having any real conversations with them, which defeats the objective of nurturing engagement. Moreover, buying likes increases the total budget of the campaign and adds to existing costs for pretty much nothing in return.

6. Not engaging on Facebook

Just having a Facebook page for your brand and having enough ‘likes’ is not enough for an effective digital marketing campaign. In a world that needs constant digital stimulation; a non-active social media page will ultimately die out.

Social media’s claim to fame is its ability to let you engage with a larger number of people on a single platform. If your business only keeps posting information and there is no dialogue between you and your followers, then you’re reaping little value from your efforts.

For instance, on an apparel brands’ social media pages, it was seen that engaging audiences in contests, games and encouraging them to post their personal stories with the brand, helped boost the brand’s sales dramatically.

Engage your community and answer all their questions. Share your thoughts and show them that you’re reachable. This will help you build deeper relationships and greater goodwill that will have a positive impact on your business in the longer run.

7. Not measuring results

With digital marketing, it’s possible to track how a campaign performs and measure its impact your business. However, many businesses fail to identify and define the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that they wish to track.

For example, some businesses just want more clicks for a campaign and want to monitor only the Cost per Acquisition (CPA). Then the agency concerts its efforts in designing campaigns that cater to that KPI.

In some other cases, businesses may only want to generate more leads that they can then convert by calling or arranging meetings at their end. In such a case, the agency launches a full-fledged campaign that focuses on lead generation.

Knowing your goals and measuring results will help you execute focused campaigns that are more likely to deliver desired results. It helps you identify things that work and things that don’t for your business, gives you key insights into audience behavior, and ensures profitability.

Wrapping Up

Your marketing efforts bear a significant impact on the success of your business. How well you brand yourself depends on how well you understand the platform. If you have just started your business, get on a digital marketing platform quickly, and get there informed.

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