Companies and individuals leveraging digital marketing in their marketing effort often commit these top mistakes in online marketing and most times it hurt them so hard. I will highlight these avoidable mistakes and how you can quickly fix them as a digital marketer.

Am I the only one that learns by mistake?

Definitely not! No wonder, Sallie Krawcheck said, “If you’re not making some notable mistakes along the way, you’re certainly not taking enough business and career chances.”

I have come across many online business marketers, who struggle with making sales online, their lines of words were usually. “I’m not sure digital marketing is my way, nothing seems to be working”. If you fall into these categories, don’t be discouraged, and be ready to learn from the mistakes I’ll be outlining in this article.

Before we dive into the Top 10 Mistakes in Online Marketing

Firstly, let me start by explaining what online marketing is all about.

Top 10 Mistakes In Online Marketing And How To Fix Them. Share on X

What Is Online Marketing

Online Marketing can also be termed digital marketing. It’s a way of promoting goods or services over the internet. An interesting definition of digital marketing was given by smartinsight, which reads; “Achieving marketing objectives through applying digital technologies and media”

If this definition is well understood, can I ask you, what are your Marketing objectives/goals, and what digital technologies or media are you using to achieve them? Your first mistake in online marketing starts from not being able to identify your goals.

If you don’t have a goal, how will success be achieved?  You may ask, what are the goals of digital marketing?

Goals Of Online Marketing

 An industry survey of over 3200 marketers was conducted, and out of these 3200, only 376 set goals for their online marketing.

Now, among those that set goals, and those that didn’t set goals, which are likely to report success?

There are several ways to achieve success, and for each way you choose to follow, you must set your goals for it. 

According to smartinsight , the below should be your goal for digital marketing.

• Sell
• Speak
• Serve

You may ask, what does this mean?

• Sell: Among your primary goals is to be able to sell more than the previous goods you sold, in the previous weeks or months.

• Speak- Develop a close relationship with your customer: You should aim at developing a close relationship with your customers, develop a channel, in which they can reach you and how they can as well get quick response.

A new ad media that just emerged, which many consider as a good alternative to Google AdSense, known as Foremedia, was able to gain publisher’s attention, via a good relationship they have with their Customers.

• Serve- you may find gaining new customers in digital marketing, quite easy.

However, what are you ready to serve to maintain them?

Aim at serving your customers with quality products or services.

Nevertheless, aside from the aforementioned goals, other goals are paramount in digital marketing which you should pursue, they include.

• Increasing solution and problem awareness:

According to dummies.com, digital marketing creates awareness to customers for something they need, and this is known as problem awareness.

In addition, you will be able to show your customers that you have a solution to that problem.

• Acquiring new customers: Aim at getting new customers.

• Activating New Customers:

If your product or service has been active for a while, perhaps, months or years, there are sure customers, who would have been a while they patronized you last.

Reach out to these customers, let them know what they stand to benefit from if they patronize you again, and perhaps, the more benefits your product or service comes with.

• Build community

One of your core goals is to be able to build community. A community, where customers can share their experience about your product or service.

• Brand Awareness:

Another goal is to create brand awareness, among people, never stop creating awareness for your brand. If Facebook, the most used social media platform according to buffer.com, is still creating awareness for their platform, nothing should stop you from creating awareness for your brand.

Now that you know what the goals of online marketing should be, pursue these goals with passion. Once you can follow these goals, you have been able to completely eradicate the first mistake people make in online marketing. Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself”

Now, let’s proceed to the top Mistakes people make in online marketing

1. Not Having A Defined Audience

Perhaps, you’ve been into online marketing for a while, and you seem to be getting little or no results. Definitely, something must be wrong somewhere. Perhaps, because you don’t define who your audiences are. As a person into online marketing, if you don’t know who your audience is, you are making a big mistake.

However, don’t feel bad.

Everyone makes mistakes; this is an avenue for you to change.

Outline who your audience are based on

• Location: Which country, state/area can use your service or product.

• Age: Which age is your product or service available for?

• Gender: Is your product or service meant for both genders?

• Occupation: Does your potential customer have to be into one occupation or the other?

• Marital Status: Is your product or service meant for those who are single or married?

Defined audience refers to specific people, who are likely to be interested in your product or service if they should come across it, be it via an advertisement.

Solution

The solution to this is to carefully monitor who your audiences are; these can be achieved via the following ways.

• Looking at your competitors
• Monitor reader comments and engagement
• Developing a close relationship with your customers

Importance of Having a Defined Audience.

Now, you may ask what are the importance attached to having a defined audience.

Below are the importance attached.

• Faster Result:

Having a defined strategy will keep you from beating around the bush. You will be hitting the nail on the head, and preventing you from years of struggles to make sales online.

• Better ROI:

Once you have a defined audience, you won’t be making a fruitless effort. Spending money on a business, without getting a return, is a big blow on such a business.

However, this mostly happens, when such a business does not have a defined strategy. If you are spending money on traffic, advertisement, you can rest assured of getting a better ROI.

According to speed startup, knowing who your audiences are is an important step for a small business strategy.

2. Not Using any Marketing Automation Tools

Let’s assume you have 188 customers on social media, and you need to communicate with these customers about your new product. Is it possible to communicate with all these customers at the same time, be it on social media or emails?

Absolutely not!

However, with the help of marketing automation tools, like Mautic you can do this effectively, at the same time.

If you are a frequent social media user, the image above won’t look strange to you. Perhaps, you might have wondered how this came to be, this is as a result of some automation tools.

Automation tools make things easy, you can set it to frequently post on your social media accounts, on some specific days, or at a particular time each day, without having to do it manually. You can also take advantage of it, to automate emails to all your customers at once.

However, before using any marketing automation tools, you should ask yourself whether your Marketing team or business needs one. Or perhaps, whether your business is in a stage where it requires one.

According to Leeds feeder, not every business requires a Marketing automation tool. Before considering using a marketing automation tool, make sure you have a Marketing Strategy working for you effectively, and you have multiple clients to connect with.

There are different types of marketing automation tool such as:

Omnisend

With Omnisend, you can automate multiple digital marketing strategies, such as email, SMS, social media. This type of platform allows you to stay relevant and consistent with your client while still growing your revenue.

Eloqua

Eloqua is part of the oracle tool, which can be used for marketing automation. With a tool like Eloqua, you can create more closed-loop marketing and sales activities and manage cross-channel B2B marketing campaigns that nurture leads across each stage of the buying process as well as create dynamic campaigns that will intrigue buyers and intelligently adapt the experience based on a buyer’s real-time activities at every stage of the customer journey.

Marketo

This automation tool is owned by adobe and the tool reports automation for all digital marketing channels. It also allows you to leverage rich behavioural data, built-in intelligence, and sophisticated journey flows to identify, engage, and accelerate your best opportunities to orchestrate your buyer’s journeys.

Solution

Now that you know how important Marketing automation tools are, to your online marketing, the best you can do at this stage is to start taking advantage of them.

Importance Of Using Marketing Automation Tools.

Knowing how effective Marketing automation tools are, it’s importance is already clear.

However, for the sake of clarification, the below are the importance of automation tools.

• It saves stress: Instead of having to post on your social media frequently, you can make use of an automation tool to do this for you, when needed.

• Connecting with multiple clients at once: At a time when your business begins to grow, and you need to get in touch with each of them at once. It will be time-consuming doing this manually, however with the help of automation tools, it’s quite possible to connect with these customers at once.

• Fewer Expenses: Imagine the amount of internet bundle you will have to exhaust if you are to connect with each of your clients.

However, making use of automation tools will shorten your expenses.

3. Not Having A Defined Strategy

According to a digital marketing report, conducted by smartinsight, it shows that half of the organizations don’t have a defined strategy for their Business. If you don’t have a defined strategy for your online business, you will be directionless. And your effort to gain visibility for your business will be synonymous with wasting money.

You may ask, what does a defined digital marketing strategy mean?

It refers to a series of online actions performed repeatedly, to achieve a specific goal.

There are a lot of digital marketing strategies, which can skyrocket your online business.

Solution

Among the digital marketing strategies that will be outlined below, kindly chose the one that will work best for your online marketing

Importance Of Having A Defined Strategy

You may wonder how digital marketing will be of benefit to your online marketing. The importance of a defined strategy in online marketing can’t be underrated.

• Saves Time: Many are into online marketing, and beating around the bush, not knowing the exact thing to do, to achieve success.

Once you have a defined strategy, you know where you are going, and you know the exact thing to do to get there.

• Saves Money: If you have a defined strategy, you won’t be spending money on needless things.

According to Landspeed, if you don’t have a defined strategy, for your online marketing, your business may stall or even fail.

Types Of Digital Marketing Strategy.

Now, you know what digital marketing strategy is, and you know how crucial it is to your online business.

You may ask, what are the types of digital marketing strategies? Knowing the type of available digital marketing strategies will help to place you on the right path, of choosing the strategy that will work best for your online business. According to SNHU.EDU, there are seven main types of digital marketing strategies, which include.

1. Email Marketing
2. SEO (Search Engine optimization)
3. Content Marketing
4. Social media marketing
5. Pay-per-click
6. Mobile Marketing
7. Marketing analytics.

Let’s briefly browse through each of these strategies one after the other.

Email Marketing: According to digitalready.co, email marketing is one of the best tools for Marketing business online. Email Marketing can be defined as electronic mail sent to potential clients or customers, to let them know about your product, business, or what you do.

This strategy works best for online marketing because you are targeting potential clients, or customers, who are likely to be interested in your product or business.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Just as the name of this strategy implies, “search engine optimization”

It is simply a way of optimizing your business, or content, to make them discoverable by a search engine, such as

• Google
• Bing
• Yandex

Using SEO in your online marketing will make your marketing easy.

Content Marketing: Content marketing refers to using educational/informative write-ups, to promote a business/service.

Social Media Marketing: Social media marketing is a type of digital marketing strategy, which involves advertising on social media. Oftentimes, you would have people across, taking advantage of social media, to market goods, or to get clients for the services they render.

This is called social media marketing!

Pay Per Click: Pay per click refers to a form of digital marketing strategy, in which a publisher pays an advertiser, once a user clicks on the ads displayed. You can make your online marketing more effective with PPC. With pay per click, ads will be placed on several websites. Bear in mind that you won’t be charged for pay-per-click advertising.

You will only be charged, once someone clicks on the ads, as a publisher, and the advertiser will be credited for each click. This will increase the visibility of the product for online marketing.

Mobile Marketing: This refers to utilizing a digital marketing strategy, to reach people using mobile devices. You may wonder why mobile devices? This is because mobile devices are easy to use, and what people use often, rather than desktop, which is being mostly used for official purposes. With mobile marketing, you reach directly to people using mobile devices.

This can be achieved via

• SMS
• Mobile applications
• Push notifications
• MMS
• Email
• Social media etc

Marketing analytics:  This is a strategic way of measuring the performance of your business.

Marketing analytics will give you insight into how well your business is performing, areas you need to work on, etc.

4. Neglecting Mobile Users

This is one mistake many online marketers make.

Mobile users should be your number one priority in online marketing, as many people use mobile rather than desktop. According to a study, by guide2research, it shows that 50.48% of web traffic is being generated from mobile devices, while 46.51% is being generated from desktop devices. While the remaining 3% is being generated from tablets. This clearly shows the importance of mobile device users. If you are not targeting mobile users, you may be losing a whole lot of potential customers.

Solution

The best you can do at this stage, not to lose a lot of potential customers, is to optimize for mobile.

You may ask, how can you optimize for mobile? Below are ways to optimize for mobile.

• Create a mobile app for your store

Customers now prefer to shop and interact with businesses in a mobile environment rather than using any other channels

• Build a responsive website.

A responsive website is a website that adapts itself to fit into any screen no matter the size. Meaning, your website will adapt to fit the screen from which it is being viewed. It negates the need to pinch or scroll horizontally and overall provides your visitors with a great user experience while on your site.

The benefits of having a responsive website are enormous because people are no longer just searching the web on a desktop – they are now using laptops, smartphones, tablets, and even smart TVs.

You can use this free Google tool to test how mobile-friendly your website is.

5. Doing It Alone

Two heads are better than one, and you go far when you team up with people to achieve a vision.

Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships. Michael Jordan

You can’t do it all by yourself, you need to hire people to work for you in some specific areas, to see the success of your online marketing.

Solution

First, acknowledge that you can’t do it alone, then hire the services of professionals.

6. Not Interacting With Your Customers

This is a big mistake many online marketers are making. Make yourself so personal with your customers, be friendly with them, and respond to them faster than they might expect.

These acts can make your customers incredibly fall in love with your marketing.

Solution

This is easy to fix, and part of the reason why I said you can’t do it all alone. You can hire someone, to be in charge of responding to your Customers, or you take advantage of any Marketing Automation Tools that have been mentioned above.

7. Poor Budgeting

Poor Budgeting can greatly affect your online marketing. If you have a poor budget, people you hire may offer poor service for you, which may make your online marketing stagnant.

However, if you have a good budget, you will be able to hire a professional, who will be able to give you the best service ever.

Solution

Increase your budget, to hire the help of professionals who will make the success of your online marketing quicker.

8. Not Offering Discounts

According to a study by CM Commerce, it shows that 91% of customers will surely return to a marketer if they redeem a coupon code.

Discounts will make your customers fall in love with you. They will always feel like coming back. Nevertheless, the discounts are only meant to be occasional or offer a discount when your customers buy in bulk. Discounts show you value your customers, and you wish to have them for as long as possible.

Solution

Set a particular time, Perhaps once in a month, when you will always offer discounts on your product, or on the service you offer. Alternatively, you can offer a particular percentage discount when your customers buy in bulk.

9. Not Checking Your Competitors Strength

Many online marketers overlook this.

Checking on your competitors will put you on the run because you will want to do better than them. You are to constantly check on who your competitors are, what they are ranking for, know their strengths, and work best on how to outrank them.

If you don’t check on your competitors’ strengths, your competitors may sweep away all your customers in no time. Because they will be offering something more valuable than you do to people.

Solution

Make use of tools such as

• Ubersuggest
• Ahrefs
• Google analytics
• KWFinder

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free Web analytics service from Goggle that provides insight into what happened within a website such as displaying to you the number of visitors to your website, their locations and how long they spent on your website, the type of devices they use in accessing your website and even helps in marketing purposes. This tool is free and available for use on any website with a single Google account

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a free keyword research tool. With Ubersuggest, you will be able to do keyword research for free, you will know the keyword people are searching and the location from which people are searching for that particular keyword. With Ubersuggest, you will also be able to know the keyword your competitors are searching for.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a multipurpose digital marketing tool, used to analyze a website’s link, conduct keyword rankings and research, view a website’s backlinks and for SEO health, keyword research, etc.

KWFinder

KWFinder is one of the best keyword research tools in the market. It enables you to test the performance of Keywords online before using them and also allows you to spy on your competitors, to know what keyword they are ranked for and to plan on how you can outrank.

If you can look at what your competitors rank for, you can target their keywords modify them to produce better contents overtake and outrank your competitors

You can spy on your competitors right away by typing your competitor’s web address in the box below and hit the “Find Keywords” button.

Without using some of these tools, competing with your competitors, might be a whole lot of stress and might sometimes seem impossible. You need to choose tools that will work for your Strategy.  For example, if you are using a blog as your digital marketing strategy, you can implement a tool called a Facebook pixel, to boost your Marketing performance.

10. Having Unrealistic Expectations

Online Marketing isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme.

The expectation of some people is to start making thousands of dollars, after some months of starting online marketing.

No! It doesn’t work that way.

Though there are some exceptional cases of some recording massive success after some months into online marketing, however, these cases are very few. To record success in online marketing, you must have patience and be steadfast.

Solution

Things may not blossom at the start, you may not get people to respond or react to your actions. However, don’t be discouraged, keep trying, and keep repeating all the steps I’ve mentioned in this article.

I will be glad to hear from you, and also witness your success in your online marketing career.

Final Thoughts On Top 10 Mistakes In Online Marketing And How To Fix Them.

There are a lot of mistakes that many make in online marketing, which is why many aren’t seeing the desired result they wanted. I hope this article will help all online marketers out there.

Are there more questions you would like to ask or any other mistakes you figure out in your online marketing experience?  If yes, I’ll be glad to hear from you in the comment box.