Given the current digital age, digital marketing is very helpful to any business, and doing it right is very crucial. Here are the mistakes you should avoid at all costs.

It has been said that “content is king” and that has never been more true in this day and age. Today, many things have gone digital—including businesses—which led to marketing, advertising, and even customer service going online. In fact, 84% of people expect brands to create their own content these days in the form of ads, blogs, and other multimedia content. 

All this just goes to show that digital marketing is important and therefore, crucial to the growth and even survival of brands and businesses. That being said, it’s best to avoid making mistakes when it comes to digital marketing. Here are five mistakes that you should avoid making at all costs. 

Targeting Everyone Instead of a Specific Audience

One of the benefits of going digital is that you have the ability to reach a wider audience—regardless of demographics. As tempting as that may be, targeting everyone is actually the wrong way to go about your digital marketing strategy. After all, in Business News Daily’s words, “If you try to be everything to everyone, your message becomes vague and less impactful.”

With that, it’s important to target the right audience because helps you avoid wasting resources—plus, you actually reach the people who are interested in what you have, which means a higher chance of availing of your products or services.

Practice due diligence and do your research. But most importantly, make sure to determine the demographics, interests, and buying habits of the right audience for your business and build up how you want to approach them from there.

Underestimating the Importance of a Blog Post

Without realizing it, many businesses underestimate how important it is to have a blog on their website. Aside from being a place for you to update your audience with the latest announcements, promotions, testimonies, or even relevant information about your business and its offerings, a website’s blog plays an important role in establishing your brand as an industry leader, which will help improve your brand identity and authority.

From a technical perspective, your blog is actually considered an indexed page. This means that content published in that section will help increase your website’s online presence through search engine optimization (SEO) and appearance on search engines like Google. Moreover, having a blog also helps increase the traffic of your website—which is one of the main goals of having and maintaining a website, to begin with. 

Once you’ve set up the blog section of your website, make sure to write in it regularly, as this will help drive people to your website. And remember to create quality content that caters to your audience. How? By including guest posts written by industry experts and other prominent figures related to your business, compiling customer testimonies and reviews, or even hiring a dedicated writer to populate the page with content.

It is also recommended that your blog should have a comment section, which you should use to interact with your audience. 

Not Having Social Media Accounts

You might think that your business can get away without having any social media accounts, but in all honesty, you can’t.

Why is that? Social media has integrated itself into many aspects of life these days, given that a user spends an average of 28% of their time on their preferred platforms. This makes social media a very practical platform for digital marketing, as you can use it to increase brand awareness and even drive leads and conversions. But more importantly, it is how people discover your brand in the first place!

Take note—you do not need to be present on all social media platforms, especially since each one of them caters to a different audience. What’s more, you’ll need to regularly maintain and post on these platforms, and having too much makes it hard to stay on top of things.

This is why it is important to determine which ones are used most by your audience, as well as which ones suit your marketing strategy. If you’re catering to a much older audience, for example, it may be better for you to be on Facebook than TikTok.

Bear in mind also that social media is more than just posting photos and videos to your account. There is so much to it that you can use to expand your reach, such as social media SEO and the e-commerce feature that some platforms may have. You can even hire a social media manager to fully focus on your social media efforts.

Disregarding SEO and Keyword Research

Having a website or any kind of presence online—including social media—is actually useless if your audience cannot even find you to begin with. If you do not appear on search results, you won’t get new leads, which means that you will lose traffic for your business. 

Making sure to follow SEO best practices will definitely help with your website and social media content. This is why you need to know what practices and words work best (based on trends) and, more importantly, integrate them into your digital marketing strategy. This is key in order to rank on search engine results.

Among the SEO best practices, the most crucial one is keyword research. “Identify what keywords are the most relevant, have high search volume, and are relatively easy to rank for,” says HubSpot. “Then, monitor where you rank for each keyword, how much traffic you’re getting from each keyword, and whether the visitors coming from that keyword are turning into leads.”

Ignoring Web Design and the User Experience of Your Website

More than just the aesthetic appearance, web design affects user experience. To have a positive user experience, your website should be user-friendly. For one thing, it shouldn’t be complicated to use, nor should it be hard to navigate. A good website contains valuable information that your audience should know. Moreover, some user-friendly features that you can consider for your website include a navigation bar, a search bar, and call-to-action buttons. 

A website that is user-friendly should also work with a user’s internet connection. Adding photos that are too large slows down the loading time of the website, which in turn, can cause the user to leave. 

Keep in mind that user-friendly websites are likewise mobile-responsive. Ensure that the elements found in your website are scalable so that the user will not have problems browsing the site no matter what device is being used.