Common Digital Marketing Mistakes to Stop Making

This blogpost is extracted by Charing Kam from our new eBook,10 Useless Things To Cut From Your Marketing.

The fast-paced world of digital marketing – with all its technological advancements and iterative improvements to our marketing processes – has theoretically made marketers’ lives easier. We have more options, tools, and resources to be better, faster, and stronger.

But the flip side of the coin — and probably the more realistic manifestation of all these advancements – is that marketers are overwhelmed. It seems like every week there’s something new we absolutely must be doing, lest we get left behind. Problem is, a lot of this new “stuff,” is now outdated and an inefficient use of a marketer’s time and budget. 

 1) Redesigning Your Website

Full-fledged website redesigns start out sounding like a great idea, and end up being a massive headache — typically pulling in more people than you thought would be involved, spending more money than you budgeted, and often adversely impacting conversion rates.

It’s not that you positively do not need a website redesign – you very well may – but before you overhaul what you’ve got, ask yourself if you can work in smaller chunks. Consider a series of A/B tests in which you incrementally improve upon parts of your website, and apply your learnings on a wider scale once they’re statistically significant. And if you do learn that a bigger redesign is needed, assess whether you have the in-house resources required to pull it off without derailing all your other initiatives. If you don’t, for your sake and your marketing’s, outsource it to a vetted professional.

2) Using Untargeted Paid Media Spend

There have been a ton of advancements in paid advertising targeting options. For instance, did you know that Twitter paid advertising now allows marketers to target their audience by interest or username? Did you know that Facebook paid advertising now lets marketers target their audience by desktop or mobile? If you’re investing in PPC in any capacity for using targeting like this, congratulations, you’re doing it right.

If, however, you’re dumping money into completely untargeted PPC, it’s kind of like emailing your entire contacts database without doing any segmentation. Turn off your paid media spend that isn’t leveraging targeting functionality, otherwise you’re starting off 2013 by throwing your brand new marketing budget right out the window.

3) Creating Monthly Marketing Offers

To generate leads, you need a blow-out marketing offer that your site visitors can convert on. But then you need another. And another, And another after that. After a while, you’ll start to realize some offers perform better than others for lead generation, so you start using that offer all of the time. Problem is, that offer can get really over-saturated really fast, and what once yielded your best clickthrough rate will end up being mediocre at best.

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