Everyone makes mistakes. However, if you are a brand with an established digital presence, you get extra attention to your activities, and mistakes can cost a lot of money to your business. Contemporary audiences are very sensitive – when a company doesn’t pay enough attention to diversity and inclusion, this might end up in outrage online. However, even minor mistakes matter to your overall marketing strategy.
Even if you try to play safe with your marketing when you buy images and optimize your website and social media platforms, there is still a chance you might do something slightly wrong. Even a small thing like a photo that’s a bit off has the potential to distract your potential customers. This article lists things you should never do in your digital marketing strategy unless you want to scare away your clients.
1. Overpersonalization
In the past several years, many brands have jumped on the trend of personalization. While personalization is great if it is well-implemented, some businesses tend to overpersonalize their ads online to the extent that they seem creepy and weird. For example, some ads on Instagram and all over the web in general might be something like ‘Are you 27, male, and live in Berlin? Then buy our product’, which might potentially disturb a person instead of making them your new client.
It is much better to appeal to users based on their interests and buyer personas instead of throwing random facts on them. If you use personalization in your digital marketing strategy, it’s a good idea to look over your ads and posts to check out if they look like they use personal information incorrectly. Social media platforms allow you to set different promoted posts for people based on interests, so try to appeal to groups of people within your target audience using information they leave on the internet wisely, taking their interests into account.
2. Being aggressive with your email marketing
Nowadays, there are very few websites, media, and blogs without a subscription option. While many of email marketing efforts seem alright, there are more and more companies these days that try to make a person who visits their website subscribe to their newsletters at any cost, and the results usually look rude, aggressive, or even manipulative.
If your popup subscription window occupies all the space or appears with each action users make on your website, it’ll be quite annoying for the visitors. It’s even more annoying if you can’t close the window by simply clicking on the x button and have to close it by clicking on some tricky phrase that guilts the user to take the only action you’d like them to. There is a high chance that a person will simply close your website and visit a website of your competitor instead of actually subscribing. It goes without saying that a business should respect its customers so that they come back to it later, so just leave a subscription option but let your visitors close that window without feeling guilty or bad.
3. Ignoring your clients on social media
It might be really hard to keep up with all the comments and feedback users leave on your social media profiles. However, unanswered comments, especially when they include complaints or questions to your brand, might look suspicious for a person who visits your profile. A regular person who is far from digital marketing doesn’t think about how much time it takes to reply to everything, and many social media users will think that you ignore clients if there are many unanswered questions in your comments section.
Sometimes brands don’t respond to comments that seem problematic, which in turn might create a sense that your company wants to avoid challenges. If you feel that a user left a rude comment that might be offensive to some of your clients, you better delete it than leave it unanswered. If you can’t reply to your comments, consider turning off the commenting option completely. Today, many people use social media platforms to contact businesses instead of visiting a website or making a phone call, which means your social media profiles should be impeccable. What’s more, your interaction with your audience boosts your overall engagement so that social media algorithms promote your brand organically.
4. Targeting too broad audiences
Many brands don’t grow as fast as they intend to simply because they don’t differentiate between their target market and their target audience. While a target market can be simply demographic characteristics, such as millennials or female users, the target audience is narrower. Target audience is a specific segment within the market you keep in mind when you target your posts.
In order to really appeal to people, you need to be more specific in your targeting. Targeting everyone is a road to nowhere, because there is little chance everyone needs your product. You need to understand how your product is useful, who are the people who will really purchase it, and how they will use it and feel after their purchase. This will help you make your ads more effective.
5. Not organizing giveaways and discounts
Some companies these days opt for giveaways and discounts as their main source of user engagement and consequential conversions. Sometimes they organize them to the extent it might even get annoying for their followers, but the reality of social media shows that it’s better than ignoring this marketing channel. For example, to take part in a giveaway, a person will need to share your post or at least leave a comment under the publication, which will skyrocket your engagement. You simply can’t get to this level with regular day-to-day content.
Organizing a giveaway or offering a discount on a special occasion such as a holiday will do you good since everyone’s on a lookout for deals. Instagram is a perfect platform to organize a giveaway as it improves engagement and works towards building more brand awareness. Discounts are also attention-grabbing. Discounts can push a person to purchase your products if they thought about it before but never did it. If they are satisfied with the things they bought from you, they will come back to you even when there is no sale.
Conclusion
It’s good to rethink your brand positioning and marketing strategy from time to time even if there is nothing wrong with either one. Everything is changing fast – things and decisions that were relevant a couple of years ago might seem odd today. You need to keep up with the latest trends on the internet and constantly analyze your digital marketing strategy to understand what you can do even better in the near future.
