When a company begins to implement digital marketing strategies, it is very likely that it will fall into not entirely adequate practices for the success of its campaigns. Below, we show you what these most common errors are and how to correct them.
In general, a Digital Marketing strategy is still something new for many companies, and not all generate results. 80% of companies around the globe are in a basic stage of digital transformation, and Digital Marketing remains as a new methodology. So there is still a lot to adapt, study and test.
As a consequence, many young companies end up making basic mistakes when they start on a Digital Marketing strategy. So if they make a mistake, they can hardly measure and prevent the traffic and lead generation of the website, or increase it in a sustainable way. That is why it costs them to have a return of time and money invested in digital marketing.
It is essential to know where to invest resources, regardless of the sector of your company, and if you are making these mistakes, you will hardly be able to analyze the data to reach the best conclusion. But don’t worry, there is always time to rectify. Better late than never!
1. You have not done research on the keywords for your strategy
How do you expect people to find your company if you don’t optimize the keywords of your website? These words are extremely important because they are the words that your target audience will use when they are searching for you on Google.
Keywords need to be identified that are relevant, have significant search volume, and are relatively easy to establish with good search engine ranking.
It is also important to monitor the current ranking of each keyword, the amount of traffic you are receiving and what is the conversion rate that this word has generated.
Performing a periodical and rigorous research process of keywords can have a positive impact of 2 to 10 times on the ROI in Digital Marketing.
How to correct it?
There are 6 strategies to research keywords, and thus have a better position in Google to get results on your website.
- Find the main business keywords (called head keywords ). For this, you can use tools like Ubbersuggest or SEMRush.
- Delete any terms that are not related to your business. Check and make sure there are no duplicate keywords.
- Search for long-tail words. This may be the differential to position yourself since long-tails make up 70% of the visiting opportunities. This is because the words that come to you by generic words have a worse conversion than the long-tail ones. We recommend using Keywordtool.io.
- Find out the volume the keyword produces. You have already found the keyword, now it is necessary to analyze starting with the organic search volume of each term. You can use tools like Keyword Planner.
- Find out if your business is already positioned in Google. Knowing the current ranking of your page is important to know if you have to focus on content production, optimization of a page that already exists, link-building … etc.
- Analyze the difficulty, opportunity, and potential of each keyword. You already know the search volume and current position of your keyword, now it is to find the three variables. We suggest using Moz for this analysis.
2. You have not defined your people
Who are the potential customers of your product or service? If you still don’t have the answer, start now! It is no use to have a wonderful product if the marketing area of your company is not communicating with your client. Can you imagine that you are selling your service to an Anglo-Saxon audience but your marketing team is using Spanish terms?
When a company has not defined its people, some of the probable consequences is that there is a very high cost of acquisition (CAC), making it difficult to close businesses and, possibly, churns (resistances) due to sales made to the wrong public.
You will ask yourself, “What is a person?” In a simple and fast way, a person is the definition of the desired client, with all its main characteristics. It is not necessarily classified by sex, age or region, but rather by their consumption habits and personal preferences.
Defining people is a fundamental step so that your marketing team can reach the right people and for your sales team can receive proposals aligned with the company’s values.
How to correct it?
You have to define the people of your company and create a shopping day for the clients.
3. You are not producing content
We usually say, both here on the blog and for our clients, that content is the gas of Inbound Marketing. This is because the content attracts new users, and to generate new leads it is necessary to have content that guides these visits to your proposal.
If there is no content creation in your company, you may be missing business opportunities. A Digital Marketing Marketing strategy is intrinsically linked to content production for several reasons. Between them:
- Content serves as ammunition for users on social media
- Relevant content generates links, the premise of any job in SEO
- The production of your own content makes your company become a market reference.
Content creation is a very important Digital Marketing tool. It is the method with which your company can receive more organic visits from search engines, thus becoming a market reference in which it manages to maintain a relationship with its audience at all stages of the purchasing process. Undoubtedly, a decisive factor in decision making and very influential at the time of purchase.
How to correct it?
If you don’t know where to start or are having difficulty writing, we recommend that you take a look at this Model blog post structure or the Kit: How To Write A Solid Business Blog That Attracts Visitors. If what you need is ideas, we recommend this post on the perfect topics or this one on how you can recycle existing content in your company.
4. You are not generating leads
It is a very common occurrence. Companies develop a website, create accounts on social networks, invest in content, SEO, paid links … and in the end, they are satisfied with generating many daily visits. However, all this is irrelevant if they fail to generate business opportunities, and this is the leads.
It is nothing new to say that the buying cycle has changed. Already today, the role of the seller is not to control the entire purchase process. This responsibility lies in the marketing department since a large part of the consumer’s purchase decision is consolidated before contacting the company. Thanks to a large amount of information available on the internet and the proactivity of the users themselves in finding information on specific questions, the role of the seller in the purchase cycle decreases.
Therefore, the website of a company has to impart a commercial role, especially in complex sales products (such as service providers, for example). In such cases, the potential client needs to study beforehand the need for the solution, the benefits it will obtain, how much energy it will have to invest, etc.
Without a generation of Leads, your company will not be able to obtain the necessary contact information to establish a relationship or be able to turn that relationship into a sales opportunity.
How to correct it?
Leads generation is a fundamental strategy at FastTech Media. It is not a coincidence that we have multiple articles on the importance of generating Leads on our blog, how it works, what problems we have faced and how we have corrected it.
5. You don’t have optimized proposals or landing pages
Lack of optimization is a very common mistake. We will rarely see optimized action calls or proposals, as well as conversion pages. Most introduce a button that says “contact us” and wait for someone to do so. This is the equivalent of having a store and asking the cashier to wait in a corner of the store, with his eyes closed and a plaque that says “only get close if you want to buy something.”
It is important to understand that someone will not contact you unless they have seen that you can help them solve their problems or that you have a product that they need. Many companies use links like “ask for a demo” or “free diagnosis” to get attention. However, this is just another way of saying “contact us to talk about buying our product/service.”
Your proposals have to be relevant to the challenges that your potential clients face.
How to correct it?
Educational offers are always a good idea. They provide visitors with what they are looking for and also allows you to classify potential customers and capture relevant contact information so that you can feed them with relevant information.
It is also important to understand that it is not about having one or two proposals. Have several proposals that resonate with your audience and that can help you understand the correlation of your product/service with its challenges and objectives.
6. You are buying email lists
One of the biggest myths of Digital Marketing is regarding email lists.
This (bad) praxis is classified as one of the least arduous ways to get started in Digital Marketing. This is probably one of the reasons why it continues to be practiced.
Despite its continuous use, it is considered a very harmful practice for the company, and with the new regulation of the General Data Protection Regulation (RGPD) a tenuous line between legal and illegal. With the GDPR, the purchase of email lists borders on malpractice. If you acquire lists of personal data from third parties, where they act as a “processor” you will need to have both the consent of the user so that they accept that the “processor” shares their personal data and that you as a company can use them.
That is, unless the user has said “yes” to their data being transferred to third parties, you will not be able to use their personal data. But most importantly, although they have said yes to third parties, you must certify and document the proof of their consent with third parties, and you must offer the option of unsubscribing from your email marketing campaigns. In short, buying an email list is more of a headache than sticking to other lead generation methods.
On the other hand, the people who are on the list you have bought do not know you and will not show interest in your company or product. So any email sent will be spam, something that will negatively affect your company’s perception, and many may label emails as spam.
How to correct it?
We have two recommendations.
- First, opt for email marketing strategies to create a relationship with your potential and/or current client.
- The second is to create email marketing campaigns. In this way, you invest your time in nurturing relationships and avoid falling into a legal problem.
7. You are not measuring where your customers come from
Like anything else in life, digital marketing demands improvement over time, and a good web analytics package is essential to assess and determine how you can improve.
The mistake lies in that most focus on the wrong metrics.
The important thing in Web Analytics packages is determining exactly which traffic sources (eg keywords, emails, links, social media … etc) are attracting the converting visitors.
Meanwhile, many people tend to focus on other items, such as the number of page views ( page views), number of visits and average time spent on the page. These metrics are quite irrelevant if you are not converting visitors to leads or paying customers.
For example, you may think that Twitter is attracting many people to your website and that these people are generating a high number of page views. However, if the views that come from an Email Marketing campaign are generating more conversion numbers, it is in that channel that you must invest.
How to correct?
To interpret and optimize all traffic sources on your website read this post.
8. You are measuring your results with vanity metrics
Many get carried away by numbers, such as the number of page views, followers on social networks, likes of a post … etc. But you have to ask yourself, “What is the impact of these metrics on my business?”
The mentioned metrics feed the ego, but by themselves, they do not contribute to the moment of the sale. In the end, selling is the only activity that brings money to your company.
We call vanity metrics all those that do not indicate how Digital Marketing contributes to the generation of business opportunities.
What really needs to be analyzed are the metrics in the sales funnel:
It is with these metrics that you can get a real picture of how Digital Marketing has helped your company.
Funnel models vary, but the most common for various B2B and B2C businesses are: Visit → Lead → Customer. With the sales funnel in mind, it is easier to measure the effectiveness of Digital Marketing for the business. Simply measure each month:
- Number of unique visits
- Number of leads generated
- Number of conquered clients
Simple and effective.
How to correct it?
Read about sales funnels to understand the concept in a general way. If you want to go deeper into the subject, we recommend you read Know the structure and metrics of good Email Marketing.
