Common Digital Marketing Mistakes to Avoid in 2024

Are you scampering around the web to find out why your online marketing efforts aren’t paying dividends?

Well, your wild goose chase ends here.

Here, we present to you 10 digital marketing mistakes to avoid.

Some of these online marketing mistakes may have never crossed your mind.

By avoiding making these digital marketing blunders, you can adopt the path of righteousness and please the algorithm gods.

So, dive in and reverse your fortunes.

Hoping to see you on Shark Tank!

Digital Marketing Mistakes

‘Is My Website Optimised for Mobile?’

More people own a smartphone than a computer.

One of the worst digital marketing mistakes is to not be inclusive of mobile users.

Here’s why:

• 54% of the world’s population owns a smartphone. GSMA
• Over 55% of global web traffic happens on mobile. Exploding Topics

You’ll be missing out on over 2.6 billion Asia-Pacific people by denying them a mobile version of your website in your digital marketing strategy.

By forgetting about mobile users, you stray away from the righteous path of modern SEO: not optimising websites for mobile.

For your inspiration, here are some websites that provide a very good mobile browsing experience.

Mobile-First Indexing

Since 2015, House Google’s motto has been ‘mobile-first indexing is coming’.

And from September 2020, mobile-first indexing is here!

Google will crawl and index your website’s mobile version first, instead of your desktop version.

Will it affect my business?

Potentially, yes!

Google’s mobile-first index will index and rank your website based on the mobile version of your website.

If the mobile version of your website has lesser, thinner, poorer content than your desktop, then your website will be at a disadvantage.

‘Is My Website Optimised for Local Searches?’

Also, are you collecting online reviews?

Many online marketing-naive businesses make this common digital marketing blunder.

But how does it impact mobile users?

Reviews are read more on mobile than desktop.

More local searches are happening on mobile than ever.

People who have a negative experience on mobile are 62% less likely to make a future purchase.

Think With Google

The psychology at work here is that when people want to fulfil a need immediately, they use local searches on mobile browsers and count on online reviews to fulfil them.

Read also: Local SEO: Why Is Local Search Important

Is your mobile marketing set to win?

Ask yourself:

• ‘Is my website optimised for mobile?’
• ‘Have I optimised for keywords that contain “best” and “near me” in them?’
• ‘Am I active in collecting Google Reviews?’

‘Do I Run Discounts and Promotions?’

To rephrase Shakespeare, ‘Admen may come and admen may go, but offering free content and value will go on forever’.

Yet we still see many social media ads, Google My Business posts and PPCs blowing their own trumpet.

But, hello? What’s in it for your customer?

The entire point of marketing is to create a value proposition; differentiate by offering unique value for your customers.

You have to give them a reason to choose you.

Discounts and promotions are one way to do that.

96% of online shoppers look for a coupon before purchasing a product. Source.

Avoid this digital marketing mistake by offering seasonal discounts.

Offering coupons also help with increasing your backlinks to your website.

There are several sites where you can promote your coupons. Each inbound link can have a small effect on your website’s overall health.

Ask yourself:

• ‘When was the last time I offered a discount?’
• ‘Are the discounts and promotions on my ad copy and landing page clear and direct?’
• ‘Have I/my copywriter clearly communicated the discount?’
• ‘Are there power words in my ad copy such as “you”, “discount”, “sales”, “X% off”?’
• ‘Do I promote my coupons on other sites?’

‘Do I Have an Updated Blog?’

Do you use your blog to enrich your inbound marketing?

By just blogging regularly you can see an increase in the number of indexed web pages.

57% of marketers say they’ve gained customers specifically through blogging.

optimonster

By not having a blog, you are basically waving away Google’s spotlight.

You stop yourself from building a community that reads, buys and turns to you for advice. Regardless of your niche, you must have a blog that is freshly updated with original, relevant and helpful content.

Read also: Google’s Helpful Content Update: Why It Remains Relevant in 2024

Blogging also increases the probability of gaining backlinks and the blog posts that get the majority of links are backed by original data (source). Inbound links are inroads for traffic from other websites. As you blog consistently, you also establish yourself as a thought leader in your niche – in the eyes of Google and website users.

You can also promote your blogs with newsletters and paid ads. By doing so, you create an evergreen, 24×7 lead generation machine.

Boycotting your blog is a deadly digital marketing mistake to avoid.

Ask yourself:

• ‘How often do I update my blog?’
• ‘Is my blog optimised for SEO?’
• ‘Does my blog feature a signup option for my newsletters?’

‘Am I Investing in the Right Resources?’

Bad resourcing allocation is a digital marketing mistake that can be avoided by carrying out basic research.

Investing in the wrong resources drains your budget without you even knowing.

Investing in the wrong platform

Bad internet marketing begins with choosing the wrong platform.

Businesses invite marketing mayhem by pursuing social ads when their buyer is clearly researching about them on Google.

Investing in the wrong goals

Many businesses boast the amount of the likes and shares their content gets while keeping mute about the revenue these vanity metrics generate.

The next topic deals with goal setting. But before that …

Ask yourself:

• ‘Is there enough evidence/market research to ensure platform/target market fit?’
• ‘How much ROI have my ads and content marketing generated?’
• ‘How do my competitors do marketing; in-house or freelancer?’

‘Are my Goals Realistic?’

All strategies – business, marketing, content – begin with setting goals.

However, there is a catch.

Winning strategies have realistic goals.

You can avoid making this marketing mistake by using the SMART framework.

Make sure your goals are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Timely

This can help you avoid costly online marketing mistakes on several fronts – in budgeting, allocating resources, targeting, identifying seasonal trends, and hiring.

Setting realistic timelines can also help with experimenting. Your digital marketing works best when you keep testing your ad copy, landing pages, and email subject lines.

By setting timelines for your goals, you become cognisant of whether it’s time to pull out from an ad or whether you should pump more resources towards them.

However, for testing to work for you, there is another digital marketing mistake to avoid.

We’ll get to that after you ask yourself these questions:

• ‘Are my goals hyper-specific?’
• ‘Are my goals achievable within the time I have set?’
• ‘If yes, do I have the resources to achieve them?’
• ‘Do I have the tools to measure my goals?’

‘Have I Been Patient Enough for my Marketing to Work?’

Digital marketing is not rocket science. Neither can you dream about making money hand over fist.

By staying patient, you can avoid many silly blunders in online marketing.

Especially when growing organically – without buying ads – expect digital marketing to test your patience.

Many businesses are scammed by freelancers and agencies that promise viral social media posts, ranking on search engines overnight, and pixie dust that can make you fly.

By the time they realise their mistake, it’s too late and they become disillusioned with digital marketing.

Digital marketing is mostly marketing and a bit about the algorithms that govern the platform.

Your Google ads, Facebook ads, content marketing all work with consistent publishing and testing.

Have patience.

Ask yourself:

• ‘Do I test my marketing before I scale?’
• ‘Do I have the patience needed?’ By lacking patience, you fall for another costly and expensive digital marketing blunder.
• ‘Am I Doing Only Paid Advertisements And Nothing Else?’

This topic has to be dealt on two fronts:

• SEO vs PPC
• Paid social vs Organic social

Regardless of the platform, paid advertisements give you quick results. ROI is quicker.

Word among online marketers is that, as your ads age, algorithms will optimise them to appear to the relevant audience.

However, ads don’t usher in long term benefits like social proof, brand recognition or organic traffic do.

They only pay dividends as long as you keep buying ad space from the platforms.

Scaling your business with paid advertisements is one costly digital marketing mistake to avoid.

Content Marketing Institute, Hubspot and Canva are companies that were built with few to no ads.

In social media, organic growth builds communities. Long term benefits occur when you build a fan community. They curate content for you, and sometimes even create content for you.

In search results, organic results are trusted more than paid search results.

Paid ads are important as well. However, banking on PPC and social media ads offers less long-term ROI than when you rank through organic means.

If you think you’re using too much paid advertising, then the next topic will help you avoid another digital marketing mistake.

Ask yourself:

• ‘How much have I invested in inbound marketing?’
• ‘Can I scale my company just by paid ads?’
• ‘Am I using SEO?’

Read also: The Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Why would you say no to free website traffic?

Did someone convince you that SEO is dead in 2024?

Well, I certainly don’t think so. Let’s look at what data has to say:

• B2B marketers see a lead close rate of 14% via SEO. Digital Marketing Institute
• 68% of peoples’ shopping experience begins in a search engine. Ahrefs
• You get 1000% more traffic through SEO than social media. Ahrefs

This is one of the easiest digital marketing mistakes to avoid. Of course, SEO is a vast ocean. The tides keep changing here.

However, it is also marketing at its finest.

SEO marketing’s potency lies in tapping the search intent of your target market. By performing thorough keyword research and best on-page practices, you can rank on Google for search terms with powerful intent.

When SEO is done right, you get relevant prospects who visit your website with sharp, specific buying intentions.

If you have been avoiding SEO, it is easy to point you to the next digital marketing mistake to avoid.

Ask yourself:

• ‘Why am I avoiding SEO?’
• ‘Is my website optimized for relevant keywords?’
• ‘What are the search terms my website is ranking for?’
• ‘Are the backlinks diverse?’
• ‘Am I promoting my website?’

‘Are You Treating Your Website as a Business Card You Hand Out on the Go?’

That’s another grave digital marketing mistake to avoid.

Your website is the backbone of content marketing.

One of the top goals for companies in 2024 was to attract traffic to their website.

Website promotion can be done by various means – keyword research, social media, SEO, blogging and paid ads.

You could even go omnichannel by packing your website within QR codes and putting them on brochures and pamphlets.

Ask yourself:

• ‘Is my website optimized for SEO?’
• ‘Do I mention my website in all of my social media handles?’
• ‘Am I updating my blog regularly?’
• ‘Do I guest blog?’
• ‘Are there opportunities to mention my website in offline channels?’
• ‘Do I track abandoned shopping carts on my website?’

‘Are You Ignoring Abandoned Shopping Carts?’

The selling point of online shopping is convenience – a seamless customer experience.

There are plenty of reasons why a user may abandon a shopping cart (source):

• Requiring an account to purchase: 25% of US customers feel creating an account exhausting
• Long weary checkout: 18% leave their carts due to this
• Lack of trustworthy payment gateways: 19% abandon their orders due to this
• Expensive shipping charges: 47% people abandon carts owing to this factor

Sometimes, however, customers don’t really need the things they’re adding to cart at that exact moment. They just fill carts for the fun of it.

And they abandon it just like that.

Abandoned carts like that are a treasure chest of data.

Use your web analytics tool to track them on your website. Check out the pages they visit on the website. Do a technical SEO audit to improve website speed, glitches and broken links.

Use tools such as Facebook pixel and Adwords cookies to remarket your products.

The money is in the follow-up.

Send emails that remind customers of the cart-in-waiting. Customers are more likely to buy from you if you remind them of their abandoned carts with multiple emails. Moreover, your emails that follow up to remind customers of abandoned carts had a click-through rate of 4.01% (Moosend).

Ask yourself:

• ‘Is my analytics set up to track abandoned shopping carts?’
• ‘Can customers complete payments hassle-free?’
• ‘Are there any broken links in my product/payment pages?’
• ‘Do I have an email chain set up to follow up with shoppers who have bounced off?’
• ‘Is there an opportunity to follow up via SMS?’

‘Am I Overlooking Email Marketing?’

Another marketing avatar that faces the brunt of taking time to ripen.

There are marketing obituaries that say email marketing is dead.

Email marketing is like The Undertaker of marketing.

Email marketing is here to stay.

• In 2023 alone, about 347 billion emails were sent and received per day. Statista.
• 40% of marketers prefer email marketing. optinmonster
• Email marketing boasts an ROI of $36 for every $1 spent. Hubspot

Despite this, graphs suggest email marketing usage is still going up.

So, do not overlook email marketing.

However, some email marketing practices are dead, such as:

• Generic subject lines
• Ignoring GDPR
• Mobile-unfriendly templates
• Poor email design
• Not testing
• Not being data-driven

So, ask yourself:

• ‘Is there a form that collects email addresses on landing pages, blog posts, paid ads?’

Conclusion

How many of these digital marketing mistakes have you made?

Too many? Don’t fret. Online marketing mistakes can be turned around easily.

Contact us to help you correct them and reverse your fortunes.