Even for pros with years of experience, the rapidly shifting domain of digital marketing can present obstacles now and then. They make mistakes. With that said, I recently came across this article by Digisurf about digital marketing mistakes. Reflecting on the highlights of this article, I found many of the points resonated with my experiences in digital marketing. Here's my take on some of the insights shared by the experts:
These people, their titles ranging from CEO to consultant, have graciously shed light on some of the most common slip-ups, as they've seen or even committed them, and furnished us with some key lessons on how to avoid them.
Concentrate on Select Digital Channels
Nicole Lee's work makes an important point, to which I would like to add my voice: she is urging marketers to concentrate their efforts on fewer digital channels. From my vantage point as a content creator at ClockOn, I myself have witnessed our team attempting to be in too many digital places at once, and the result is often the appearance of spreading oneself too thin. We recently had a team meeting where we spoke about content distribution. One of the biggest takeaways from that team meeting was that we needed to stop first and identify on which digital channels ClockOn's audience is actually most socially active and engaged.
Pavel Naydenov believes putting engagement before reach is the right strategy. He agrees that ClockOn should pursue audience interaction as its North Star metric of success and sees our mission as keeping society informed through our content, products, and services. "To succeed in our weekly, structured, and interaction goals, our team creates content, asks open-ended questions, and engages with the audience on a personal level. This strategy forms not just customers who interact with us, but a community of advocates for our brand."
Keep Digital Marketing Aspirations Real: Damnfew's CEO, Vinod Sabat, calls this "the most important lesson" he's learned. Along the way, this entrepreneur also encountered enormous pressure from customers panting for instant, spectacular success. He feels their pain, he says, but he doesn't let it faze him. He's figured out how to deliver real results in a reasonable amount of time. He's almost succeeded in not succumbing to the temptation of touting miracles as something his team had any hand in delivering.
Embrace Mobile-First
What Chad DeBolt has to say about your website can hardly be ignored these days. If it isn't already, your site must not just become friendly to those of us who refuse to let go of our phones but actually put those folks first. Why? What uptick can you possibly expect to see in either search rankings or conversions? "Search will go on, and search will return," as ClockOn Visionary and man of letters (or at least concise emails) Ron Mendelson promised us just last week.
Kevin Hall's emphasis on solution-related keywords, in place of branding, is both perspicuous and valuable when one has a limited budget to work with. And yet, that is just the beginning of the story. Hall’s point is that for a business with big constraints on its financial and human resources, branding is one possible way to go. But when taken together with the keyword "solutions," what emerges is a kind of narrative, sometimes related and sometimes not, that gets at the business's return to the reason it might not have been so successful in the first place.
Continual Management and Optimization Gabriel Lukov is correct in saying that the approach of "setting up a campaign and then forgetting about it" is something marketers cannot afford to do. The ongoing process of managing and optimizing that campaign is critical. At ClockOn, we make sure to stay on top of this. We treat our marketing operations with a high degree of seriousness and are always asking the question, "What can we do to perform better?"
Know Your Target Audience Well
The counsel that Alex Stasiak offers to really get to know and understand your target audience can’t be sufficiently emphasized. On the base level, marketers do well to comprehend the audience’s most common demographic denominators. But the real pay dirt lies not only in knowing "who" in the typical way marketers discuss identity but also in understanding "how" the audience behaves, thinks, lives, and works; and "why" they do what they do, in the way that they do it. Only then can a marketer or agency do truly audience-tailored work that is worth much of anything.
Finally, let's come to the crux of the matter. My (Blake Smith's) insight into successfully going about digital marketing christens this last core principle: "Balance long-term vision with agility." Lead with a clear, common, and inspiring long-term goal, but be nimble when it comes to executing day-to-day details and working with immediate changes. For ClockOn (my innovative, Australia-based company that offers time and attendance solutions to businesses of all kinds), this balanced approach has helped us become not just pioneers but also visionaries who validate our vanguard ideas with real-world payoffs.
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