There is no doubt that digital marketing can work extremely well for your business if you have a great marketing strategy, vision and objective. However, if you lack in these areas, your business might have a downturn and you might end up wasting your money and time.

Technology is rapidly changing. It gets difficult and confusing for most of the businesses to match-up the pace of it, leading to some serious mistakes. Hence, it is necessary to have goals that can help businesses to generate more revenue.

It is very essential that business is noticed by the customers no matter how huge the competition is and businesses must ensure that their ROI doesn’t get affected by any kind of mistakes.

Having knowledge about what should be done is as equally important as what shouldn’t be done while applying digital marketing strategies. Instead of wasting time by setting baseless goals without any possibility of succeeding, it is better for businesses to look forward to the alternative forms of digital marketing.

Do’s and Don’ts of digital marketing that cannot be neglected while running a business

Things you SHOULD consider

Invest in a business blog

Digital marketing is a platform that connects you to the world of SEOs. Companies that blog have 97% more inbound links. (Source: Hubspot) Inbound links are defined as links from other sites that point to your site, otherwise known as backlinks.

Blogging will also help you to share your ideas and communicate your business to the world as a form of online communication and online marketing. Companies that do moderate blog posting between 1-2 times per month have 67% more sales opportunities than companies that do not blog. (Source: InsideView)

Business blogging should be given an opportunity to grow your business instead of creating your digital marketing structures depending solely on social media platforms where everything will eventually slump down with one algorithm update.

Optimize for mobile

In 2019, 52.2% of traffic came from mobile phones compared to 16.2% in 2013, which means mobile traffic has grown by 222% in the last 7 years.

With the rapid increase in mobile phones usage, Google has started the implementation of mobile first index in the search engine results pages.

Looking at this scenario of mobile phones, it has become even more important to optimize your web pages and blogs to make it mobile friendly in order to set standards for your company in the coming years.

Realize the significance of analytics

In the recent marketing world, decisions are not made based on hypothesis and past experiences but the influential marketing ideas are driven by analytics and huge data.

Good knowledge of Google Analytics will help you to figure out the objectives and manage tabs on them and finally provide your business with valuable vision.

In simple words, tracking and analyzing ROI on every segment of your investment will enable you to set fruitful goals for the future.

Apply a well-planned strategy on social media

49% of the global population are active social media users, i.e. 3.80 billion. This provides a huge pool of people to tap on through social media marketing. Social media can give you miraculous results if you apply well-crafted strategies to it.

It is very necessary to understand that every element should be placed in the right order starting from selecting the right color theme that portrays the essence of your brand, to establishing your brand voice and creating a content calendar.

Besides, if you are ready to invest a large amount of money on social media advertising, you will need to figure out how much budget you can delegate towards boosted posts and the like.

Create a proper plan

If you have a great marketing campaign it can help your business transform, that is why it is necessary to focus on getting one for your own purpose.

Give your full attention and time on creating and researching digital marketing strategies and identify which tool will be helpful to your business.

For instance, the strategies that work amazingly for software companies does not necessarily mean that it will work accordingly to a clothing brand as well.

Although you can take ideas from other businesses on how their business is working, totally depending on the strategy that is applied by others won’t help you in the long-run.

When you set up a strong marketing strategy, to begin with such as basic SEO and a Facebook Business Page, you can gradually expand upon it as your business grows.

Know your customers and contenders

Coming up with some great strategies is important but what you need to understand is whether those ideas fit the requirement of your existing as well as the potential customers or not.

And for better understanding your audience, you need to be more focused and identify what demographics do they belong to, what they want, what they are looking for, what they might need.

Likewise, it is also very necessary that you know your opponents and their way of doing marketing for the business. Identify what they are good at and how they are attracting their customers based on those ideas you can generate your digital marketing strategy.

Target keywords

Data can help you find out what your customer is looking for or what keywords they are using when searching for your product or service and enable you to target those keywords to drive traffic to your channel.

You can identify your as well as your contender’s potential keyword through the data provided by Google AdWords Keyword Tool and based on that you can determine which one is on-demand and what you are missing.

Get expert advice

Many businesses find it difficult to create a new strategy and get stuck into the previous one which is not helping them in any way.

In such circumstances, you can hire people who are digital marketing experts or contact digital marketing agencies to generate new effective ideas. Depending on the details provided by you such as what kind of business you own, product or service that you offer and other features, these agencies or experts can develop a strategy which you are exactly looking for.

Stay updated

If your online presence is just for the sake of the name, you don’t post new content and are lacking information about the latest trends then it is more or less similar to not having an online presence. 

Digital marketing is a serious matter for your business, it is a portal for your company to reach a mass at once. Without having knowledge about your product, consumers are not going to come knocking your doors to buy your product.

You need to push yourself to invest time and energy in social media, websites and blogs in order to stay updated as well as spend time on your own social pages to let everyone know what kind of product you offer. 81% of marketers found that increased traffic occurred with as little as six hours per week invested in social media marketing.

The most important thing you shouldn’t forget, you should keep on posting something new and creative content that will eventually attract more customers to engage with it.

Things you SHOULDN’T do

Focusing only on the text

A very famous statement in the world of online marketing is, “First impressions are 94% design related.” Only texts with no design can be boring , try using images, videos and GIFs with the help of professionals.

Creating only text images can be boring , try using videos made with the help of professionals, images, for instance, GIFs.

Every social network has its own dimensions and interfaces, you should avoid using the same image or the format in all social networks. It is better to understand which video or image can work more fruitfully for which social networking site.

Spamming Users

Spam might grab the user’s attention but there is nothing more irritating to the internet users than avoiding and shutting the pop-ups that become a problem to the content you are looking for. Spam costs businesses a whopping $20.5 billion every year.

Everyone counts seconds to close ads on Youtube videos and similarly tend to delete spam in their email inbox as if they are not even worth looking at.

Create user UNfriendly website

Sometimes users are looking for important information mentioned in your website but due to the obstacle like:

• Your main section is secured with advertisements or different pointless information.
• Your site is not showing what the users wants.
• Site is too slow and not optimized for mobile.

These are some factors that cause inconvenience to your site and user-unfriendly despite having an incredible looking website.

You need to a have good understanding of driving engagement to your website:

• Ensure it is mobile optimized
• Select font size and color that is easily visible and effortless to use.
• Create a website that is bright, opens easily and gives all the necessary information your customers are seeking.

Forget to update SEO

If you think your website ranking on the first page of Google is the ultimate thing you need to do then you are wrong. You should never forget to timely update content on Google.

SEO being the most competitive field, there are numerous contenders looking for the chance to step ahead of you. Since the rules and regulations keep on changing, you are the one who is responsible to make sure your position doesn’t fluctuate in any situation.

That is why you need to be more aware of what’s appearing and trending on Google and ensure your content is up-to-date.

Create a website on an outdated Content Management System (CMS)

Basically, CMS is a piece of software designed to enable users to create and edit a website’s digital content.

But depending fully on this software can be risky as it has equal chances of leading your digital marketing efforts to everything or nothing.

Likewise, choosing an outdated CMS should be regarded as a big no and can truly stop your business potential. Therefore, it is highly recommended to do research carefully and find a platform that can give suitable results today and in upcoming days.

Some drawbacks of having old CMS are

• It is costlier to manage
• Security is at high risk
• Your resources are designated to the issues in the past instead of creating a system for future solutions.

Underestimate the quality for quantity

Readers never focus on how many blogs you have posted on your site. Something they really want to see is how creatively you have presented your work.

It is better not to create content rather than having it that is not good enough to drive the reader’s attention. In any way it won’t be productive to your business, so you need to target how to enhance quality over volume.

Overdo and solely depend on social media

You found about the benefits of social media and many companies without even thinking either use all the social media platforms or shower audiences with the information and posts that might be relevant or irrelevant to them.

For instance,Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Pinterest and even Instagram don’t do much for all kinds of organizations.

It is your responsibility to identify where your audience could be and create productive content that will save your money, time and efforts.

The use of social media platforms that are appropriate for your business with a social media marketing strategy will allow increment in the participation and engagement which will consequently lead to driving more traffic and increasing sales.

If your business is aware of the things that you should and shouldn’t do while marketing your content on digital platforms, it will be a great achievement for them as it is a very important aspect for the successful running of any business.