Digital marketing is not an easy task that could be perfected in a matter of moments. Even the most successful experts in the world of digital marketing have become the best through working and experimenting, while being more or less successful. Even though the path to perfect digital marketing is full of challenges, you should be aware of these five biggest mistakes in digital marketing that you should avoid for any cost.
1. You are selling a product without value
Every seller believes that his product stands out from the rest, for one reason or another. It may have better quality, smaller price, it is locally produced, has nicer colours or can be delivered in only one day.
Even if you, as an owner, see the value of your product, your main goal should be to represent the value to potential customers. It is not enough if you add a small label saying “best product” on a left corner of the product`s picture – you need testimonials, blog posts about the usage, pictures of happy customers and everything else that let the users know how great they will feel once they own this product.
2. You did not create your buyer persona(s)
In general, a buyer persona is a made up person that has specific characteristics and way of thinking that line up with your customers. By creating one or multiple buyer personas the seller can get a great understanding of who his clients are, what are their interests, and how he can sell his product to them.
Even though creating buyer personas bring huge value to the business it remains something that most sellers forget about, or they create their buyer personas only once, usually before they get actual buyers. And that means their buyer personas are based solely on their own expectations and not on real data. Both, not having buyer personas and having completely made up buyer personas, usually means losing money and time for advertising that does not bring desired results.
3. You are not investing into content marketing
Writing optimized content for search engines, regularly updating blog, adding video content and image galleries are the keys to great content marketing. But reality is that content marketing is still not used by many online stores which are missing some great opportunities it brings.
Content marketing is one of the key elements of today`s digital marketing and should be used by anybody who is serious about his online career. Appropriate content is a simple way to present specific features of a product, to increase product`s value and let potential customers know why they should choose your product. Apart from that, created content represents the best elements to use on social media and the basics for creating a social media marketing strategy.
4. Using social media without prior strategy
When it comes to using social media for business purposes many businessmen throw themselves into creating multiple social media accounts and then start posting content, that does not seem to have any cohesive thread. Posts on Facebook are not in line with the content on their website, they are advertising products that are not on sale in their online store.
Using social media without good social media marketing strategy is simply a waste of time on a long term. Huge number of followers on Facebook does not mean much if those followers do not even know your products and do not intend to buy them. That way you are just losing time entertaining a group of random people that do not have much value for your business while you should be spending time getting customers.
5. You have no idea what your ROI is
ROI or Return of Investment is one of the most important metrics for assessing the success of your advertising activities. In general, this metric tells us if the investment in chosen activity has paid off, in terms of reaching a set goal.
The most common way of keeping a look on ROI for most online store owners presents keeping track of the money they spend on Google Ad`s pay for click advertising. Their main goal is mostly setting the amount that they are willing to spend to get one click with the expectation that that click will benefit in profitable sale.
Of course, the set goals can be much more complex which requires additional calculations of ROI. If, for example, we set a goal of getting customers that will bring us at least five sequence buys we will have to create a more complex advertising activity and create a complex calculation for our ROI.
