5 mistakes that can cost you big in Digital marketing

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.