Companies make mistakes, that’s a given, and it seems that
when it come to digital marketing, they make a lot of them. You have probably
read in the paper or online about these before, and more than likely
experienced a few of them yourself.
While there is no way I could fit all these mistakes into
one post, I’ve cut down to my top 5 mistakes in digital marketing in the hope
you can avoid them:
1) Reliance on one channel
This one seems a bit obvious, but you may be surprised how
many people fall into the trap. Marketing activity has always been perceived as
a mix of channels, working together to create a network, targeting your entire
demographic, and this is still the case with digital marketing.
Digital marketing is just one piece of the puzzle; you
shouldn’t be placing all your hopes on it. Traditional marketing tactics are
still effective ways of communicating your brand to your customers; digital
marketing is simply a way to get your message across to another demographic.
That being said, once you are online, don’t become a one
trick pony, you need to cover all the bases, simply setting up a Facebook page
wont have your sale shooting through the roof, you need to analyse your target
audience and create a digital marketing strategy that will reach these
consumers, a mix of social platforms, digital advertising and even viral
campaigns will deliver a much stronger result than one tactic alone.
Its important that you understand how each of your channels
is used by consumers, treating your twitter account like your Facebook will
doom you to fail, as will simply copying over your offline messages to online
adds. Understand each channel you want to use and manage it properly.
2) Viral must be the way forward
After Cadburys series of well know viral adverts, companies
the world over attempted to copy their success, only to find their campaigns
did nearly nothing for their brand image.
The reason that these campaigns worked so well for Cadburys
is that they are a world-renowned company; if you ask someone in the street
what they sell, 99 out of 100 people will tell you “chocolate”. This resulted
in Cadburys not needing to highlight their products, their beliefs, or their
brand image, they simply made something interesting (who doesn’t want to watch
a gorilla play drums to Phil Collins) filled the screen with the classic
Cadburys purple and flashed their logo at the end, they didn’t want new
customers, they wanted their old customers to remember them.
If you are not lucky enough to have the same level of brand
awareness you need to stay clear of this type of advertising. Gillete made a
brilliant viral ad (see below), but it had nothing to do with their company, resulting in
may not even realising they saw an ad, this type of exposure doesn’t improve
sales and you wouldn’t put it offline, so what’s the point using it online?
3) Mistaking increased traffic for success
Its only normal to try and find the positives when you spend
your time on something, and that is where many people go wrong.
You put out a new add and the very next day the traffic to
your website skyrockets, the campaign is obviously a huge success, right? In
fact its not, traffic means nothing if you can’t convert it. Using metrics such
as conversion, bounce rates, orders and revenue participation are much more
effective ways of measuring the success of your campaigns.
If all you get is increased traffic, you are not doing the
right thing, you have clearly connected with those you targeted, but you have
targeted the wrong people.
4) Vision and Direction
Many forms of digital marketing have a much lower cost than
traditional means, e.g. its cheaper to start a Twitter or Facebook account than
it is to take out an add on TV or in the paper. This has inevitably given
companies the chance to trial new messaging with less financial risk, which on
paper seems to be a good thing.
However some companies get a little carried away with their
new found freedom, trialling so many different messages through so many channels
that this ends up damaging the brand as a whole, confusing their customers.
When you start a new campaign you need to look past just the
financial risk, just because it cost you nothing to put something out on the
web, doesn’t mean it cant cost you in the long run. All of your messages must
retain a clear vision and direction, people have to know it’s from you and it
needs to have a purpose (why will it make people buy).
You shouldn’t be looking at your ads as individual messages
to a select number of customers, but as part of a strong and targeted marketing
mix building your brand awareness and promoting your products. Your channels need
to compliment each other so ensure your Social, SEO and CRM teams (among
others) are aligned and working towards the same goal.
5) The move to mobile
Now here I’m not saying that you should not move to mobile,
it’s a rapidly growing market and people more now than ever are using their
mobile devices to browse and buy online, however you may be surprised how easy
this is to get wrong.
The majority of issues here come from companies failing to
make their entire sites responsive, which leads to frustration and lost sales.
Picture this:
You are on your
morning commute, on your smartphone and see and email for a product (something
you really don’t need, but want), you click through the link and are taken to a
responsive landing page (so far so good), you select the item you want and
click through to the checkout. Now you are faced with a page designed for a
conventional browser, its difficult to select the right options and add your
information and so you close the window, you decide you will do it later on
when you get home (but you probably won’t).
The problem here is that the company did not understand the
needs of the consumer and in so lost an impulse sale (and probably 100’s more)
purely by focusing their attention on the wrong pages. It would have been much
simpler for the customer to use a non-responsive page to add the item to the
basket and go through to a responsive check out, they would have lost far less
customers and made far more money.
The trick here is to know your customers and provide the
user experience that they want, not the one you want.
