While the size of your audience is vital to your marketing initiatives, the quality is even more important. If you have a large social media audience but you lack qualified fans, your social media programs won’t garner optimal results. For example, if you’re promoting your local coffee shop through Facebook and Twitter, you won’t get many new customers if a vast majority of your fans and followers are out of town. Therefore, it’s imperative for you to continuously assess your fan-base to see if it consists of qualified prospects. If you realize that a large portion of the fans are unqualified customers, expand your network by interacting with qualified prospects and induce them to join your social media pages. This will help you create a greater impact when promoting products or services. 

Every purchase cycle contains multiple stakeholders: the end-user, the decision-maker, the influencer, and purchaser. Each stakeholder has his concern. For example, if Safeway plans to buy new cash register software, the decision maker would be concerned if the product can accelerate the checkout process and help cashiers get through more customers per day. The cashiers (end-user) on the other hand will be concerned if the software is cumbersome or difficult to learn. By understanding each stakeholder’s fears, you can develop unique selling propositions for different stakeholder and enhance overall product appeal.

Strong call-to-actions are vital in inducing your audience to visit a specific webpage (i.e. service page, contact form, or Twitter) or performing particular actions (i.e. download eBook or create trial account). By adding call-to-actions to your articles, videos, or images, you can optimize web traffic and encourage visitors to perform activities that bring value to your company. 

The orientation of your web content affects sales results. For example, product image on the left-hand side and text caption on the right side can produce more sales than product image on the right and caption on the left. To determine the optimal web content orientation, split test. Use tools such as Visual Website Optimizer to see which variation of the web content generate the most click-through, sales conversion, eBook downloads, or other activities. This allows you to generate optimal results from your web traffic as your visitors are engaging in activities that you want them to perform.

Just like every other marketing or advertising channel, digital marketing should be sales-driven and goal-oriented. You should define exactly what you want to get from your digital programs and how you can achieve it. For example, if you want to enhance sales through Twitter and email campaigns, you should specify that you want to convert 25 sales from Twitter and email marketing collectively in 8 weeks. This will help you focus on what you need to achieve and generate tactics that’ll achieve it – be it adding call-to-actions in blog posts to encourage visitors to purchase items, or sending weekly emails to promote discounted items. 

 

These are just a handful of digital marketing mistakes we see teams make frequently from the audits we perform. To learn more about other best digital marketing practices, register for our 1-day Digital Marketing Training Workshop. Additionally, feel free to contact us for specific needs.