The internet never forgets. When digital marketing goes awry, your brand is tried in the court of public opinion. In this era of immense competition, digital media is playing a crucial role in the corporate world. Research shows that 64% of people use Social Media channels to find inspiration for shopping. Thus, designing a top-notch Digital Marketing campaign is essential for both newly emerging and well-established brands.

But, even the best marketing connoisseurs can sometimes derail the entire campaign by making seemingly harmless mistakes that don’t go down too well with their target audience. Many businesses have faced great losses due to carelessness. Therefore, we are sharing 4 mistakes that businesses must avoid when planning their digital marketing campaigns.

Mistake #1 – Not engaging with people on social media

If your company is on social media, that’s a great start! However, you’re making a big mistake and missing some prime opportunities if you’re just scheduling posts in an auto-scheduler like Hootsuite. Setting up your social media accounts and just posting to them isn’t quite enough—social media has to be monitored consistently. Someone at your company should be responsible for regularly responding to comments and questions on social media.

Consumers have increasingly been turning to social media to voice their customer service concerns, so make sure you have a member of your customer service team ready to address any issues. And let’s face it, there will likely be people who dislike your company or post negative comments for no reason. Don’t ignore them! Respond to their comments, treat them with respect, and if possible, direct them to a private source of communication like email to address their issue.

Mistake #2 – Not A/B testing your emails

So you’re sending out emails to your database, but do you know what causes your audience to open them? What causes them to click through your emails or even make a purchase? This is a major digital marketing mistake that marketers often do is not using A/B testing with their email template. Whenever possible, you should always be testing different variables in your promotional emails.

You can do A/B testing in a variety of ways. Experiment with different subject lines to see which gets the highest click-through rate. Within the email itself, try to play around with different layouts. Maybe your audience prefers emails with one main message; maybe they prefer a newsletter type of email with multiple news articles that they can browse through. Send a few different layouts to the same sample audience and then take a look at the email analytics and see which produces a higher open, click-through and conversion rate.

You can also play around with sending emails at different times to see which produces the highest open rate. Maybe your audience receives dozens of emails in the morning, but few at night; you may want to consider sending your emails in the evening to give them a better chance of standing out.

Mistake #3 – Not doing keyword research

If you have a content calendar and are regularly producing new content, congratulations—you’re headed in the right direction! But was your editorial calendar put together strategically, or did you just have a big team brainstorming session about the content you should put out? If it’s the latter, don’t fret—there are easy ways to optimize your content to make sure it’s being found by search engines and ultimately, users.

As you are putting together or tweaking your editorial calendar, try to do keyword research to see what people are searching for. The bottom line is: you may be producing the most valuable content on the web, but if no one is searching it, no one cares.

Let’s say you’re writing a blog post on digital marketing mistakes. Think about what people would search if they are looking for information on this topic. Then try those keywords in a keyword research tool.

Mistake #4 – Not tweaking your campaign on Google AdWords

For Google AdWords, there are a few ways we always tweak a campaign.

First, let the campaign run for about two to three weeks untouched so that you can start to gather some data. Then, take a look at the keywords people have been searching that have pulled up your ad.

Maybe there’s a particular keyword that’s generated a high click-through rate and you should increase your bid on that keyword. Or maybe your ad is getting clicked on when people are searching for ‘free’ services and you don’t offer those. You can add ‘free’ as a negative keyword so that your ad does not display when someone includes the word ‘free’ in their search query.

Make sure to also take a look at different keyword match types to include or exclude different queries for which you want your ad to show up.

Finally, take a look at when people are clicking and converting. Maybe it would make more sense for you to run your ads on the weekends only or at nighttime. All of these stats are available in the Google AdWords dashboard.

Bonus tip: Mistake #5 – Not tweaking social media ads

Take a look at when people have interacted with your ad—it might make more sense for your budget to run the ads during the business day or in the evening closer to bedtime.

With most social media channels, you can create some version of lookalike audiences. When you have a group of people that have interacted with your ad, whether it be clicking, commenting or making a purchase, you can create a new custom audience that mimics those people that have already converted. That way, you can target even more people who are likely to convert.

Finally…

We hope you found this post useful. Please feel free to share other tips that you think are often forgotten in the comments section below.

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