10 digital marketing mistakes to avoid

If you've got one minute, we've got 10 digital marketing mistakes to avoid. This post can help save your sanity, marketing budget, and team morale.  

1.  Not getting your company description and positioning right

• Everyone, including a 6-year-old to your great grandma, needs to be able to understand what you do. That includes employees, partners and customers - e-v-e-r-y-o-n-e needs to understand how you’re different from the competition.

2.  Focusing on your MarTech stack before addressing #1

• Securing all the best tools in the world is NOT a strategy. Please repeat. See #4 here. 
• Don't buy the best of the best unless you have the staff to support it and use all of the features available. Starting small never hurt anyone.

3.  Poorly designed websites (Hint: cheap costs you more in the long run)

• Building a website without doing #1 on this list is catastrophic
• Ignoring SEO is certainly a runner-up
• Confusing navigation and UX can cause visitors to run for the hills
• Not setting up and/or ignoring your analytics 
• One of the worst: not blocking your employees and partners' IP addresses

4.  Hiring a single marketing ninja and expecting them to do it all

• We’ll save you the trouble. It won’t work (here’s why)

5.  Not establishing measurable goals and KPIs

• We’ve seen it all, from no goals and measurement to vanity metrics. Spending time at the onset of a planning stage will set you up for success.

6.  Focusing too much on marketing and not enough on your product

• All the best marketing in the world cannot solve a bad product. Sadly, you can’t polish a turd.

7.  Prioritizing net new customers vs nurturing and growing your existing

• If you like wasting money, this is a sure-fire way to do it. It’s 5-25X more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing customer.

8.  Ignoring and/or discounting the power of customer reviews

• Nearly nine out of ten (89 percent) consumers worldwide make the effort to read reviews before buying products (Trustpilot, 2020).
• Google is by far the most popular channel people turn to for reviews, with approximately 59 percent of shoppers using it (Bizrate Insights, 2021) -- followed by Amazon @ 57 percent. 
• Think reviews are only for B2C? Wrong. Sites like Clutch, G2Crowd, Google My Business, are rampant with reviews and can be quite a large generator of traffic.

9.  Spending all your resources on a podcast without accounting for the time and dollars it takes to build a following

• We get it. Everyone wants to hop onto the newest trend. Remember when Clubhouse was all the rage? Make sure you think about what channel is right for you and if your audience is there. Creating content not only takes money, it also takes time and internal resources that might be better used elsewhere.

10.  Inadvertently injecting bias and exclusion into your brand

• While the latest buzzwords are inclusive and diverse, this should NOT be an exercise in checking the box. Ask yourself how your brand image and tone might exclude certain folks. This isn’t just about race or gender, it can also include things like ageism.

This list isn't exhaustive. We'll save performance marketing mishaps for a future post.