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Digital MarketingMistakes You’re Making10
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10 Digital Marketing Mistakes You’re Making
With all the digital marketing experts around, it’s very easy for marketers to be taken in and spend their money on the wrong pursuits. Technology and techniques seem to have taken over what really should be plain old marketing: focus on the customer, relentlessly.
As we work with large and mid-size customers in the B2B and B2C domains, we keep stumbling upon some of the mistakes that agencies get marketers to make. Here’s what they are, so you can steer clear of them.
2 Social Media in the Hands of Interns
3 Not Being Current with the Latest
4 Email Marketing to Wrong TG
5 Not Being Data Driven
6
Paid Social Media Followers7
Ad-dependent Traffic
1 Irrelevant Content
8 Having Inflexible Marketing Plans
9 Silo-ed Approach to Tech, Design and Marketing
10 No Mobile Strategy
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1 Irrelevant Content
“Marketing is telling the world you’re a rock star. Content marketing is showing the world that you are one.”
- Robert Rose, Content Marketing Institute
There’s a myth that is still, amazingly, doing the rounds in online marketing circles: that it’s more important to have tons of content up there, rather than having con-tent that delivers value to the target group (TG) related to your offering.
It’s a perfect strategy if you take your TG to be fools.
One of our customers followed this strategy. Their offering was a merchandising and assortment planning software, used by large retailers. Their existing SEO agency supplied them with content, which was submitted to us for review. We were shocked to see the content. Instead of covering forecasting inventory and local trends analysis, it talked about how aisles should be planned: well-lit, easy to move about, and so on. And the text around merchandise planning kept
repeating very few keywords—clearly a case of keyword stuffing (which Google frowns upon). The TG was supposed to be the CXO audience of retail companies. Imagine clicking to read about merchandising planning and then seeing stuff about aisles and lighting! No CXO would spend more than a second on that page. Bounce rate: 100%!
Tell your content team to keep the TG in mind. What does the TG think and feel? What do they need to know? What can you tell them that helps them get insights in your domain? Think relevant content.
X
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Social Media in the Hands of Interns2Agreed, a social media intern or a fresher probably knows more about Facebook and Instagram than your entire sales and marketing team put together. But that’s not the primary thing needed for social media success. You need someone who understands your business, your brand, the messaging, and the target audience, first! Social media muscle comes later. Choose who you want to trust your brand with carefully.
A junior social media person may not have the maturity to truly ‘get’ your customer, especially in the B2B space. This will lead to irrelevant content being created and shared, or the wrong voice and tone being used to address potential customers.
Your social presence is your media channel, would you want it to degenerate into a newsfeed
begging for likes and shares?
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A couple of years ago, the tools in a digital marketer’s arsenal were limited: Google Analytics, the popular social media channels, a few social media management tools, and email.
Today, there are a number of tools that can automate large parts of your online marketing operations. There are tools that capture user behavior down to every lit-tle click, that automate social media sharing by your employees, that let you do A/B testing, that help you create content, and many, many more.
In 2014 alone, we worked with 30+ tools that helped us in automating drip mar-keting, engaging website traffic in real time, increasing subscribers, getting event registrations, and capturing leads from social media.
Every few days, new features are added to the popular tools and platforms that can help you fine-tune your reach or make your brand more discoverable. And each tool is improving its analytics prowess with time. So you have a ton of data avail-able to you, ready for analysis!
Just going with one set of tools that was relevant two years ago and using them in the same old way is akin to losing the baton in a relay race. You lose momentum, and precious time.
Not Being Current with the Latest in Platforms, Networks and Tools3
There are tools that capture user behavior down to every little click, that automate social media sharing by your employees,
that let you do A/B testing, that help you create content.
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“Our email marketing conversion rates are poor,” says a product head at an ecom-merce portal. “We send our emailers to over a 100,000 email IDs, even then we don’t see any results,” he continues.
“Who are these one 100,000 people?” we ask.
“No idea, we bought the database from some agency,” he says.
When you have no idea who you are sending your emailers to, why would the con-version rate be great? In that case, do not say that email marketing doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because you have not profiled your customers and not analyzed what the existing clickthroughs are saying.
Start segmenting your users and then run targeted campaigns. This serves two purposes: your conversion rates are higher and your unsubscribe rate goes down.
Bonus read: 5 Ways to Improve Your Email Open Rates by 300%
It’s all about relevance to the reader, and if you don’t know who your TG is, or who the people in the database
are, you are only wasting your emailer budget.
Email Marketing to the Wrong TG4
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Not Being Data Driven5It’s not just email campaign data analysis that you need to do. You have to review the web analytics reports. “Oh, I look at the data for total visitors, unique visitors, page views, bounce rate, keywords, etc!” you say.
Great. Now go beyond this data that your web chappie sends you. Go deeper: what did the visitors view? What are the repeat visitors viewing and spending time on?
What were your conversion goals? Did people click on the Submit button as you wanted them to? No? What could be the reason? Have you looked at the heat maps to see visitor behavior? Are there design issues you need to solve? How can you solve them so that the visitor engages better?
How can you correlate this data with the data from your Facebook or other social media pages? What insights can you garner?
Over time, what do these in-depth analyses show? Go beyond worrying about traffic numbers. Focus on whether there has been an improvement in the traffic of relevant users (bounce rate goes down, visitor time on site has increased, etc).
Analytics is where the real action is, focus on it, rather than some strategies re-volving around SEO content or black hat techniques. And don’t make the mistake of going by just what the hotshot analytics tool says. Put brains behind it, and glean the real insights.
What were your conversion goals? Did people click on the Submit button as you wanted them to? No? What could be
the reason? Have you looked at the heat maps to see visitor behavior?
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6The marketing head of a large media site tells us that the site sees a lot of traffic. We spend a little time on the backend analytics, only to see that the traffic is most-ly ad-driven.
So we ask her, what happens when you don’t have the funds to sustain this traffic? She looks at us a bit taken aback, as we seem to have read her mind. She is consid-ering bringing down the ad spend, and is worried about the drop in traffic.
It’s better to face up to the fact that what you should be focusing on is organic traffic, traffic from those people who have found something on your site which interests them. And then analyze their behavior to predict what other content would in-terest them and keep them engaged, even get them to share it on their so-cial mediapages. Yes, it’s hard work, and painstaking. ‘No pain, no gain’, works in the online space too.
Ad-dependent Traffic
Let’s get this clear: ad-driven traffic is not a scalable model. When you exhaust your funds, traffic nosedives. Look at the e-commerce
sites in India, and you’ll know what we are talking about.
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“Our FB page has a million likes,” boasts a senior product manager at a media company. We are impressed and quickly log in to view the page. “If you have that many fans, why is it that each post gets only a few likes, and most don’t even get shared?” we ask her. Silence.
Everyone wants likes, but after the initial euphoria of seeing so many people hit-ting the like button, the marketer is left facing the question, “But where is the engagement?”
How can fake likes deliver these objectives? Instead, have you thought of promot-ing your content and getting ‘likes/followers’ in the process? Why not? You will find people who will like the promoted content. These are the people you want to attract: people who found your content interesting.
Of course, if the objective was merely to impress the boss who doesn’t understand the S of social media, it’s a different matter altogether.
Paid Social Media Followers7
Remember the reason why you created the social media page or channel. It was most likely to improve your brand image among your target audience, or get leads, or build a community that is
engaged with what you have to offer.
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Having Inflexible Marketing Plans8Everybody knows business doesn’t happen as per plan. It evolves as markets change and as new opportunities come up. Marketing too, then, cannot stick to a grand annual plan drawn up at the beginning of the year. As the business evolves, marketing has to keep pace. Specially online marketing.
You have to keep the long-term goal in sight, and draw up short-term plans, and review every two weeks. Yes, two weeks! Because your traffic may get hit by a new Google Panda update. Or your product team may finish developing a new, innova-tive product. Or the CEO may decide that she wants to target a new geography! It’s business—anything can happen.
The only way to stay in pace with change is to go agile, the good old software development way. Set goals, and create a laundry list of tasks. Work in two-week sprints with the right list of tasks. Completing these in that time will help you reach your goals faster.
The only way to stay in pace with change is to go agile, the good old software development way.
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Silo-ed Approach to Tech, Design and Marketing9
We come across a lot of situations where the website is handled by the tech team. That’s great, as long as the tech team is handling only the code. But no, in most companies, the tech team also has Analytics access, while the marketing team doesn’t. The marketing team believes that Analytics is a ‘technical thing’, and goes by whatever screenshots the tech team sends them when asked.
This is a great recipe for online marketing failure. Analytics is your most important window into your TG. Don’t work with the blinds closed. Work closely with the tech team to understand the goings-on of your website.
Another mistake we see is with respect to web design. Just because the CEO met someone at a conference who said some unsavory things about the website, or because the new design head dislikes the existing design, you do not dive into a redesign project.
You do that only when your website data shows that the design is responsible for high bounce rates, dropping traffic, shorter session durations or low conver-sion rate. You start with a hypothesis, do A/B testing of a high-visit page, and see what’s working. Only when the data shows that your goals are not being achieved because of the design should you go for a redesign. Not because someone doesn’t like the home page colors.
Analytics is your most important window into your TG. Don’t work with the blinds closed. Work closely with the tech team to understand the goings-on of your website.
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There’s No Mobile Strategy10Compare the traffic from mobile devices to your website today, to that a year ago. It’s very likely that there’s a lot more traffic coming from mobile devices. While that traffic may still be less than 20%, it is growing, and in many sectors, growing rapidly. It’s growth you can’t ignore anymore. It’s no longer enough to just have a mobile responsive website (if yours isn’t, your site will go down the ranks in Google search). You have to bring the device right into your marketing plan, and figure out how to reach your TG through it. It could be social media, apps, mobile ads or mes-saging apps. And you will need to review your communication, because what works on a large screen may not on 5” screens.
?
While that traffic may still be less than 20%, it is growing, and in many sectors, growing rapidly.
Are you making any of these
mistakes?
Not sure if you are making any these mistakes? Write to us at [email protected] for a
digital marketing audit.
Let’s bring the focus back to your marketing goals!
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